North America — Volume 1

by Anthony Trollope

The town of Ottawa lies between two waterfalls. The upper one, or Rideau Fall, is formed by the confluence of a small river with the larger one; and the lower fall—designated as lower because it is at the foot of the hill, though it is higher up the Ottawa river—is called the Chaudière, from its resemblance to a boiling kettle. This is on the Ottawa river itself. The Rideau fall is divided into two branches, thus forming an island in the middle as is the case at Niagara. It is pretty enough, and worth visiting, even were it further from the town than it is; but by those who have hunted out many cataracts in their travels it will not be considered very remarkable. The Chaudière fall I did think very remarkable. It is of trifling depth, being formed by fractures in the rocky bed of the river; but the waters have so cut the rock as to create beautiful forms in the rush which they make in their descent. Strangers are told to look at these falls from the suspension bridge; and it is well that they should do so. But in so looking at them they obtain but a very small part of their effect. On the Ottawa side of the bridge is a brewery, which brewery is surrounded by a huge timber-yard. This timber-yard I found to be very muddy, and the passing and repassing through it is a work of trouble; but nevertheless let the traveller by all means make his way through the mud, and scramble over the timber, and cross the plank bridges which traverse the streams of the sawmills, and thus take himself to the outer edge of the woodwork over the water. If he will then seat himself, about the hour of sunset, he will see the Chaudière fall aright.

But the glory of Ottawa will be—and, indeed, already is—the set of public buildings which is now being erected on the rock which guards as it were the town from the river. How much of the excellence of these buildings may be due to the taste of Sir Edmund Head, the late Governor, I do not know. That he has greatly interested himself in the subject is well known: and as the style of the different buildings is so much alike as to make one whole, though the designs of different architects were selected, and these different architects employed, I imagine that considerable alterations must have been made in the original drawings. There are three buildings, forming three sides of a quadrangle; but they are not joined, the vacant spaces at the corner being of considerable extent. The fourth side of the quadrangle opens upon one of the principal streets of the town. The centre building is intended for the Houses of Parliament, and the two side buildings for the Government offices. Of the first Messrs. Fuller and Jones are the architects, and of the latter Messrs. Stent and Laver. I did not have the pleasure of meeting any of these gentlemen; but I take upon myself to say that as regards purity of art and manliness of conception their joint work is entitled to the very highest praise. How far the buildings may be well arranged for the required purposes, how far they may be economical in construction, or specially adapted to the severe climate of the country, I cannot say; but I have no hesitation in risking my reputation for judgment in giving my warmest commendation to them as regards beauty of outline and truthful nobility of detail.

I will not attempt to describe them, for I should interest no one in doing so, and should certainly fail in my attempt to make any reader understand me. I know no modern Gothic purer of its kind, or less sullied with fictitious ornamentation. Our own Houses of Parliament are very fine, but it is, I believe, generally felt that the ornamentation is too minute; and, moreover, it may be questioned whether perpendicular Gothic is capable of the highest nobility which architecture can achieve. I do not pretend to say that these Canadian public buildings will reach that highest nobility. They must be finished before any final judgment can be pronounced; but I do feel very certain that that final judgment will be greatly in their favour. The total frontage of the quadrangle, including the side buildings, is 1,200 feet; that of the centre buildings is 475. As I have said before, £225,000 has already been expended, and it is estimated that the total cost, including the arrangement and decoration of the ground behind the building and in the quadrangle, will be half a million.

The buildings front upon what will, I suppose, be the principal street of Ottawa, and they stand upon a rock looking immediately down upon the river. In this way they are blessed with a site peculiarly happy. Indeed I cannot at this moment remember any so much so. The castle of Edinburgh stands very well; but then, like many other castles, it stands on a summit by itself, and can only be approached by a steep ascent. These buildings at Ottawa, though they look down from a grand eminence immediately on the river, are approached from the town without any ascent. The rock, though it falls almost precipitously down to the water, is covered with trees and shrubs, and then the river that runs beneath is rapid, bright, and picturesque in the irregularity of all its lines. The view from the back of the library, up to the Chaudière falls, and to the saw-mills by which they are surrounded, is very lovely. So that I will say again, that I know no site for such a set of buildings so happy as regards both beauty and grandeur. It is intended that the library, of which the walls were only ten feet above the ground when I was there, shall be an octagonal building, in shape and outward character like the chapter-house of a cathedral. This structure will, I presume, be surrounded by gravel walks and green sward. Of the library there is a large model showing all the details of the architecture; and if that model be ultimately followed, this building alone will be worthy of a visit from English tourists. To me it was very wonderful to find such an edifice in the course of erection on the banks of a wild river, almost at the back of Canada. But if ever I visit Canada again it will be to see those buildings when completed.

And now, like all friendly critics, having bestowed my modicum of praise, I must proceed to find fault. I cannot bring myself to administer my sugar-plum without adding to it some bitter morsel by way of antidote. The building to the left of the quadrangle as it is entered is deficient in length, and on that account appears mean to the eye. The two side buildings are brought up close to the street, so that each has a frontage immediately on the street. Such being the case they should be of equal length, or nearly so. Had the centre of one fronted the centre of the other, a difference of length might have been allowed; but in this case the side front of the smaller one would not have reached the street. As it is, the space between the main building and the smaller wing is disproportionably large, and the very distance at which it stands will, I fear, give to it that appearance of meanness of which I have spoken. The clerk of the works, who explained to me with much courtesy the plan of the buildings, stated that the design of this wing was capable of elongation, and had been expressly prepared with that object. If this be so, I trust that the defect will be remedied.

The great trade of Canada is lumbering; and lumbering consists in cutting down pine trees up in the far distant forests, in hewing or sawing them into shape for market, and getting them down the rivers to Quebec, from whence they are exported to Europe, and chiefly to England. Timber in Canada is called lumber; those engaged in the trade are called lumberers, and the business itself is called lumbering. After a lapse of time it must no doubt become monotonous to those engaged in it, and the name is not engaging; but there is much about it that is very picturesque. A saw-mill worked by water power is almost always a pretty object, and stacks of new cut timber are pleasant to the smell, and group themselves not amiss on the water's edge. If I had the time, and were a year or two younger, I should love well to go up lumbering into the woods. The men for this purpose are hired in the fall of the year, and are sent up hundreds of miles away to the pine forests in strong gangs. Everything is there found for them. They make log huts for their shelter, and food of the best and the strongest is taken up for their diet. But no strong drink of any kind is allowed, nor is any within reach of the men. There are no publics, no shebeen houses, no grog-shops. Sobriety is an enforced virtue; and so much is this considered by the masters, and understood by the men, that very little contraband work is done in the way of taking up spirits to these settlements. It may be said that the work up in the forests is done with the assistance of no stronger drink than tea; and it is very hard work. There cannot be much work that is harder; and it is done amidst the snows and forests of a Canadian winter. A convict in Bermuda cannot get through his daily eight hours of light labour without an allowance of rum; but a Canadian lumberer can manage to do his daily task on tea without milk. These men, however, are by no means teetotallers. When they come back to the towns they break out, and reward themselves for their long enforced moderation. The wages I found to be very various, running from thirteen or fourteen dollars a month to twenty-eight or thirty, according to the nature of the work. The men who cut down the trees receive more than those who hew them when down, and these again more than the under class who make the roads and clear the ground. These money wages, however, are in addition to their diet. The operation requiring the most skill is that of marking the trees for the axe. The largest only are worth cutting, and form and soundness must also be considered.

But if I were about to visit a party of lumberers in the forest, I should not be disposed to pass a whole winter with them. Even of a very good thing one may have too much. I would go up in the spring, when the rafts are being formed in the small tributary streams, and I would come down upon one of them, shooting the rapids of the rivers as soon as the first freshets had left the way open. A freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting snow and ice. The first freshets take down the winter waters of the nearer lakes and rivers. Then the streams become for a time navigable, and the rafts go down. After that comes the second freshet, occasioned by the melting of far-off snow and ice up in the great northern lakes which are little known. These rafts are of immense construction, such as those which we have seen on the Rhone and Rhine, and often contain timber to the value of two, three, and four thousand pounds. At the rapids the large rafts are, as it were, unyoked, and divided into small portions, which go down separately. The excitement and motion of such transit must, I should say, be very joyous. I was told that the Prince of Wales desired to go down a rapid on a raft, but that the men in charge would not undertake to say that there was no possible danger. Whereupon those who accompanied the prince requested his Royal Highness to forbear. I fear that in these careful days crowned heads and their heirs must often find themselves in the position of Sancho at the banquet. The sailor prince who came after his brother was allowed to go down a rapid, and got, as I was told, rather a rough bump as he did so.

Ottawa is a great place for these timber rafts. Indeed, it may, I think, be called the head-quarters of timber for the world. Nearly all the best pine wood comes down the Ottawa and its tributaries. The other rivers by which timber is brought down to the St. Lawrence are chiefly the St. Maurice, the Madawaska, and the Saguenay; but the Ottawa and its tributaries water 75,000 square miles; whereas the other three rivers with their tributaries water only 53,000. The timber from the Ottawa and St. Maurice finds its way down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, where, however, it loses the whole of its picturesque character. The Saguenay and the Madawaska fall into the St. Lawrence below Quebec.

From Ottawa we went by rail to Prescott, which is surely one of the most wretched little places to be found in any country. Immediately opposite to it, on the other side of the St. Lawrence, is the thriving town of Ogdensburgh. But Ogdensburgh is in the United States. Had we been able to learn at Ottawa any facts as to the hours of the river steamers and railways we might have saved time and have avoided Prescott; but this was out of the question. Had I asked the exact hour at which I might reach Calcutta by the quickest route, an accurate reply would not have been more out of the question. I was much struck at Prescott—and indeed all through Canada, though more in the upper than in the lower province—by the sturdy roughness, some would call it insolence, of those of the lower classes of the people with whom I was brought into contact. If the words "lower classes" give offence to any reader, I beg to apologize;—to apologize and to assert that I am one of the last of men to apply such a term in a sense of reproach to those who earn their bread by the labour of their hands. But it is hard to find terms which will be understood; and that term, whether it give offence or no, will be understood. Of course such a complaint as that I now make is very common as made against the States. Men in the States with horned hands and fustian coats are very often most unnecessarily insolent in asserting their independence. What I now mean to say is that precisely the same fault is to be found in Canada. I know well what the men mean when they offend in this manner. And when I think on the subject with deliberation, at my own desk, I can not only excuse, but almost approve them. But when one personally encounters their corduroy braggadocio; when the man to whose services one is entitled answers one with determined insolence; when one is bidden to follow "that young lady," meaning the chambermaid, or desired, with a toss of the head, to wait for the "gentleman who is coming," meaning the boots, the heart is sickened, and the English traveller pines for the civility,—for the servility, if my American friends choose to call it so,—of a well-ordered servant. But the whole scene is easily construed, and turned into English. A man is asked by a stranger some question about his employment, and he replies in a tone which seems to imply anger, insolence, and a dishonest intention to evade the service for which he is paid. Or if there be no question of service or payment, the man's manner will be the same, and the stranger feels that he is slapped in the face and insulted. The translation of it is this. The man questioned, who is aware that as regards coat, hat, boots, and outward cleanliness he is below him by whom he is questioned, unconsciously feels himself called upon to assert his political equality. It is his shibboleth that he is politically equal to the best, that he is independent, and that his labour, though it earn him but a dollar a day by porterage, places him as a citizen on an equal rank with the most wealthy fellow-man that may employ or accost him. But being so inferior in that coat, hat and boots matter, he is forced to assert his equality by some effort. As he improves in externals he will diminish the roughness of his claim. As long as the man makes his claim with any roughness, so long does he acknowledge within himself some feeling of external inferiority. When that has gone,—when the American has polished himself up by education and general well being to a feeling of external equality with gentlemen, he shows, I think, no more of that outward braggadocio of independence than a Frenchman.

But the blow at the moment of the stroke is very galling. I confess that I have occasionally all but broken down beneath it. But when it is thought of afterwards it admits of full excuse. No effort that a man can make is better than a true effort at independence. But this insolence is a false effort, it will be said. It should rather be called a false accompaniment to a life-long true effort. The man probably is not dishonest, does not desire to shirk any service which is due from him,—is not even inclined to insolence. Accept his first declaration of equality for that which it is intended to represent, and the man afterwards will be found obliging and communicative. If occasion offer he will sit down in the room with you and will talk with you on any subject that he may choose; but having once ascertained that you show no resentment for this assertion of equality, he will do pretty nearly all that he is asked. He will at any rate do as much in that way as an Englishman. I say thus much on this subject now especially, because I was quite as much struck by the feeling in Canada as I was within the States.