The Gatineau River

and its role in our history

Names of rivers and passages we take for granted can recall the events that caused those names to be chosen. Keeping our history alive can lead to a depth of understanding of ourselves and how we became what we are.

Nicolas Gastineau Duplessis arrived in New France in 1649 and began work as a clerk for the Company of 100 Associates. He may never have known that the company was created to take trade – and the colony – from French Protestants who had imagined and founded the colony in a quest for religious freedom, all a part of the Wars of Religion in Europe. His employment brought him to Trois Rivières, and he soon found business opportunities across the St. Maurice River at the Indigenous markets in Cap de la Magdeleine. The word ‘cap’ indicated a point of land extending into the water, the opposite of a bay. At the time he was there, the point of land was being developed to house a Jesuit mission to convert the Indigenous people who were present and to keep them away from the influences of the Dutch and English Protestants. They originally called it Cap de la Magdeleine, and later, Cap de la Madeleine.

At that time, La Madeleine was a marketplace where the Algonquin from the Ottawa Valley and the upper Laurentians came to trade with the French. These same Algonquin had shared peacefully with their Wendat neighbours to the west of the Ottawa River on Lake Huron since time before memory, but the arrival of Europeans upset those patterns. The Wendat, that the French called Huron, were Iroquoian farmers capable of supplying grain to the Ottawa, the Algonquin and the other nations that surrounded them. As an expression of their appreciation these nations would offer their products – canoes, clothing, dried fruit and meat – giving them and the Wendat access to a shared wealth.

The Algonquin met Champlain and the Company of 100 Associates, and they tried to act as intermediaries between the huge Wendat culture and the French. Their easiest route to get to the French at Quebec and Trois Rivières was to go down the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The problem with this route, though, was that the Mohawk nation (see Five Nations), trading with the Dutch at Fort Orange and later the English, controlled the St. Lawrence River and were under pressure to supply their European partners. These Europeans were happy to trade in guns, upsetting the balance that the Indigenous nations had lived in for a long time. Neither they nor the Mohawk were welcomed at French ports. Being allied with the European enemies of France, the Mohawk were unwillingly and unwittingly taking sides in the European Wars of Religion that had raged ever since King Henry VIII, Martin Luther and Jean Calvin left the Catholic Church. The Mohawk and other Indigenous nations didn’t have to know about European politics and wars to find themselves in the middle of them.

The Mohawk and Oneida nations were running out of the highly desired beaver pelts that both sides in the Wars of Religion wanted. They possessed guns, and when the French refused to trade with them, Algonquin canoes laden with Wendat, Ottawa and Algonquin furs being transported to the French were easy pickings. The Mohawk waited in ambush, taking the booty and thereby fulfilling their obligations to the Dutch and English.

In some seasons the Mohawk were not a danger, but it was difficult to predict, so the Algonquin began to use different routes, to the north. One such route took them up the Gatineau River to the small mountain lakes that feed it. From there they would follow streams and portage across to the mountain lakes that feed the St. Maurice River. The trip down the St. Maurice brought them to Cap de la Madeleine, where the St. Maurice empties into the mighty St. Lawrence – and downstream from incursions that the Mohawk might inflict. It was with these traders that Nicolas Gastineau Duplessis established his credentials.

Gatineau River basin author Kmusser October 2007, Creative Commons

From 1651 until he disappears from the records in 1681, Gastineau Duplessis became known as an important fur trader, and no doubt he, too, would have made the arduous trip up the Mauricie and across the lakes, travelling from his home on the St. Lawrence River to theirs on the Ottawa River without using either of those two important arteries.

Gastineau Duplessis’s son, Jean-Baptiste, started his career in the employ of the explorer Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, working later for the intendant Jean Bochart de Champigny, both occupations taking him to the upper Mississippi and the Detroit area. After that, he was involved in business in Trois Rivières and in iron works in the Mauricie. It is hard to confirm if he traded with the Algonquin in Cap de la Madeleine or if he travelled up along the Gatineau. Some sources state that the Gatineau River was named for his father and at least one authoritative source, Pierre Georges Roy, writing in 1906, suggests that Nicolas Gastineau Duplessis probably drowned in the river, thereby connecting his name to it. Other sources mention that both the father and some of his sons maintained a trading post, but no mention is made in the record of his son Jean-Baptiste, and no other son is specifically named.

The spelling of the river’s name without the ‘s’ may be significant in that it was also spelled ‘Lettinoe’ on a map prepared in 1783, and later, Colonel By spelled it Gatteno, while Jean-Baptiste Perrault’s maps from 1830 called it Àgatinung. This would lend credence to a completely different naming origin suggested by Jean Cournoyer in Le Dictionnaire des Noms Propres de Québec (Le Petit JEAN). Cournoyer describes the naming as having possibly come from the Algonquin whose name for it – spelled ‘tenagatin’ – means ‘the river that goes up forever.’ The name suggests that the source of the river could not be found – or at least could not be defined. They could always find an alternate source, a stream or creek that suggested they were not yet at the beginning of the river. This naming legend seems to fit well with their use of the river and their detailed explorations of it, the lakes that feed it and the many navigable streams that allowed them to travel across a mountain range to reach the St. Lawrence at Cap de la Madeleine. Such a naming story would be a worthy way of commemorating the skills of the Laurentian and Ottawa Valley Algonquin.

These explanations came into our history because Indigenous nations allied with the French, but unaware of the Christian wars across the Atlantic Ocean, needed to find a way of avoiding enemies who were also unwittingly being driven by these same religious wars. These northern river valleys and lakes served as a refuge from wars that were opaque to those who lived there but were deeply changing them. Like the river itself, we may never prove the source of its name or where the river begins but we may be able, one day, to put aside old differences and learn to live together without disrupting the lives of unsuspecting neighbours.