ALL WATERS LED TO THE CAPITAL
Without the river the Algonquin called Kichi Sibi — the Great River — most of us likely wouldn’t be living here today.
The Ottawa River has been a vital transportation and trade route for millennia, first for indigenous peoples and later for the Europeans who explored, exploited and settled this land.
“We can trace connections, basically, on a continental scale,” says Jean-Luc Pilon, an archeologist at the Canadian Museum of History. “Having the Rideau, the Gatineau and the Ottawa rivers linked together here makes it a very important place for the exchange of materials, ideas and people.”
The National Capital Region is “at the heart of a vast pre-contact communications and exchange network,” says Ian Badgley, a National Capital Commission archeologist. “It goes back about 6,000 years. It’s always been a meeting place for different groups.”
Jacques Cartier was likely the first European to see the Ottawa River. In 1535, he stood atop Mount Royal and saw a great river extending toward the western horizon.
But European exploration of the river didn’t begin until about 1608, when one of Samuel de Champlain’s emissaries, Étienne Brûlé, then just 19, paddled up the Ottawa, eventually reaching Georgian Bay and Lake Huron via the Mattawa River.
Champlain first travelled on the river in 1613. He reached the present site of Ottawa in June of that year, encountering a deep basin where, he later wrote, “The water whirls around to such an extent, and in the middle sends up such big swirls, that the Indians call it Asticou, which means boiler.” He named it Sault de la Chaudière. Today, we know it as Chaudière Falls.
Champlain was searching for a northern sea — perhaps Hudson Bay — that another of his emissaries, Nicolas de Vignau, had reported seeing. At Morrison Island, near present-day Pembroke, he met with Tessoüat, a powerful Algonquin chief, and tried to convince him to provide guides and canoes for the journey to the northern sea. Tessoüat refused, and Champlain’s party was forced to turn back.
Champlain undertook a second voyage up the river in 1615, reaching Lake Huron. His Ottawa River trips pioneered what would become a well-travelled highway into the interior for 17th- and 18th-century explorers and voyageurs eager to harvest the new land’s seemingly endless bounty of beaver and other animals prized for their fur.
“The river is a magnet every time there’s a significant new arrival in this region,” says Carleton University professor Randy Boswell. “When the next wave of voyageurs and fur traders comes, it’s because the river is the way into the upper Great Lakes and ultimately across Western Canada. The river is the liquid highway that takes you into the interior.”
A 2005 background study done to support the river’s nomination as a Canadian Heritage River connected all the dots: “The events most central to the history and formation of Canada occurred along and because of the Ottawa River,” it says, “including Champlain’s explorations, the fur trade, the square timber and lumber trade and the related, shifting relationships between First Nations People, French and English cultures. The Ottawa River was both the scene for these events and enabled them.”
New Englander Philemon Wright, who founded the first permanent settlement in the region in 1800, chose a site at the foot of Chaudière Falls, recognizing the area’s ample arable land and the potential of the falls to power the gristmills and sawmills he subsequently built.
Short of money in 1806, Wright cut down some of the huge red and white pines then lining the river, bundled them into rafts and floated them to Quebec City for export to Britain. That was the beginning of the timber trade that would fuel the growth of Canada’s future capital.
It was the river that provided access to those pine forests and a way to get their bounty to market. Loggers assembled massive rafts, hundreds of metres wide, containing as many as 2,400 squared timbers, and floated them downriver.
In 1829, Ruggles Wright, one of Philemon’s sons, built the first timber slide, a wooden chute large enough to convey large sections of the rafts around Chaudière Falls. Soon, slides had been built everywhere rapids were an obstacle.
Chaudière Falls later became a source of power to drive saws when the sawn-lumber industry supplanted the squared-timber trade in the second half of the 19th century.
That attracted the lumber barons, whose names still deck streets in the capital: H.F. Bronson, E.B. Eddy, John R. Booth and others. As mill technology improved, production soared. Before long, the islands around Chaudière Falls had become the world’s biggest sawn-lumber site.
Boswell says the Ottawa River was “the definitive reason” Queen Victoria chose Ottawa as capital of the United Province of Canada in 1857.
“Every stage of Ottawa’s industrial development is based on the river,” he says.