page_title: Ottawa River timber trade
section_title: Timber slides, cribs, rafts
hierarchical_section_title: Ottawa River timber trade / Timber slides, cribs, rafts
caption_attribution_description: English: Timber slide Chaudiere Falls, ca.1880-1900
context_page_description: The Ottawa River timber trade, also known as the Ottawa Valley timber trade or Ottawa River lumber trade, was the nineteenth century production of wood products by Canada on areas of the Ottawa River destined for British and American markets. It was the major industry of the historical colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada and it created an entrepreneur known as a lumber baron. The trade in squared timber and later sawed lumber led to population growth and prosperity to communities in the Ottawa Valley, especially the city of Bytown. The product was chiefly red and white pine. The industry lasted until around 1900 as both markets and supplies decreased.
  The industry came about following Napoleon's 1806 Continental Blockade in Europe causing the United Kingdom to require a new source for timber especially for its navy and shipbuilding. Later the U.K.'s application of gradually increasing preferential tariffs increased Canadian imports. The first part of the industry, the trade in squared timber lasted until about the 1850s. The transportation for the raw timber was first by means of floating down the Ottawa River, proved possible in 1806 by Philemon Wright.
context_section_description: The Ottawa River was the means of transporting logs to Quebec, using timber rafting.  Sticks were trapped by a boom "at the mouth of the tributary" to be assembled into cribs, each crib consisting of 30 or more sticks of timber.  Then the cribs, up to 100 of them, were joined together into a raft that served as the "riverman's home for the  month-long journey downriver to Quebec. The crew lived in bunk houses right on the raft, and one of the cribs contained the cookery.
  There were two principal types of assemblages of logs, a dram and a crib.  The crib was usually used on the Ottawa River wheres the dram was used on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence.  A crib consisted of two layers of logs where were about twenty-four feet wide at most, as they were designed to get along the rapids at the Chaudière Falls and Des Chats, whereas drams could be more than a hundred feet wide.
  Rafts destined for Quebec have 2000 to 3000 pieces, almost all of them pine.  The rafts are made up in cribs; each crib has 25 pieces.
  Rafts were powered by oars, or occasionally sails.  Rafts had to be dismantled and reassembled to get past rapids and obstructions.  At Chaudière Falls 20 days could be lost in hauling the timber overland.  Timber slides were an idea to solve that problem.
  The first timber slide on the Ottawa River was built on the North Side near the Chaudière Falls by Ruggles Wright, son of Philemon following a visit to Scandinavia to learn of lumbering techniques there.  The slide was 26 feet wide and was used to bypass the falls.  Prior to this, bypassing the falls was a difficult task, and at times met with fatalities.  His first slide was built in 1829 and during the next few years, other locations on the river began to employ them.
  The trip to the timber shipping yards in Quebec, headquarters of many lumber exporting firms, often took as long as six weeks.
  Pointer boat is a boat commissioned by Booth to move white pine down the Ottawa River built by John Cockburn first in Ottawa who then moved to Pembroke, whose marina now holds its monument.
caption: Timber slide, Chaudière Falls, 1880-1900
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