Côté

Côte in French is a hillside, the rising ground above a river, and also a coast. A household took the name from where it stood rather than from what it did or who had fathered it, and bynames of that kind are the plainest in Europe: they point at something anyone walking past could see.

Nearly every bearer of the name in North America runs back to a single couple. Jean Côté had crossed from the Mortagne country and was on the St Lawrence before 1635, and his marriage to Anne Martin stands among the first weddings the colony entered in a register. From that household the name spread until it was among the commonest in Quebec, one of the small set of surnames out of which French Canada was built.

Commonness on that scale means the surname alone identifies nobody: the founder of 1635 and the Alberta senator born in 1867 were both Jean Côté, and share nothing on the record but the word.

Jean Léon Côté was born on 26 May 1867 at Les Éboulements, then in Canada East, to Cléophas and Denise Côté. He trained as a surveyor and civil engineer and first saw the Edmonton country in 1886 with a survey crew. He went back east to qualify as a Dominion Land Surveyor, worked for the Department of the Interior from 1893 to 1900 on projects including the Alaska Boundary Commission, and in 1903 went west to help fix the frontier between Alaska and the Yukon.

Surveying paid for what followed. Côté turned to mining engineering in Alberta and did well at it, and on 4 February 1907 married Cécile Gagnon of a wealthy Quebec City family, with whom he had five children. A name meaning a slope had landed on a man whose trade was running lines across ground nobody had yet measured.

Côté stood as a Liberal for Athabasca in 1909 and took the seat off the sitting member, William Bredin. The redistribution of 1913 created the new district of Grouard and he won it comfortably; he increased his vote sharply again in 1917, and in 1918 became Provincial Secretary, holding the post until his government fell in 1921. That election swept most of the Liberal caucus out of the Alberta legislature, but Côté held on against the United Farmers candidate H.G. Dimsdale.

Mackenzie King advised his appointment to the Senate on 14 August 1923; he gave up the provincial seat in November, sat a year in Ottawa and died on 23 September 1924. Mount Côté, on the Alberta and British Columbia border, and the hamlet of Jean Cote in the Municipal District of Smoky River carry the name of a man whose first job had been to put such places on paper.

Ernest Adolphe Côté, the surveyor's son, was born in Edmonton on 12 June 1913 and was eleven when his father died. He took a science degree at the Université Laval in 1931, worked for the Alberta government, campaigned with the Association canadienne-francaise de l'Alberta to keep French alive in the province, and added a law degree at the University of Alberta in 1938. His motto was faire ce qui doit etre fait, do what must be done.

He joined the Royal 22e Régiment, the Van Doos, as a lieutenant in 1939 and sailed from Quebec City on 8 December with the 1st Canadian Infantry Division. Early in 1940 he was assigned to guide Marshal Maurice Gamelin around the regiment, and the French commander's recommendation brought him to the notice of his superiors. A staff course followed, then the 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade, deputy adjutant general of I Canadian Corps in 1942, and an MBE from George VI.

Made lieutenant-colonel in 1943 and quartermaster-general of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, he had to put everything 15,000 men needed where they needed it. Told in January 1944 that the division would land at Juno Beach beside Courseulles-sur-Mer, he planned routes where no paths existed and had road signs carried across to mark them, sited the supply points for water, gasoline, diesel and ammunition, and chose in advance the ground for the field hospitals and for a cemetery. He made the paymasters serve as assistant adjutants in action so that no officer could draw the wages of a soldier already killed.

Côté came ashore at Juno at about eleven in the morning on 6 June 1944, four hours behind the first landing, and asked the British beach group to get the dead off the sand: not a good sight for morale. He helped establish the Canadian headquarters at Bény-sur-Mer. On 5 July, with the fighting for Caen under way, the British corps commander John Crocker reported that the men actually running the 3rd Division were Côté and the chief of staff Donald Mingay.

He served through Caen and the Battle of the Scheldt and was mentioned in dispatches for courage under fire; General Jean Victor Allard said he had worked brilliantly as quartermaster, and noted how few French Canadians reached that authority in an army so overwhelmingly English Canadian. On 6 June 2014, aged a hundred, he stood on Juno Beach for the seventieth anniversary and returned on 11 November to lay a wreath, by then the last living colonel who had served in the Canadian Army in that war.

Côté left the army for External Affairs and reached London in November 1945 with the Canadian delegation to the first general session of the United Nations. He had a hand in writing the charter of the World Health Organization in 1946 and advised Mackenzie King at the UN sessions in Paris in 1948. At Northern Affairs from 1955 he oversaw the restoration of the Fortress of Louisbourg and worked on the St Lawrence Seaway, where the United States wanted control of all three locks and he came away with one in Canadian hands and a Canadian say in the other two.

As deputy minister from 1963 his main work was devolution, arranging matters so the people of the Northwest Territories could elect their own government, and Lester Pearson put him in charge of planning the Centennial of 1967. Retired in Ottawa after an ambassadorship to Finland, he campaigned successfully for Ontario to fund French-language secondary schools, and France made him a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2004.

Hypolite Wilfrid Marcaurèle Côté was born at Arthabaska in 1869 to a father who was already an artist, and is known as Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. He trained as a baritone at the Paris Conservatory in 1890 before turning to paint and clay under Léon Bonnat at the École des Beaux-Arts, and made his first fully Impressionist canvases in Brittany in 1906. Home in Quebec from 1908 with a Montreal studio, he was after the play of light on snow and water. Return from the Harvest Field, painted in 1903, went onto a Canada Post stamp in 1969.

Gérard Côté of Saint-Barnabé-Sud was training as a boxer when he changed sports. He ran his first Boston Marathon in 1936 and won the race four times, in 1940, 1943, 1944 and 1948, setting a course record with the first of them and taking the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada's athlete of the year, the first francophone to receive it. Out of 264 races he finished first in 112 and second in 56.

Alcide Côté was Postmaster General, and so was Jean-Pierre Côté, a Montreal dental technician who won Longueuil for the Liberals in 1963 and held it in 1965 and 1968; he went to the Senate in 1972 and served as Lieutenant Governor of Quebec from 1978 to 1984. Pierre-Ferdinand Côté, a Quebec City lawyer, became the first Chief Electoral Officer of Quebec in 1978 and ran the province's elections and referendums for nearly twenty years. Suzanne Côté sits on the Supreme Court of Canada.