The Rideau Purchase

The land of the Rideau River and the Ottawa once belonged exclusively to the Algonquin, though several other Anishinaabe traders would travel through the area as well.  But a price was paid for the land, and it was opened for white settlement.  Now, who bought and who sold the land, and for how much, represents the details in which the Devil might hide.  For more details about the two treaties that governed the Rideau Purchase, click here. 

Transcript

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Good day, Ottawa History people, and welcome back to the Ottawa History Hub Podcast. In recent weeks, we've looked at migration to Upper Canada after the American War of Independence and Loyalist settlement along the Rideau and Ottawa rivers, and those waterways that had been developed through the Rideau Canal Project. Today, we're going to talk about the non-immigrants to the region, the Algonquin, and how they were situated during this influx of settlers from the South and the East. It's quite common to close emails and open public meetings with land acknowledgments, which have some modern political connotations that we don't need to get into here. Often you'll hear terms like treaty peoples, unceded territory, or traditional lands. So today we're going to talk about treaties and land sessions and traditional territories. While I don't particularly want to talk about modern politics in a history podcast, I'm not really able to avoid the subject. Avoiding politics in Ottawa would seem to be a bit of a fool's game. The basin of the Kichisibbe River, called the Grand or Ottawa River, flows from the Canadian Shield southwards and eastwards towards the St. Lawrence, and out to the Atlantic Ocean, and has been inhabited by various Anishnabe people over the years. Speaking dialects of Anishinaabemoin, the Nipissing lived at the northern headwaters, the Kichissiparini further downriver, around modern day Pembroke, and the Omamawini lived south of them. Other Algonquin peoples lived in the river valleys flowing into the Kichissippi, including the Gatineau and the Rideau Rivers. Most Algonquin people lived on the northern side in Lower Canada, modern Quebec, but there were smaller communities on the south shore of the river in Upper Canada as well. At this point in our narrative, the Algonquin were not as numerically powerful as other Anishinaabe people. Early French estimates had put the numbers at approximately 6,000, but that guess was far from statistically consistent. In 1768, the British estimated that the numbers were closer to 1,500, around a quarter of the pre-contact population. Though that was still just a guess, without anything close to a proper modern census. This was as a result of the Beaver Wars, see episodes six and seven from chapter one, which included famine, disease, and war, but also conversion. Not just to Christianity, but Algonquin people joining, freely or forcibly, other indigenous nations, particularly the Hodenoshone people, also called the Iroquois, also called the Five and Later Six Nations. Today there are approximately eight thousand members of various algonquin groups in Canada, and about thirty thousand who claim some algonquin heritage. The term claim and some heritage are topics for others to deep dive into. The important reality is that as the Loyalists were moving into Upper Canada, and Dalhousie was thinking of his Grand River Canal Project, the Algonquin did not have the population, the strength of arms, the political support, or the economy to effectively contest the will of the settlers to the same degree as the Haudenosaunee or some other various nations of Upper Canada. As noted earlier, most Algonquin then as now lived on the Quebec side of the river, and in the early 1800s, the Algonquin presence along the Rideau was more of a seasonal territory than a settled year-round community. Most Algonquin would have sites that they would return to every summer and other locations for the winters. Before Colonel Bai and the Canal Deers arrived in September of 1829, the junction of the Rideau and Ottawa rivers was a wintering quarter for the Partridge Clan of the Algonquin and their leader, Pierre Constant Pinesset. This background brings us to 1819, when the Crown, as represented by Governor General George Ramsey, Earl of Dalhousie, began looking at the Rideau River, Rideau Lakes, and Cataracee River as a location for a possible giant civil engineering project, and realized that it would need a land transfer agreement before construction could begin seven years later in eighteen twenty six. There are three questions that need to have good answers when you talk about buying land for the future Rideau Canal. Who can sell the land, who can buy the land, and how much land should be included in the deal. Then you get additional questions like compensation, lease tenure, and the like. So to start with, the Rideau Purchase, like the Crawford Purchase before it, was an agreement between the Crown and some indigenous people for the British to take possession of the territory from the Grand or Ottawa River to Kingston, in the territory that the Algonquin claimed by tradition, and the English claimed rights by the unattested Crawford Purchase of 1783. The Rideau Purchase is actually two treaties, one proposed and one ratified, which are called Treaties twenty-seven in eighteen nineteen and treaty twenty seven and a quarter in eighteen twenty two. The first treaty was negotiated between nineteen signatories, described as the chiefs and principal men of the Mississauga Nation of Indians, inhabiting and claiming the tract of land herein mentioned. They were largely from the Kingston area, not the area that would become Ottawa, and representing the crown was Colonel William Klaus, the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Three years later, those chiefs signed with three officers of the 68th Regiment on behalf of George IV, in Niagara, a fair distance from the Rideau River area. It's not a huge treaty on paper. When converted into a Microsoft Word document, it's only three and a half pages long. Before we get into the treaty, you have to remember that the Mississauga Chiefs were given the authority to speak on behalf of all other Agenchnabe by the British, not by the Algonquin, for example, who were not consulted. If you think that this treaty is legitimate, I would be happy to sell you a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge for a very reasonable price. Legitimacy aside, it's been acted upon, and history moves forward, and so do we. The deal involved a transfer of sovereignty from the Mississauga to the Crown, a large piece of land measuring two million seven hundred and forty eight thousand acres. I've got a long quote here from the treaty, so bear with me. All land commencing from the northwest angle of the township of Rowdon, then along the division line between produced north sixteen degrees west from the northeast angle of the town of Bedford, then north sixteen degrees west to the Ottawa or Grand River, then down the said river to the northwest angle of the township of Nepean, then south sixteen degrees east fifteen miles, more or less. For the record, the inclusion of the term more or less in a treaty is a warning sign, more or less to the northeast angle of the township of Marlborough, then south fifty four degrees west, to the northwest angle of township of Crosby, then south seventy four degrees, west sixty one miles, again more or less, to the place of beginning, together with all the woods, waters thereon, and all singular the rights, privileges, easements, benefits, and appurances thereupon belonging, and the reversion and reversions, remainder and remainders, rents, issues, and profits thereto belonging, or in any wise appertaining, and all the estate, right, title, trust, interest, use, claims, and demand whatsoever, both at law and in equity, of the said Mississauga Nation of Indians inhabiting and claiming the said parcel of land. It does not need to be pointed out, but it will be, that while the Mississauga Nation did indeed claim the parcel of land, they did not in fact inhabit it, though the Algonquin did. That is a huge tract of land, opening up all of eastern Upper Canada to white settlement. If you can imagine a line going from Petawawa, south to Peterborough, then east to Richmond, north to the Ottawa River, and then back up to Petawa, that's the stretch of land given to settlement. Ontario east of this, including Parliament Hill, was considered Crown land, purchased by William Redford Crawford, in exchange for hats, coats, and some rifles in the 1780s. Though there is no surviving written proof of this agreement to examine, the lack of a written record, particularly concerning the area of Parliament Hill and the Rideau Valley is an ongoing issue for the modern treaty process. The Rideau River was occupied by the Crown for military strategic purposes at this time, so the Rideau Purchase effectively pushed the border with the indigenous inhabitants 180 kilometers westward. What did the Mississauga get? Well, each man, woman, and child of the Mississauga Nation would get an annual annuity of two pounds ten shillings, payable in merchandise at Montreal prices, for the remainder of their lives. In modern conversion, this is just south of five hundred and thirty Canadian. For the future, all members of the nation born after twenty eighth november eighteen twenty two, would be entitled to five shillings per year, or roughly ten dollars and thirty cents. Not covered in this land session was Golden Lake, south of Petawa. It was just on the border of British holdings and was unpurchased territories of the Algonquin. Golden Lake, called Pikwakenagan in Anishnabimoan, was to stay an Algonquin Reserve. It is the only federally recognized Algonquin reserve on the Ontario side, and has 1,992 members, with only four hundred and six of whom live on the community proper. There are nine reserves in Quebec, because Lower Canada has a longer history of treaties with the Omamawini Algonquin, and there wasn't exactly a long line of settlers looking for land in the deep forests of West Quebec at the time. In Upper Canada, there was a political imperative to settle the land with loyalists to deter another American invasion. In 1789, an Algonquin man named Pierre Louis Constant Penesset was born along the Ottawa River. He would spend his summers at the Lake of Two Mountains, just west of Montreal, and his winters upriver, either where the Ottawa meets the Rideau or at Labreton Flats. He and his sons served in the War of 1812, fighting with the French militias and the Voltigers against the invading Yankees at the Battle of Chateau in 1813. After the war, he returned to his family hunting grounds, near the site of modern New Edinburgh. Hunting and trapping along the territory between the Ottawa and Rideau rivers was enough for he and his extended partridge clan. Pennissy means partridge in Anishnabemoen. For them to live comfortably, as they did, in the winters until Colonel Bai and his army of civil engineering workers came and set up a disquiet of a labor community during September of 1826, while Pennissey and his community were still in the summer quarters. The canal project, with its excavation explosions, saws and axes hunting for lumber, and the general unrest of a community of expatriate men laboring away from their homes and families, broke the peace of the valley. While I don't want to cast a judgmental nimby eye towards these bytown pioneers, I think that Penasset was not out of line, considering them to be less than ideal new neighbors. Penassie, being a law abiding soul, wrote a notice of trespass in French, which was the white language that he spoke, and delivered it to the Department of Indian Affairs. He was informed that the land was no longer sovereign to the Algonquin, but to the British, and much of it was to be used for canal construction. Penance lived with his branch of the Partridge Clan as chief. When Sir James Kent of the Indian Office and namesake of Kempville, got the petition, rather than supporting Penancy's land claim or increasing his pension, Kemp instead chose to promote Penancey to grand chief of the tribe of the Algonquins at the Lake of Two Mountains. This title included neither land nor money nor authority, but it certainly included the word grand. Because the land was no longer rich enough to support hunting, trapping, and fishing, Penancy and his clan migrated upriver, after petitioning the governments of Upper and Lower Canada for restitution on numerous occasions. He's buried in Burns Town, up the Matawasca from Arnprior, where he died in poverty on a pension of twenty two hundred a year of today's currency. In June of eighteen thirty five, a group of chiefs and other notables from the Algonquin and Nipissing people of the Ottawa River petitioned John Colburn, the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, on behalf of their people. As part of the opening text of the petition, here is a taste of the language of subordination that they were expected to use. We, the Indian chiefs and warriors, who now most respectfully approach your Excellency, do for ourselves and our respective nations, tribes, and kindred, humbly and obediently implore your excellency, as our temporal father and protector, to vouchsafe your gracious intentions and considerations of this the humble memorial of the grievances and deprivations which we, your red children, have long endured, patiently and submissively without complaint, under the conviction, however, that these grievances, now becoming more and more burdensome, when made known to your Excellency, our Father would obtain retribution, justice, and equity, having ever been coordinate with the government over which you continue so meritoriously to preside. They would proceed to evoke the 1763 Royal Proclamation guaranteeing indigenous sovereignty, and mention that along the one hundred and seventeen leagues from Hawkesbury to Nippissing, white settlement was feta complete along the southern shore of the Ottawa, and that the Algonquin had been pushed further inland from their river base, onto smaller tributary and lake communities, with the local economies burdened. The government of Upper Canada moved with characteristic swiftness. An agreement in principle was reached with the Algonquin the following March. Wait, that's not correct, that wasn't March 1836, that was March of twenty sixteen. So one hundred and eighty winters later. The agreement is still just an agreement in principle as of time of recording, and is being contested between the federally recognized Piquakanagan First Nations and the broader organization of the Algonquin of Ontario, which both have different standards of membership as to what constitutes a member of the Algonquin Nation. By the time this podcast catches up to the modern period, there may be some movement to report by then. When I lived in Niagara, I lived and worked in an area that was part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty. Edmonton, Alberta is on Treaty 6 land. Ottawa was largely an expropriation for the construction of the canal, and the rest was a part of the Crawford or Rideau purchases. My assertion here is that these treaties lacked legitimacy, and the participants did not have the authority to negotiate it. Because I can't read the Crawford Treaty, I don't have an opinion on it, but the lack of a copy is significant. The Mississauga were given the authority to participate by the English, who were themselves parties to the negotiation. The Algonquin who held the land were not consulted in any real capacity. For this reason, Ottawa is not treaty land, by my understanding. Ottawa is built on the unceded traditional land of the Algonquin people. Thank you everyone for listening to this week's episode of the Ottawa History Hub Podcast. This podcast is written, recorded, and produced by myself, Brendan Ray. Please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get this. Please visit the website at OttawahistoryHub.com, where you can see some of the data sources that I've used for this and other episodes. And follow on Facebook, Twitter, X, and Blue Sky. Next week, we'll be returning to the settlement at the north end of the Rideau as Bytown begins to emerge as a permanent settlement rather than a temporary labor camp. Until then, Advance Ottawa en avant.