Ottawa History Hub

This is the introduction to the Ottawa History Hub Podcast. I introduce the city and give some of the planned structure to the podcast going forward.

Before Ottawa was Ottawa, it was a forest, and before it was a forest, it was under 80m of water as an extension of the Atlantic Ocean. Whales, seals, walrus and other marine animals called it home. This is what Ottawa was like 115,000 years ago. The Champlain Sea stretched across the Saint Laurence and Ottawa River Valleys, before the glaciers melted and the seabed rose to the surface.

This episode introduces the Algonquin, an Anishinaabe people who've inhabited the Ottawa area for more than two thousand years. It includes elements of their language (Anishinaabemowin), religion (Midewiwin), and relationships with other Anishinaabe people (Ojibwe,Montagnais-Innu, and Odawa), as well as allied or rival Iroquoian peoples (Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat).

Etienne Brule was the first coureur de bois, an independent fur trader operating in the Saint Laurence Basin. He travelled up the Ottawa River in 1610, learnt to speak several Indigenous languages to communicate with Algonquin, Huron-Wendat, and Odawa. He lived most of his life in the Great Lakes region, working as a fur trader, diplomat, adventurer, explorer and mercenary.

Samuel de Champlain was the famed military man, explorer extraordinaire, founder of Quebec City, and governor of New France in all but official title. He navigated the Ottawa River, and was the first European to chronicle the experience, naming the Rideau River, Chaudière Falls, and putting the site on paper for the first time.

Alongside the Coureurs de Bois, the merchants and artisans of the colony, and the soldiers, missionaries were another important pillar of New France. Recollect Missionaries accompanied many traders and explorers, and they recorded much of what they witnessed, leaving some of the best eye-witness accounts of life in the period.

Also known as the French-Iroquois Wars, the Beaver Wars were fought across the Great-Lakes region and created a refugee crisis, spread plagues and reformed alliances from 1609-1701. The future of the European-North American alliance system was recast and this marks a catastrophic decimation of the Indigenous population.

Also known as the French-Iroquois Wars, the Beaver Wars were fought across the Great-Lakes region and created a refugee crisis, spread plagues and reformed alliances from 1609-1701. The future of the European-North American alliance system was recast and this marks a catastrophic decimation of the Indigenous population.

So far, New France has been at the heart of our narrative, but that came to an end with the Seven-Years War. This episode discusses the war, the 1759 Fall of Quebec, and the 1763 Treaty of Paris that brought Nouvelle France to an end and closes the first part of the narrative.

Season 2 continues the introduction to the world into which Ottawa would be born. This starts with the shift from French to English Imperialism, and the Crown finds itself in the middle of relations between Indigenous nations and American Rebels, and then gradual settlement of eastern Ontario until the roots of Bytown take permanent hold.

This episode looks at the relationship between the Crown, the French subjects, the Anglo-American subjects, and the Indigenous nations of the newly expanded British holdings in North America

This episode looks at the Quebec Act and the political administration of Peak Quebec, and why it became known as one of the "Intolerable Acts" that justified the American Revolutionary War.

So... About 1776 and all that... We've all heard about the American Revolution, but what did that mean for those who didn't think it was such a great idea at the time? Loyalist people and Loyalist colonies had different experiences than those celebrated by our Yankee neighbours on the 4th of July. The American Revolution created a refugee crisis that we'll be looking at for the next couple of episodes.

United Empire Loyalists were on the move. To England, to Florida and the Caribbean, but also northward to the Loyalist colonies of Nova Scotia and Quebec. They were to come in such numbers that two new provinces would end up being invented just to administer them! Ontario would begin its trek to eventually become the centre for the British presence in the Americas.

The Crown was selling land and giving it away throughout the late 1700s, and some hearty settlers went beyond the Saint Laurence and Great Lakes, north of Kingston and west of Montreal. Roger Stevens becomes the first settler in what would become Ottawa city limits.

The Constitution of 1791 divided the great province of Quebec in two. Upriver was the creation of Upper Canada, and downriver was the new province of Lower Canada. There were new systems of governance and voting, that would influence the way the south shore of the Ottawa River would grow, in comparison to the path chosen on the north shore.

In this episode, we look at the circle of settlement closing in around what would become Ottawa. In the south by Loyalists, and from the east by way of Montreal.

Philemon Wright was the founder of Hull, the first settlement in the Ottawa area that could be called "urban". Migrating from Massachusetts in the winter of 1800, he and his family migrated the shoals of the Lower Canada and Upper Canada bureaucracies, as well as crown agents and Algonquin neighbours.

The War of 1812 was a central event in the foundation of the Canadas. It also served to settle the American War of Independence and bring a political norm to North America that there were two distinct countries, rather than Free and Occupied sections.

In this episode, we conclude the war part of the War of 1812, setting up the diminished status of the Indigenous allies, despite their heroic participation in the war, and establishing the justification for the Rideau Canal.