OTTAWA - There's a tale historians tell of Queen Victoria choosing Canada's capital by lobbing a dart at a map, which by happenstance landed on Ottawa.
Why else, they ask wryly, would Victoria pick a rough-and-tumble backwater like Ottawa, a bawdy logging town at the junction of two rivers and the Rideau Canal, as the seat of Canada's government?
The answer: location, location, location.
"One of the reasons that it was chosen was because it was remote from the St. Lawrence and the idea that if the Americans ever invaded, then you wouldn't have your capital right on the other side of the border,'' said Heritage Ottawa president David Flemming.
But he notes the Queen's decision in 1857 was hardly popular among other cities jockeying for capital status, such as Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Kingston, Ont.
"Ottawa, to some extent, was the darkhorse. But Ottawa was everybody's second choice,'' Flemming said.
"The choice of Ottawa was something that the rest of the communities could hold their nose and accept.''
Canada's first Governor General, Sir Charles Stanley Monck, also appears to have hated the idea, according the Ottawa Book of Everything.
"It seems like an act of insanity,'' Monck wrote to British politician Edward Cardwell, "to have fixed the capital of this great country away from the civilization, intelligence and commercial enterprise of this province, in a place that can never be of importance and where the political section of the community will live in isolation and removed from the action of any public opinion''
Nevertheless, the decision stuck and Ottawa marks on Dec. 31 its 150th anniversary as Canada's capital with a splashy fireworks display put on by the National Capital Commission.
Far from today's commonly-held perception of Ottawa as a dull enclave of civil servants, in 1857 it was a rowdy town divided along linguistic lines into affluent, English-speaking Upper Town and working-class, French-speaking Lower Town, said Dave Mullington of the Historical Society of Ottawa.
The damp December breeze blows off the Ottawa River seemingly through to the bone as Mullington walks through the Byward Market to the site where tensions between the two solitudes escalated in 1849 into a riot.
Reformists from Lower Town clashed with Tories from Upper Town over an upcoming visit by Lord Elgin, who Mullington said was deeply unpopular with Upper Canadians for compensating Lower Canadians for losses suffered during the rebellions of 1837-38.
The two factions battered each other with sticks and stones and, later, with gunfire, leaving 30 wounded and one man shot dead.
"At any rate, it's still a lively place. Always things happening,'' Mullington said of the Byward Market, still a beehive of bars and booze.
Though no longer sharply split by language, the former Upper and Lower Towns still retain much of their original character. Lower Town is now home to many University of Ottawa students while what was Upper Town is nearly deserted when government employees leave the downtown core after work.
Over time, Ottawa became more synonymous with the civil service and less with the logging industry. Today, nearly one out of every five people in Ottawa and neighbouring Gatineau, Que. work for the federal government, Statistics Canada reported last month.
Amalgamation in 2001 of the Ottawa-Carleton region and 11 municipalities made Ottawa the country's fourth-largest city after Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
It's hard to say what Ottawa would have become had it not been picked as Canada's capital, Flemming said.
"It probably would be more of an industrial place than it is now,'' he said.
"It probably would never have eclipsed Toronto or anything like that, just because of its geographic location.''
