Then again, someone stopping at the local museum might actually find out that Mattawa was actually once quite the hub of activity, even if that activity was largely based on river travel and involved people passing through the small confluence of two rivers at the base of the Laurentian Mountains.
To the south, travelers would later favor roads traveled by walkers, horsemen, and eventually automobiles, but for the Canadiens and native peoples, the rivers were the roads. Voyageurs and missionaries opened up the heart of a mysterious continent long before the steady stream of advancing "civilization" was filtering through the Appalachians.
Early on, however, the Canadiens faced a remarkable double obstacle: the Niagara Escarpment and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations. An easy route to the upper Great Lakes and the lands to the west in the interior seemed to be a distant dream in the face of a thundering waterfall and towering limestone cliffs, to say nothing of nations that took an almost immediate hostility to a foreign power that had founds friends among their traditional enemies, the Wendat (Hurons) and Algonquins. Fortunately for Champlain and the newly arrived French, those same enemies had long since known about a fairly level water passage into the upper lakes. This passage existed far to the north of the Haudenosaunee and the newly forming English and Dutch colonies on the shores of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts. This passage, which connected the French and Ottawa River valleys, existed in a rugged northern land that had winters even more severe than in Quebec, and was important to the Wendat, Algonquins, and numerous nations to the north. The southerners, as a result, would have to contend with multiple fronts if they wanted to keep the French out of the interior.
They could not. Even after the Haudenosaunee were pacified by a surge of troops from France in the late 17th century, the Mattawa passage had so conveniently opened up a rather large river network to the Canadiens that it never got abandoned in favor of a more climate-friendly southern route through the lower lakes. The great location of the passage even meant that it took primacy of importance over the Mississippi network which would be opened up following the founding of New Orleans. Again, an enemy proved that the Mattawa route was far too valuable to abandon, the foe this time being the Spanish who continued to expand northward through Tejas. So what did this passage connect?
Everything from Quebec clear to the Rockies, including the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Platte, Illinois, Wabash, Des Moines, Red, Saskatchewan, Niobara, Nelson, St. Croix, and many other rivers. The red route which was denied to the French and their allies for so long eventually became insignificant, as that small yellow dot you see in northern Ontario proved to be the most vital link in the great chain of North American rivers. The Mattawa passage, in fact, was the Canadian equivalent to the Erie Canal (lime line in New York) which would later be the passage to open up volumes of traffic into the American interior, built in the core Haudenosaunee territory no less.
Even after the time of the canoe had long gone by, the position of Mattawa remained important, and the trans-Canadian railroad commenced construction not far away in a sleepy Franco-Ontarian town of Bonfield. The line still passes through Mattawa to this very day, alongside the Trans-Canada Highway. So what does this confluence of rivers look like these days?
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| The water in the foreground is the Mattawa River, with the water in the background being the larger Ottawa River. The land in behind the Ottawa is Quebec, while the vantage point and the land to the left of the falling slope in the background is Ontario. |
The confluence looks very much like a scene that Champlain and the Jesuits would have encountered in their time, even with a railroad bridge and a town just off the view of the camera vantage point.
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