The one-time hunting ground of the
Algonkian-speaking Outaouais,
Ottawa
received its first recorded European
visitor in 1613 in the shape of
Samuel de Champlain. The French
explorer pitched up, paused to watch
his aboriginal guides make offerings
of tobacco to the misty falls which
he christened Chaudière (French for
"cauldron") and then took
off in search of more appealing
pastures. Later, the
Ottawa River
became a major transportation route,
but the Ottawa area remained no more
than a camping spot until 1800, when
Philemon Wright snowshoed up
here along the frozen Ottawa River
from Massachusetts. Wright founded a
small settlement, which he called
Wrightstown and subsequently Hull
after his parents' birthplace in
England. Aware that the British navy
was desperate for timber, Wright
then worked out a way of shifting
the tall trees that surrounded him
by squaring them off, tying them
together and floating them as rafts
down the river to Montréal. His
scheme worked well and Hull was soon
flourishing. Meanwhile, nothing much
happened on the other side of the
river until 1826 when the completion
of the
Rideau Canal
linked the site of present-day
Ottawa to Kingston and the St
Lawrence River. The canal builders
were commanded by
Lieutenant-Colonel
John By and it was he who gave
his name to the new settlement,
Bytown
, which soon became a hard-edged
lumber town characterized by drunken
brawls and broken bones.
In 1855 Bytown relabelled itself Ottawa
in a bid to become the capital of
the Province of Canada, hoping that
a change of name would relieve the
town of its sordid reputation. As
part of their pitch, the community
stressed the town's location on the
border of Upper and Lower Canada and
its industrial prosperity. In the
event, Queen Victoria granted their
request, though this had little to
do with their efforts and much more
to do with her artistic tastes: the
Queen had been looking at some
romantic landscape paintings of the
Ottawa area and decided this was the
perfect spot for a new capital. Few
approved and Canada's politicians
fumed at the inconvenience - Sir
Wilfred Laurier, for one, found it
"hard to say anything
good" about the place. Neither
did the politicians enjoy the
mockery heaped on them from south of
the border with one American
newspaper suggesting it would never
be attacked as any "invader
would inevitably get lost in the
woods trying to find it".
Give or take the odd federal
building - including the rambling
Parliament - Ottawa remained a
workaday town until the late 1940s,
when the Paris city planner, Jacques
Greber, was commissioned to beautify
the city with a profusion of parks,
wide avenues and tree-lined
pathways. The scheme transformed the
city and defined much of its current
appearance, though nowadays Greber's
green and open spaces also serve to
confine a city centre packed with
modern concrete-and-glass office
blocks. Ottawa has municipal
ambitions too, encapsulated by the
creation of the Capital Region
, which attempts to bolster its
economy and raise its profile by
welding together the Québec and
Ontario settlements on either side
of the Ottawa River.
