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Ottawa
Clustered on their limestone bluffs at the confluence of three great rivers,
the Gothic spires of Ottawa echo to many a visitor the castled crags of
Edinburgh. But the diamond-bright Canadian sky strips Ottawa of the reti-
cence of the Scots capital; and from the neighboring hills in Quebec Province
the thrust of its towers can be seen for twenty miles on a crisp fall day.
The Ottawa River, dark brown from its 600-mile journey through the north
woods, curves like a broad scimitar by the city’s front door. As it flows
beneath the bridges connecting Ontario and Quebec it is joined by the Rideau,
gray-green and dreamy, ambling north through rich Ontario farmlands; and
by the Gatineau, blue and turbulent, plunging 300 miles southward over the
Laurentian Shield, its bosom freighted with giant log-booms, each containing
25,000 sticks of spruce, pine and balsam, red-gold on the blue water. It was
the first-growth timber of the hinterland—magnificent stands of white pine—
that attracted the first settlers at the end of the eighteenth century, almost
200 years after Champlain had first named the Rideau Falls.
Ottawa grew to early maturity in the era of wood and water: and these
elements have left their mark on the city. Though greater Ottawa now
numbers almost a quarter of a million people, and though its chief business
is government and its typical citizen a civil servant rather than a woodsman,
it still retains memories of the boisterous era when huge rafts of squared-
timber floated down the Ottawa on their way to Europe, and the town saw
savage encounters between Irish navvies and French-Canadian lumberjacks.
Indeed, the new official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada is a mansion
built by one of the lumber kings in the great days of the Ottawa Valley timber
trade. | i
Bisecting the city is a fourth river: man-made. This is the Rideau Canal,
completed in 1826 by Royal Engineers, under Colonel John By, to provide
a safe route from Montreal to Kingston, in Upper Canada, without having to
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