If a present-day explorer went back to 1613 when Samuel de Champlain encountered Chaudiere Falls, he would be in awe. The falls cascaded between Ottawa and Gatineau, a riveting scene on the Ottawa River.
He or she would also have found sturgeon and eels aplenty “which have fed our people for thousands of years”, said Metis architect, Douglas Cardinal, who spoke about unleashing the falls to allow fish to migrate at a meeting of The Circle of all Nations on September 21st, 2014 in Ottawa.
The Chaudiere Falls are sacred to Algonquin people. Lindsay Lambert, Ottawa researcher and historian says Victoria Island or Asinabka, is also vitally important to First Nations people. Ancient, unceded Algonquin territory, it is regarded as a neutral meeting place. The Chaudiere District includes the falls, a semi-circular dam, a section of the Ottawa River, Chaudiere, Victoria, Amelia and Albert islands, as well as Philemon (now a peninsula), two river banks, two bridges, walking trails, an aboriginal interpretive centre, industrial buildings no longer used, small power stations and an inoperative paper mill.1)
Mark Thompson Brandt, Conservation Architect and Urbanist, calls the Chaudiere District a “National Treasure” in the Heritage Ottawa Newsletter, Spring 2006 Volume 33, No. 2, stating: “Next to the Parliament Buildings, no other place in Canada is as charged with symbolic meaning for Canadians and yet so little known by residents and visitors alike.”
Brandt continued: “The earliest evidence of human presence in the Ottawa Valley dates from about 8,500 years ago.” From the “emergence and then disappearance of the Champlain Sea, the Paleo-Indian period is characterized by people who hunted game with stone-pointed javelins.” Later inhabitants of the valley “began to advance agriculture and cooking.”
Krieghoff (1815 to 1872) painted the falls; Montrealer William Notman photographed them; 19th century William Pittman Lett penned poetry about Chaudiere; Charles Sangster (1822-1893) wrote about “the thunderous Chaudiere” with “clouds of snowy spray generally spanned by a brilliant rainbow.”
James W. Buel included the Chaudiere in America`s Wonderlands. Buel stated: “… our artist proceeded to Ottawa … for the purpose of taking views of Chaudiere Falls, which are famous alike for their size and grandeur… a more entrancing sight can hardly be found in any part of North America.” The rainbow formed in the “kettle” and the spray generated could be seen 10 km. away.
In the 1850s, Queen Victoria had to decide on a capital city. She selected Bytown, described by Toronto’s Goldwin Smith as “the nearest lumber village to the north pole”. In 1854, the name was changed to Ottawa, derived from the Algonquin adawe, meaning to trade.
Tourists flocked to the new capital to see the Chaudiere. Prince Albert of Wales (future King Edward V11) visited the falls in 1860 as well as the future King George V in 1901. Both experienced the excitement of “shooting the timber slides”.
. The Chaudiere, according to the Encyclopedie du patrimoine culturel de l`Àmerique francaise, “straddles the Quebec-Ontario border and parts of the cities of Gatineau and Ottawa.”
Champlain’s Journal from June, 1613 stated: “At one place the water falls with such violence upon a rock, that, in the course of time, there has been hollowed out in it a wide and deep basin, so that the water flows round and round there and makes, in the middle, great whirlpools.“ It was called Asticou by the indigenous people, meaning kettle.
In a ceremony described by Champlain in June 1613, tobacco was thrown into the middle of the turbulent water “as an offering to the spirit of the Chaudiere Falls“.
He described the tobacco ceremony as follows: “Having carried their canoes to the foot of the falls, they assemble in one place, where one of them takes up a collection with a wooden plate into which each puts a piece of tobacco. After the collection, the plate is set down in the middle of the group and all dance about it, singing after their fashion. Then one of the chiefs makes a speech, points out for years they have been accustomed to make such an offering, and that thereby they receive protection from their enemies; that otherwise misfortune would happen to them …”. 1)
The Canadian writer, W. H. Withrow, in his book Our Own Country (1889) wrote: “Around a lofty cliff, tree-clad from base to summit, sweeps the majestic Ottawa, to left resounds the everlasting thunder of the Chaudiere, and in the distance rise the purple slopes of the Laurentians.”
Dr. Robert H. Hubbard, once Curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery, told Carl Weiselberger, Evening Citizen Art Critic in 1959 that the “ building of the Parliament group was begun in 1859 on the cliff high above the Ottawa River in the capital of United Canada.” 2). Some people felt it was mainly to watch the Algonquins below.
In 1936, Prime Minister Mackenzie King commissioned Parisian urban planner, Jacques Greber to submit a master plan for the National Capital Commission (NCC). It was delivered in 1950 and in it Greber referred to the falls as “the main feature of Ottawa’s natural setting” and called for moving all industrial features to “more appropriate sites.”
I suggest imagining what the falls would look like if they were returned to their natural state of raw beauty, mighty yet serene, freed from the dams and decline of the 19th century industrialists. The falls might then be declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.
(See notes below)
1) Encyclopedie du patrimoine culturel de l’Amerique francaise in an article by Louise N. Boucher, lists heritage designations for the Chaudiere site: the E.B. Eddy Company looking out on Laurier Street in Gatineau designated by the Government of Quebec; the Chaudiere Portages Trail, designated a National Historic Site in 1927 by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada; and on the Ontario side, the Victorian-style Bronson Company Office, the Willson Carbide Mill (footprint only), and the Ottawa Electric Railway Company Steam Plant, all designated Recognized Federal Heritage Buildings by the Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office; The Hydro Ottawa Generating Station 2 was named a Classified Federal Heritage Building by the same body. 2 ) Yale University, Beinecke Library, Les Voyages sievr de Champlain Xaintongeois, Paris: Chez lean Berjon, 1613, pages 46 -47.
3) The Ottawa Evening Citizen, April 28, 1953.