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History
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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 ChaudiA?re (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 MontrAİal. 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 QuAİbec and Ontario settlements on either side of the Ottawa River. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Canada,
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