In late summer of 1938, twenty-five-year-old Montagnais/Innu¹ trapper Louis-Georges Boivin set out with his brothers from the Indian reserve at Pointe-Bleue, Lac St-Jean, on an 800-mile journey by canoe and snowshoe. The young men had spent several weeks at the reserve with family and friends, sharing stories of the previous season’s hunt, attending Mass and exchanging pelts for a trapper’s provisions at the trading post. They would spend the next eleven months, through autumn, winter, and spring, roaming the northern bush, tending their traplines and hunting game. To the well-fed, urban-dwelling historian of the early twenty-first century, the Boivins’ voyage...

This chapter focuses on the Peribonka’s industrial ‘prehistory,’ that is, on the period before the state conceded rights to the river’s development and before actual dam building took place. How were human beings utilizing this terrain prior to its industrial transformation? When and why did capital first seek to develop the energy resources of the Peribonka River? How did the state respond to capital’s demands? Finding answers to these questions promises to fill out our knowledge of the economic development of the Saguenay region. It will yield insight into the evolving policy and politics of hydro development in the decades...

The Great Depression quashed any additional hydroelectrical development of the Saguenay watershed through the mid-1930s. By this decade, Lac St-Jean controlled the flow of the Saguenay River; and in tapping this regulated flow of water, Aluminum was producing electricity at Isle Maligne (1926) and at a partially completed power plant at Chute-à-Caron thirty miles downstream (1931). By the 1930s as well, Quebec’s Surveys Branch of the Department of Lands and Forests had mapped this territory with the aid of aerial survey. Quebec’s Streams Commission, prompted originally by private enterprise’s contemplation of reservoir construction in the Peribonka valley and also by...

While Lac Manouan was constructed to serve British demand for ingot, the reservoir on the upper Peribonka River at Passe Dangereuse – the largest by volume in the province to this date – was created to serve growing wartime energy and ingot demand in the United States. The story of US power demand for aluminum manufacture and the inception of the Shipshaw hydroelectric plant is more fully documented in the next chapter.¹ In brief: it was late in the autumn of 1940, with the Lac Manouan dam under construction, that Canada’s power controller, Herbert Symington, began urging Aluminum Company to complete the...

Little is written on the US electrical power industry during the Second World War. At war’s end, the US government commissioned a broad array of historical reports and special studies dealing with the war-production effort, the purpose being a “full and objective analysis of the administrative problems and techniques involved in the mobilization of American industry” during the crisis.¹ Subjects ranged from truck manufacture to the labour shortage to the War Production Board’s policies toward lead and zinc. Electrical power was not among the topics, nor have scholars since made the effort to synthesize the war’s electrical power history.² This...

The political fallout materialized as dam construction neared completion. Interestingly, it was Shipshaw, rather than Passe Dangereuse, that first ignited the controversy. The ‘Shipshaw Scandal’ broke in the United States in the spring of 1943, after The New York Times reported in January on the completion of the Canadian dam, noting that the US government had essentially paid for it with its purchases of ingot. Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior and public power advocate Harold Ickes felt certain that Shipshaw’s enormous energy threatened the US public power movement. Residents of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere‚ led by Representative John coffee,...

The history of hydroelectricity across the twentieth century can be written in terms of increasing geographic scales of power exploitation: from the development of isolated falls, to the exploitation of a river’s full ‘power reach,’ to the use of multiple watersheds via river diversion. This growing scale of development was abetted and encouraged by technological advancements (in dam construction, turbine design, power transmission), by urbanization and electrification (including growing consumer and industrial demand for electricity), and, of course, by available venture capital.

The exploitation of Quebec’s Saguenay basin provides a case in point. At the turn of the century, reflecting...

Three decisions about the course of rivers – the Manouan, the Peribonka, and the Bersimis – provide us with something of a measure and range of what the Quebec government found acceptable to concede in wartime. And those decisions seem to have depended largely on the scale and nature of capital’s demands. Lac Manouan’s remoteness meant there were no competing forestry interests involved, and it drove up the cost and increased the difficulty of dam-building. The pre-existence of a chain of lakes in the region meant relatively minor rearrangement of a natural order. All of this produced a relatively easy and generous...