Paddling the Chats – with care
OTTAWA RIVER PADDLE INTRODUCES US TO LITTLE-KNOWN CANADIAN HISTORY
By Katharine Fletcher
“ I call this area the Kingdom of the Chats ,” said local historian Armand Ducharme . “ There ’ s so much history here .”
Standing at the ferry docks at Quyon , Que ., Ducharme was spending a morning with a group of paddler-explorers keen on hearing about this richly historical section of the Ottawa River . It ’ s between the ferry dock and the 1932 Chats Falls Dam and Generating Station which silenced forever the 10.7-metre-high surging whitewater .
So let me take you on a historical tour before you paddle what ’ s locally known as “ the Chats ” in the Pontiac region of the Outaouais .
WHAT ’ S IN THE NAME ?
The name “ chats ” is from the French for “ cat ,” but Ducharme noted that although racoons are raton laveur in French , they are colloquially called chats sauvages ( wild cats ). So the name comes from the French explorers who travelled with First Nations ’ guides , traders in their own right who negotiated the rapids and portages where jagged rocks gouged canoes . In his 1613 journal , Samuel de Champlain described the tobacco ceremony at the Chaudière , where his native guides asked the river gods for safe passage . Maybe Mishapashoo , the capricious spirit of the rapids would not tip their canoes , imperilling goods and lives .
PONTIAC BAY , BORN OF THE FUR TRADE
Paddling northwest along the Quebec side of the Ottawa , you ’ ll see Quyon ’ s Tim Horton ’ s Camp des Voyageur ’ s children ’ s camp overlooking Pontiac Bay . What a different scene would have greeted us in the late 1700s .
In 1785 , French settler Joseph Mondion built a supply depot and cleared a small farm overlooking the Bay , where he remained for 14 years . In 1814 , Philemon Wright ( founder of Wrightville , which became Hull , now Gatineau ) built a timber slide so white pine and red pine logs could bypass the falls en route to ByTown ( Ottawa ). By 1821 , the Hudson Bay Company operated Chats House at Mondion ’ s Point as a fur trading post .
By the 1840s , the lumber trade was in high gear , on rivers serving as transportaww tion to get the log booms to Ottawa , Montreal , and Britain . In 1840 imagine a sawmill at Pontiac Bay … and a few years later , one on the Quyon River , both built by lumber baron John Egan .
Eventually , Pontiac Bay became a community of 141 residents – but when you paddle past today , everything ’ s gone , lost to history but being recalled by tellers like Ducharme . People settled here , Ducharme explained , because the Chats ’ four kilometres of rapids presented a barrier to westward travel . From 1832 to 1914 the steamships plying the waters from Ottawa to Pontiac Bay were unable to transport people and goods upriver , so a community grew alongside the portage . But , how could business get upriver past Pontiac Bay ?
ENTER THE HORSE RAILWAY
The Union Forwarding and Railway Company , which built the steamships Lady Colborne and George Buchanan , seized the opportunity . In 1847 , the company constructed almost five-kilometres of horse railway to link Pontiac and Union bays , through rocky , forested and marshy land . Workers blasted rock , and dumped fill where wooden trestle bridges completed the job .
Envision that horse railway : a two-horse team hauled carriages with steamer passengers and goods along a cut through the forest . This makeshift conveyance enabled
trade to continue up and down river for about 40 years . You can find traces of it at Pontiac Bay , west of the Tim Horton Camp in a shallow bay with an outcrop of Precambrian Shield . Imagine the Ann Sisson or another steamboat at its base . Passengers disembarked here , climbed a steep flight of wooden stairs up the rock face , then boarded the horse railway ’ s tram carriage , alighting at the Union Bay village of Chats Lake ( not a real lake , just a broad section of the Ottawa ). Here , the Oregon conveyed goods to Portage-du-Fort .
River transportation dwindled after 1886 when the iron horse – The Pontiac and Pacific Junction Railway – opened along the north shore , bypassing Quyon , stopping just north of it , at Wyman .
Pontiac Village residents drifted away , moving to Quyon , where John Egan ’ s 1840s mill on the Quyon River offered jobs .
THE GEORGIAN BAY CANAL Under the heading of “ What if ?” history , there was a scheme link Montreal to Georgian Bay by canal . “ Business folks thought a canal could link river traffic from Montreal to Ottawa and from there to the Great Lakes ,” Ducharme said . In 1854 , the partners were given $ 500,000 for the project , which commenced a year later . With 500 men working , and within an astonishing 15 metres of the culmination of the canal , money ran out , leaving behind the pile of gunpowderblasted rock we can see at the end reach of Pontiac Bay . The rock holds back a cut filled with river water , and the canal cut is still visible around Chats Lake and Pontiac Bay .
Just imagine how this 4.5-kilometre , sixlock canal would have altered the face of the Ottawa River and brought settlements to its
An 1821 painting of the Chats by artist John Elliott Woolford .
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