Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
Stoney Monday was a specific event going back to Bytown days but was far from isolated. Bytown was considered the most violent community in North America at the time with ongoing sectarian violence centred on the Byward Market and Sapper's Bridge. A poem was written about the first Bytown fair in 1829 and how the happy event suddenly got out of control. It didn't help that so many lumbermen came to Bytown from the surrounding countryside to have a drunken good time when they were not working in the woods. Old Bytown was filled with seedy hotels, taverns and brothels to satisfy those lumbermen.
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I concur.
Bytown, before it was chosen to be Canada's capital, was very much a frontier town in the boonies. Lawlessness was rampant and law was enforced only by calling in the British troops encamped on the Hill.
Most violence involved ethnic conflicts between the English, the Scots, the Irish and the French as well as between Anglicans, Presbyterians, Irish Catholics and Irish Orangemen .
Personal conflicts were usually settled with bare fists at assigned street corners or alleys. These fights were probably part of the entertainment for the locals,
The town's business was lumber and lumbermen and their lumberjacks ruled the streets.
Lumber was hewn in the woods during fall and winter and then driven down streams and rivers and then down the Ottawa River as rafts in the spring and summer by raftsmen. Most of the lumberjacks would have gone home to their farms and family by then but raftsmen may have been mostly single guys or others who were shirking their homesteading and family duties. Before going back to the woods in late summer or fall, some raftsmen would hang around (lots of brothels), drink a lot and presumably indulged in fighting as a pastime.
The name Raftsmen has a pretty rough edge to it and very suitable to a not-so-gentle sport known as football on the north-american continent.
It is equivalent to the "rough riders" of the 19th century rough terrain throughout western North America. That's why Teddy Roosevelt hired a bunch of them, mostly from Texas, to help out with the invasion of Cuba in 1897.
When silent movies came out a decade or so afterwards, these wilderness rough riders were sissied down to "cow boys" riding on open ranges. That's probably because the Hollywood movie studios were mostly in Arizona.
So I think that "Raftsmen" would be an appropriate name for a football team.
Heck, we even have one on the City's Coat of Arms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Ottawa
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