Ottawa is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest city and was known as Bytown, named after a Colonel By until it was renamed Ottawa in 1855. The Ottawa region was long home to First Nations peoples who were part of the Algonquin. The Algonquin called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the Ottawa region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible and Ottawa was soon a boom town based on the timber industry. Government backed sponsored immigration schemes brought many poor Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants to settle farm land in and around present day Ottawa, beginning in 1817 which began a steady stream of Irish immigration to the area over the next few decades. On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for Canada East and Canada West (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa.