Low Down Articles
Echoes from the Past
Article 70 of 111
This article first appeared in the "Echoes from the Past" column of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Samuel Bingham, River Driver
Although Samuel Bingham, born in 1841 in Lower Bytown, was a driver and handled the Gilmours' logs he was not in their employment. He had gained his experience as a millhand at Almonte. Later he became a sawfiler. Feeling that the latter was a dead-end job he turned to the logging activities on the Gatineau River.
In 1878 he received a contract from Gilmour & Company and the W.C. Edwards Company for driving and rafting on the river, remaining in this capacity for nearly thirty years.
Further down river from Chelsea the Gatineau Boom Company, of which Bingham was also the operator, took over the sorting of the logs of the two companies. This was probably at Ironside, known to have been the scene of the Gilmour's piling grounds.
Bingham became known as the "King of the Cascades" (Alonzo Wright having pre-empted the title of "King of the Gatineau"). Bingham received his naming from the great chute on the Gatineau River known to this day as Cascades.
Although he worked on the Gatineau River, Bingham lived on Sussex Street, Ottawa, near the present-day National Research Council. He travelled back and forth either by horse and buggy or by train. Because of the seasonal nature of his employment he found time to enter local politics, becoming Mayor of Ottawa in 1897.
Bingham, a man known for his generosity, signed over his monthly mayoralty pay cheque to some deserving charity, one month Catholic, the next Protestant. He also paid for the construction of a small park in Lower Town, called Bingham Square. The park disappeared when the approaches to the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge were put in.
On the night of 16 June 1905, after a day on the river, he received a telegraph that a log-jam was forming at Cascades. He hired a rig about midnight and set off for the site of the jam. He and his men worked all night managing to free the jam before dawn. With his hired rig he headed to Wakefield for some well-earned shut-eye but sleep overtook him on the way. The horse walked into the river for a drink, lost its footing and carried the buggy and the sleeping occupant into deep water where it tipped, drowning the unfortunate Bingham.