Ottawa, Canada -- Canadians talk most about weather, it is said, because we have so much of it. With the near-record snows of the winter of 2008 almost behind us, one hears weather talk everywhere, over coffee and cocktails.

At a table beside me in a coffee shop recently, I heard a man say that the worst winter in Ottawa was in the 1800s when a volcano on the other side of the world exploded and threw tons of dust into the atmosphere.

The result blocked the sun, cooled the Earth, and Ottawa went through a summer when the snow didn't melt. It was a solid year of winter.
For two reasons, I couldn't correct him. First, I didn't know for certain he was wrong. Second, he wasn't speaking to me.

He planted a puzzle of the type I can't leave alone. Finding the answers, right or wrong, would give readers of this column a needed edge in the game of cocktail chatter.

Turned out the man with the double-double was both right and wrong.

There was a summerless year. I found reference to it in the 1968 book by Harry J. Walker, Carleton Saga, printed by Runge Press. "The year of 1816 was the ultimate in human misery ever experienced in the Ottawa district and in fact throughout Upper Canada."

The volcano he referred to could only have been Krakatoa in the Indian Ocean.

When it blew its top, it created what was likeliest the loudest noise ever on the planet. It threw an estimated 25 cubic kilometres of earth into the atmosphere, and it did indeed affect weather around the world. It also killed 36,417 people.

But it happened Aug. 26, 1883.

Getting back to the year when summer didn't happen: It's why Maritimers are called Bluenosers.

It started to snow in June, 1816, Harry Walker said, using diaries of the day as a source.

It wasn't happening just in the area that is now Ottawa, but through much of what is now Ontario and Quebec. This part of the world was a collection of pioneer farms, and Ira Honeywell, the founder of Nepean, made an "epic" trip to Prescott to fetch flour.

He shared it with his neighbours, Abram Dow (Dow's Lake) and Brad Billings (Billings Bridge).

Practically nothing was gathered in the way of a crop. People survived for 12 months without fruit or vegetables.

Cattle starved or were eaten, and when they were gone, the meat on the table was venison, porcupine and groundhog. "The winter of horror" was followed by a bumper crop, and much of that was due to the arrival of settlers from Nova Scotia.

They brought with them the seeds for a new potato crop, and shared them with their new neighbours. The hardy new potatoes had a blue point and the farmers of Upper Canada named them "bluenosers." The name was also applied, in friendly appreciation, to the new arrivals.

As for the winter with the worst snow, according to Walker, that would have been 1869. It started to snow heavily Feb. 11 "and scarcely stopped until well after St. Patrick's Day."

Some believed the snow was to punish the population for its morbid curiosity. The day it started, thousands had turned out to watch the public hanging of Patrick Whelan for the murder of Thomas D'Arcy McGee. It was the last public hanging in Ottawa, and many attendees who headed home to places like Bells Corners, Richmond and South March, didn't make it. They were forced to seek shelter in homes along the way, planning to continue when the storm let up. Most spent weeks waiting.

Walker had access to a diary kept by farmer William Upton. His farm would eventually become Uplands Airport and the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club. Upton kept a daily record of the unusually cold temperatures and the record-setting snowstorms. With no mechanized snowplows or telephones, individual groups were on their own.

Worried about a daughter who had travelled to Manotick, Upton mounted a rescue expedition. He found her party trapped in deep snow. With his help, they dug out the horses and found their way to a farm home.

Food for people and their animals was running out in Ottawa and the rural areas. The federal government ordered troops out to open the rail line from Ottawa to Prescott. A train trapped in a cut, according to witnesses, was under more than six metres of snow. Upton recorded the temperature at minus 18 on April 13.