Note 54 — VOYAGES AND TRAVELS

The Nipigon River is the largest and most northerly tributary of Lake Superior, and the outlet for Lake Nipigon. Its region, until the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, was almost as wild and unknown as when visited by the French explorers in the seventeenth century. Perrot mentions this river and lake in his Mémoire (1658); and Duluth (1684) wrote to De la Barre of the “fort which I have constructed near the River à la Maune, at the bottom [the north end of Lake Alemipigon,” as a barrier to the English trade from Hudson Bay. In 1687, Duluth’s brother traded with fifteen hundred Indians in the Lake Nipigon region. The furs from this district were especially rich and valuable, and the trading post on the lake appears to have been maintained throughout the French occupation. La Vérendrye was commandant here in 1728, when he became fired by the reports of the savage Ochagach, with zeal for Western exploration. See Northern and Western Boundaries of Ontario (Toronto, 1878), pp. 68–80.

In 1757, Bougainville describes this post as follows: “Les Népigons, a post established to the north of Lake Superior; the commandant is its farmer and pays for that privilege about 4,000 francs; it includes the Lake à la Carpe.... The post produces generally every year from eighty to one hundred bundles of fur.” After the British occupation the productiveness of the region declined. Duncan Cameron says that when he first went to this country (1785), the whole district produced but fifty-six packs of fur, although it had no opposition from Hudson Bay, and part of the Lake Winnipeg department was included in the Nipigon district. See Cameron, “The Nipigon Country,” in Masson, Bourgeois, ii, pp. 231–300. The North West Company considered this to be its territory, but later the Hudson’s Bay Company built a post at Red Rock, near the mouth of the river—now a station on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Hudson’s Bay Company still maintains a wintering post, known as Poplar Lodge, on the east shore of Lake Nipigon. See Canadian Bureau of Mines Report, 1901, p. 212. The Nipigon River is now noted as a fisherman’s paradise. For a description of the route from the mouth of the river to the lake, see Canadian Geological Survey Report, 1867–69, p. 336.—Ed.