More Stories of the Ottawa River

I first gazed upon the Ottawa River when I was a schoolgirl, visiting the National Capital Region on a geography field trip from my Toronto high school. Back then, after I climbed King Mountain in Gatineau Park and surveyed the Ottawa Valley stretching below me, I vowed this would be the place I’d live someday. The Ottawa River had cast its spell and captured my soul.

After graduating from Trent University in 1974, I settled in Ottawa. Five years later I married Eric Fletcher, who shares my passion for the region and by 1989 we moved north of Quyon, a Quebec village whose history is bound to the river.

Since 1988 I’ve published five books which include stories about the Ottawa River’s fabled history, and I know I will never tire of its varied moods.

When I first started writing this Riverkeeper column, I wrote Stories of the Ottawa River (find it on the website’s archive). You loved those tales… so here are more stories of river we all so passionately wish to preserve.

First Nations’ use

In Historical Walks: The Gatineau Park Story, I quote late historian Lucien Brault who spoke of the network of rivers which provided not only trade but also escape routes. Brault wrote: “From 1636 to 1649, the Iroquois relentlessly pursued them [the Hurons], each portage became an ambush, the Chaudière Falls ordinarily being the last one. To avoid it, the Hurons or the Algonquins, their allies, often paddled up Brewery Creek… or the Gatineau River as far as Chelsea, thence portaged to Kingsmere Lake through Aylmer and Lac Deschênes. Another portage trail was from Leamy Lake, on the Gatineau River, along the Mountain Ridge to Breckenridge.”

Potential Penal Colony

Also in Historical Walks, I quote from John MacTaggart’s journal of 1826-29. In it, Colonel By’s then Clerk of Works for the Rideau Canal proposed that territory just north of the Ottawa River would make an excellent penal colony. Convinced that convicts could be transported here at a tremendous saving to Britain, he thought they’d be “quite apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the colony, and it would be perfectly impossible for them to escape.” MacTaggart wrote,

“A tailor once took into his head to run away from his master at Hull, and return to Quebec, the place of his nativity. He started early in the morning, took a canoe, crossed over the River Ottawa, and entered the wilderness on the opposite side. Day after day the poor fellow wandered in the woods, and found nothing to support life but a few wild raspberries. At last, on the tenth day of his desertion, he came out at the Rapid des Chats [Quyon’s formerly mighty rapids] about thirty miles from Hull, and quite in an opposite direction to that he intended to travel. The mosquitoes had feasted on him in a shocking manner; as, in passing through the thick woods the trees had torn off his garments, and exposed his almost famished carcass to the mercy of the merciless insects. He got back to the lapboard, and never thought of stirring away more.”

Rivers as highways

While these days we take rail, air and road communication infrastructures for granted, back in the mid 1800s water routes comprised the primary if not only “highway.” After all, roads were a pioneer’s nightmare: just cutting roads was nigh impossible for immigrants who came to the colonies but who had never even held an axe – let alone use one.

Once a road was cut, it became mired in our infamous mud seasons – hence the unpopularity of uncomfortable corduroy roads. (Just imagine travelling in one of Klock’s stagecoaches bumping along the Britannia Road from Hull to Aylmer… This road was built as a road portage so people and produce could bypass the Chaudière, Dechênes and other rapids which rendered the Ottawa impassable.) Indeed, just as we might expect, road maintenance was a source of heated arguments between neighbours in “the good old days.”

Using rivers as highways wasn’t only the prerequisite of explorers, fur traders and Jesuits. Rivers were used by immigrants as highways. In 1800, Philemon Wright and his band of New England settlers used the river networks including the Ottawa, when they journeyed to what Wright founded as Wrightsville, then Hull – today’s City of Gatineau. Using ox-drawn wagons, the hardy group voyaged up the Richelieu, St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers.

Early archaeologists on the Ottawa

Edwin Sowter and Sand Bay

While researching Capital Rambles: Exploring the National Capital Region, I encountered early archaeologists who discovered aboriginal remains along the Ottawa. Through his diary, I “met” archaeologist T. Edwin Sowter who was born in Aylmer in 1860. In 1917, he recorded his findings along the stretch of the Ottawa River between Big Sand Point and Constance Creek.

“The beach for this point for about 150 yards in length and 20 yards in width from high water mark was strewn with fragments of pottery, flints, arrowheads and shards of earthenware. It would appear that here the red hunters [sic] made their campfires and appeased their appetites with roast clam.”

Pointe à la Bataille

Sowter spun the tale of how the French and Algonquin seized opportunity to ambush an Iroquois encampment in the mid 1600s.

“A great many years ago an expedition of French fur-traders, together with a number of friendly Indian, possibly Algonquin and Huron allies, went into camp one evening at Pointe à la Bataille [at Constance Creek]. Fires were lighted, kettles were slung and all preparations made to pass the night in peace and quietness. Soon, however, the lights from other camp fires began to glimmer through the foliage, on the opposite shore of the bay, and a reconnaissance presently revealed a large war-party of Iroquois in a barricaded encampment on the Wendigo Mound at Big Sand Point. Well skilled as they were in all the artifices of forest warfare, the French and their Indian companions were satisfied something would happen before morning. …

“Towards midnight, the attacking party left Pointe à la Bataille and proceeded stealthily southward, in their canoes, along the eastern rim of Sand Bay, crossed the outlet of Constance Creek and landing on the western shore of the bay, advanced towards Big Sand Point through the pine forest. … The attack was entirely successful, for it descended upon and enveloped the sleeping camp like a hideous nightmare. Many of the Iroquois died in their sleep, while the rest of the party perished to a man in the wild confusion of a midnight massacre.”

Horse railway at Union Village

Portaging rapids such as the Rapides des Chats at Quyon continued to thwart trade up the Ottawa. Steamships plied the waters by the mid 1800s, but we can all imagine how unloading then conveying goods and people around the rapids, and re-loading same onto an upstream steamer would be time-consuming – not to mention particularly aggravating during bug season. Enter the horse railway near Quyon. The Union Forwarding Company built it,

“over swamps, where some rock and earth fill but mainly log trestles were built, and through the tough rock of the Canadian Shield where expensive rock cuts were necessary to keep the right-of-way level. It was a laborious task hand drilling the granite gneiss and pink syenite that lay along most of the railroad right-of-way. (Pneumatic drills did not come into use until 1867.) As the line neared Lac des Chats, drillers found their task a little easier, for here the bedrock was the softer, white, crystalline limestone.”

Steamships such as the Emerald and Ann Sisson docked at Pontiac Village. Here passengers disembarked, climbed a set of stairs in the rock, sat on a “train” whereupon horses hauled the conveyance to Union Village, whereupon they boarded another steamer bound for Portage de Fort.

Today the point of rock against which the Ann Sisson docked still thrusts into Pontiac Bay, west of Quyon, near present-day Tim Horton’s Voyageur Camp. But no remnants of the horse railway remain visible, just there…

More stories

These are just a few of the stories of the river. If you have more to share, contact me at chesley@allstream.net . I will be happy to publish your stories in future issues of this column.

Katharine Fletcher is a freelance journalist who is author of several historical and ecological guides. Read more of her Ottawa River stories in Historical Walks: The Gatineau Park Story and Capital Rambles: Exploring the National Capital Region – find her guides at regional bookstores or at Mountain Equipment Co-op..