The Gatineau River has always been an important transportation route. It was well known to the various Indian Nations of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence valleys and it was used extensively as a highway for seasonal travel.1 It was only in the early 1800s that permanent settlement occurred in the Gatineau Valley. Beginning with the American Philemon Wright's settlement of Hull in 1800, colonization gradually extended north. By the 1830s a village at Wakefield was growing on the west bank of the Gatineau, close to its junction with the La Pêche River, where Fairbairn had built a water-powered grist mill.
