The Ouananiche

Many of the small headwater lakes feeding the North River in the Laurentians north of Montreal were named for fish, mostly varieties of trout. There are a limited number of varieties, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that they travelled through the river system to different lakes. They must have scaled rapids climbing natural fish ladders, eventually filling a lot of lakes with just a few different types of trout. Their goal, sparkling clear water, bubbled out of the rocks as though it were being created underground, and the lakes, rivers and even the streams were eventually teeming with trout.

We have degraded their environment for over two centuries, each successive generation adjusting to new norms of reduced numbers of fish, as though stepping down our own staircase or fish ladder of degradation one generation at a time.

Long before the Bible was written, the huge Laurentide Ice Sheet finally retreated northward leaving behind, stamped into the Canadian Shield, the rock formations, lakes and valleys that are our heritage. As the ice sheet receded, forests, animals, fish and humans slowly moved in, living in a harsh but balanced relationship. Throughout the millennia, this balance would be maintained, complete with its unforgiving winters and hot summers, and life adapted, dependent upon the woodlands and the bounty in the life-giving, pure waters.

It is very hard to estimate how many people lived in the Laurentian River valleys and along the Ottawa during these ancient times, because they had such a light environmental footprint that their tracks are hard to follow. To try to get a perspective, though, the Americas were settled – and sharing in their gift culture – long before the Europeans arrived, and according to Charles Mann in his book 1491, the human population of our continents prior to the arrival of the Europeans was greater than Europe’s at that time. He describes two established civilizations complete with their own written records. While the northern peoples who lived here were on the periphery, they knew how to produce goods to use and to share and acquired essential products from their southern neighbours in exchange. The Wendat (Huron), for instance, offered corn and received clothing, canoes and dried foods from the Weskerinis (Petite Nation) Algonquin of our region.

Measuring the time since humans moved into the ecosystem that had slowly replaced the receding glacier, the earliest settlements in the Laurentian River valleys occurred three thousand years before Abraham left Ur, as related in the Book of Genesis.

Humans have lived in these valleys for a long time. As the Gardiens du Patrimoine Archéologique at Lac Nominingue showed, a beautiful blue ceremonial axe dating to 6000 years ago was found near there. During those thousands of years, that ancient and still living culture maintained a balance with our rivers, flora and fauna, living with forests dominated by enormous white pines, trees that rose in places as high as 20 storeys, broken only by lakes, rivers and Iroquoian farms, from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast. It is only in the last two centuries that the felling of these giant trees began. The British navy needed them during the wars with Napoleon, and then the sawmills continued the insatiable consumption. As the trees disappeared, rivers floated logs, were channelled, and lake levels were adjusted in an effort to harness the simple energy of flowing water with little regard for the bounty it contained. Surviving ‘la drave,’ and struggling to maintain themselves as the rivers’ shores became degraded, the fish would remain a significant resource throughout the 1800s.

We know today how destructive our management has been; in fact, we have known there are problems with our practices for almost half the time since that first mill was installed in St. Anderew’s East around 1805. In his History of Argenteuil, published just over a hundred years ago, Cyrus Thomas recounts a story in which a Mr. Clark drowned. While the teller, E.S. Orr, does not give precise dates, the event happened before the 1830s when Clark brought grist to the Lachute mill to have it ground. While the miller was processing it, Clark “went to fish for salmon, which were then to be had below the dam, and was drowned.” Salmon? In Lachute? Two-hundred-foot-high trees? This is not British Columbia but our own Ottawa River Valley and the basins of its tributaries. Records do not suggest an awareness of rapid degradation, but dwell instead on economic successes and setbacks. Beside the simple word ‘mills’ in the index of Cyrus Thomas’s book, there are 23 references. The same index does not contain the words Algonquin, salmon, or even pine. Degradation, it seems, was normal. In fact, it was progress.

In his 1912 history of Ste. Agathe, Dr. Edmond Grignon mentions fishing for ouananiche, a land-locked salmon that is thought to occur where trout and salmon meet. He rails against the sawmills and dams and blames them in part for the disappearance of the abundant fish population. He warns that Ste. Agathe was losing its status as the fisherman’s paradise. He mentions also that the introduction of southern minnows, used as bait, were destroying the trout eggs, and calls on the authorities to monitor and correct the problems. That was over a century ago, 120 years after that first mill was installed in St. Andrew’s East. How long ago did the first mill seem to people when Ste. Agathe was still a fisherman’s paradise?

The ouananiche were present and may have been the salmon that Mr. Clark hoped to catch, but they are gone, extinguished from the North River, without even a placename to commemorate them. The trout are struggling to survive and the salmon may never make it back. Different groups have come forward to try to clean things up, but each generation is like a single step of that staircase, each one wanting the river to be put back to the way it was when they were young. The very top of the steps is too far back for anyone to remember. Today, though, the mills are gone, the dams serve no economic purpose, and the forests are coming back. Today, we can dare to dream that we can put things back the way they were, the way the Weskerinis Algonquin people cared for them. We can imagine and encourage gigantic pine forests and a river teeming with trout. Is it a dream beyond our reach? Perhaps. But maybe we can encourage our children to look back up the staircase to the top. Maybe we can achieve the goal of returning our river basins to the state they were in as recently as 3000 years after Abraham left Ur.