4
About the Delesderniers family:"The one that came here, John Mark Crank Delesderniers, was among other things, a trader and a merchant and he set up a store in the field next to his house down the road, and traded with the Indians, and what he traded with among other things, he sold all kinds of things to the settlers, I mean flour and glass and including rum, he traded ginseng. The Indians would bring him ginseng. Apparently it grew all over the place here. And he would give them goods, whatever they needed. What happened to the ginseng was that John Mark Crank Delesderniers processed it in a way so that it became what was known as crystallized ginseng, and it was sent by middle-men to the far east, particularly to China. We have that in his own writing, which is interesting because ginseng these days usually comes from China."
"They were one of the very early, early settlers here, they came here long before the Cumberland settlers. They are always referred to in local history as the early English settlers. We know that John Mark Crank spoke English, French, and several Indian languages. So they came here as English settlers as opposed to French in spite of their name. They were obviously fluently bilingual... that generation anyway. "
"At the time of the Rebellions, John Mark Crank Delesderniers' son, who lived at Greenwood was a justice of the peace and he was with what they called the "Vaudreuil Loyal Volunteers" which were the Loyalists, and his sister had married a Desjardins, who was one of the leaders of the Patriotes and lived here in Como, near Willow Place Inn. He was one of the quite an important leader, and another sister of Peter Francis Christian Delesderniers was married to Whitlock who was also a supporter of the Patriotes with his broadsheets that he printed at the time. So when the Rebellion was over, and the Patriotes did not win, Delesderniers was left with the job of arresting his brothers in law! They were in prison in Montreal for a while... "
5
About Robert Ward Shepherd and the Ottawa River Navigation Company:"One of the stories we were always told about him as children, is that somebody had left some money somewhere, one of the guests or somebody at the inn where he worked and he had given it back to them, and so he had a reputation from then on for being honest, and that of course is a good thing."
"He then decided he was going to get a better job he had read about a job West of Ottawa, keeping the books of a lumber company, and so he set out from Montreal again... he was about 18 years old... on horseback it took him 2 days to get to Ottawa and when he was in Ottawa he stayed in an inn there where he met a couple of men who were interested in somebody working on one of their boats. Obviously the lumber company job went up in smoke and he came back and he tells the story of coming back by stage coach, via Prescott, from Ottawa and sleeping in an inn... with two other men, all three in the same bed and he had all the money in the world with him... 200 dollars and he was absolutely terrified that they were going to steal it from him in the middle of the night, so he didn't get much sleep."
"Came back to Montreal, saw the other people who were involved in the ownership of these boats and was asked to start to work on the boat... He had a little bit of experience, he had a few years been working on a boat on the Ottawa River under a captain Robbins, but not in command and he saw after a couple of seasons that there wasn't any chance of promotion, because captain Robbins was around and there was only this one boat ........ so he was sent by these new owners to Brockville to see that this boat, which was the St. David was finished and fitted out for the season. And he brought that St.David which was a little tiny boat, we have no pictures of it... a paddle-wheel steamer... he brought that down all the rapids of the St. Lawrence, which when you think about it was an incredible feat... and so he was on the St.David for one summer. Then during that summer he found a new channel for the boats at Vaudreuil."
"To get to the Ottawa River from the St.Lawrence you had to go through the white-water if you like, either at St.Anne's or Vaudreuil and one of the rival companies had built a lock at St.Anne's, and they were the only ones who were allowed to use it. So when he brought his barges down, because these were all tow-boats, they would go down the rapids at St.Anne's. That summer the water was so low that they couldn't get down the rapids at St.Anne's and he decided that they would go over to Vaudreuil. If you go down there today you can see under the bridge there, there's a little island... one of the crew got into the water and they made soundings all the way down through the rapids... and put markers, put buoys out, and found that there was just enough, they only needed about three feet of water, they were very shallow draft. So at that point of course all the barges, not just his company's barges, but all the barges who weren't from this rival company could go down without worrying about the locks at St.Anne's. If they'd been stuck up there, all their goods would have been a little late getting to the market in Montreal."
"So the owners of the St.David were so impressed with this feat that they gave him the command of their larger steamer the next summer, which was much more comfortable... the "Oldfield". So he was on the Oldfield for a couple of seasons and the owners decided to move their business over to the St.Lawrence river, and he wanted to stay on the Ottawa River, partly because he knew it, and partly because he had met Mary Cecilia Delesderniers who lived at Greenwood, and it was much more convenient to visit her if he was sailing up and down the Ottawa River. So they said if he could find people to invest, he could buy the Oldfield and start his own company, and that's how the Ottawa River Navigation Company got started..."
"They were able to fit out a couple of cabins... a large cabin for the ladies, and a large cabin for the gentlemen and they would take people, it was the first time there was actually passengers on a steamer. Up until then these steamers had always had barges behind them, and if you wanted to take a trip up the river you could sit in the barge, but it wasn't very comfortable. So they decided they would have a passenger service, and they could go as far as Carillon, and the boat was too big to go through the canal at Carillon and so they got one of their rival companies to take the passengers from Grenville up to Ottawa, and they went between Carillon and Grenville in a stage-coach at that time. This was the first true passenger service from Montreal to Ottawa, about 1847."
"After that they built many, many steamers. Over a period of time they had at least 20 steamers on the river, not all at the same time, they still had market-boats or freight-boats and they still had a few tow-boats because towing barges was still a good business and in the 1860 and 70s that was the height of the travel between Montreal and Ottawa. They had two steamers running every day, they had one during the day to Carillon, one during the day from Grenville to Ottawa and one at night .... because business was so good. In the 1880's they still were building several new steamers. These, by the 1880's, were carrying 700-800 passengers ... the largest boat they ever built was the Peerless and she ran from Grenville to Ottawa in the 1880's, and she was 202 feet long, and she carried 1100 day passengers... The steamers on the lower river, the Montreal to Carillon steamers, after 1875 when they returned from Carillon to Lachine, they'd always shoot the rapids, and you could get off the boat and take the train into Montreal if you wanted to..."
"It was very exciting because the Lachine rapids in those days were completely different from today... there was a very narrow channel it was S shaped so that it was very tricky and there were rocks on either side and you just felt that, an inch here or an inch there, the boat was going to hit the rocks. And so it was a very exciting trip! All of the little pamphlets of the day said that it was very exciting, and perfectly safe... "
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