By Jim Stone
Do you wonder about the Algonquin history of the area that now includes Lowertown? It wasn’t all that long ago–220 years–that Pierre Louis Constant Pinesi, a chief of the Algonquins, hunted and lived with his family in this area before it was settled by farmers, loggers and later became what is now Ottawa. It is hard to imagine his life at that time: forests covered the area , and there were no roads, so summer travel was by birch-bark canoe on the Rideau and Ottawa Rivers. There were no stores. In the winter, Chief Pinesi and his extended family had winter camps from which they hunted on snowshoes for animals such as moose, deer, elk (killed off by overhunting in the early 1800s), beaver and rabbits. Before the Rideau Canal was built in the late 1820s, the Rideau River had more rapids and fish, was edged by forests and was a canoe route from the Ottawa River to the St. Lawrence River.

The son of another Algonquin chief, Chief Pinesi was respected by his people and was recognized by the British government as Grand Chief of the Algonquins. His name Pinesi relates to the partridge bird. The Algonquins lived in their traditional lands which Chief Pinesi and other chiefs said stretched from Montreal along the Ottawa River to near North Bay and covered all the rivers in Quebec and Ontario that flowed into the Ottawa River along this stretch. This area is almost 100,000 square kilometres, twice as large as Switzerland! Within this area, individual Algonquin families had their hunting grounds. Chief Pinesi’s hunting grounds were bounded on the north by the Ottawa River and centered around the Rideau Falls, which would include Lowertown today.
An estimate is that these hunting grounds covered about 1800 square kilometres, about 20 kilometres on each side of the Rideau Falls along the Ottawa River and about 40 kilometres south to about Kemptville. This included all of what is now Ottawa, including Parliament Hill and Lowertown. Archeologists have found only a few locations in the Ottawa area showing Indigenous sites, mostly on the Quebec shore of the Ottawa River. They have found remains of Indigenous pottery at a site on the portage around Rideau Falls, (The portage was likely from Governor’s Bay on the Ottawa River to about the St. Patrick Street Bridge.) So far no sites have been found in Lowertown.

Chief Pinesi was a traveller and spent much time with other Algonquins and Iroquois in the town of Oka near Montreal as well as in what is now Algonquin Park. He traded furs with French and English traders for metal goods and tools and would have watched the annual great canoe fleets of Montreal fur traders as they portaged over the Chaudière Falls on their way to and from trading posts as far as the Northwest Territories. In the War of 1812, he and Algonquins joined other Indigenous nations to fight as allies of Britain against the US invasion. He was part of the Algonquin contingent that travelled more than 500 kilometres to the west end of Lake Ontario and claimed victory in the Battle of the Beaver Dams in the Niagara Peninsula in 1813.
Chief Pinesi dedicated much of his life between 1795 and 1834 when he died to getting the British to recognize that the Algonquins owned their traditional lands and that these lands had never been sold to the British government. He was not successful, although the land was never legally transferred to the British government. When you hear the term “unceded Algonquin land”, this is what it means.
Chief Pinesi and his family witnessed the transition of their hunting grounds from forest to fields as waves of settlers arrived, chopped down the trees, killed the animals he and his family ate and transformed the landscape. Did you know that the Rideau Canal required a dam which raised the Rideau River water level by 13 metres at Hog’s Back to make what is now Mooney’s Bay? In 1800 there were only a handful of settlers in the Ottawa area. By 1850 Bytown had 7000 people. During this time, Chief Pinesi and his family tried to continue their traditional way of life and faced increasing poverty.
So next time that you think of history of Lowertown, think beyond the settlers and Bytown and think of the struggles of Chief Pinesi.