PICTURE IT. I am driving over a long bridge on Highway 7 at Innisville, Ont. -- some 60 kilometres southwest of Ottawa -- when my out-of-province passenger stops talking in mid-sentence and asks incredulously, "Did that sign say Mississippi River? Is this near the head of North America's greatest river?"
"Well," I respond "yes and no." We had, in fact, crossed the Mississippi River, but it was not part of the famous "Father of Waters" that stretches 3,780 kilometres through the United States from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.
Canada's own Mississippi River -- a tributary of the Ottawa -- is considerably smaller at 201 kilometres in length. From its headwaters in the Madawaska Highlands of central Ontario, it winds through villages, towns and lake-studded woodlands, dropping 323 metres along its course. Its upper reaches flow south through the picturesque Upper and Lower Mazinaw lakes in Bon Echo Provincial Park, then on to Marble and Georgia lakes. From there the river swings east through Kashwakamak, Crotch, Dalhousie and Mississippi lakes, then turns northwest just east of the town of Carleton Place. After tumbling over falls and rapids at Appleton, Almonte, Blakeney, Pakenham and Galetta, it empties into Lac des Chats, a reservoir on the Ottawa River.
Before the Mississippi reaches Lac des Chats, a second outlet -- the Mississippi Snye -- flows east for six kilometres and empties into the Ottawa River downstream from the Chats Falls dam and generating station. This double outlet was well known to explorers and settlers from the early 1800s. Yet, until the 1970s, the final two kilometres of the main outlet and the snye were incorrectly identified on Canadian topographical maps and sailing charts as the Ottawa River (South Branch).
The Mississippi River's history has been well documented, but the origin of its name is still not clear. In Cree and other Algonquin languages, Mississippi implies it is the biggest river ("sippi" meaning river). But the name is inappropriate since the Mississippi is not only smaller than the nearby Madawaska River, it is a mere mite beside the mighty Ottawa. Perhaps early explorers and mapmakers mistakenly applied " Mississippi" to the river instead of another Ojibwa, Mississauga or Algonquin word with a meaning more suitable to the river's characteristics.
In 1827, Charles Thomas -- the Hudson's Bay Company factor based at Chats Falls -- referred to the river in company reports as the Tomississippi and the Tomissipii. I looked up both names and words with a similar "tomi" root in 19th-century Ojibwa and Algonquin dictionaries, but I could find nothing that even closely resembled them.
In 1968, historian Howard Brown of Ottawa speculated that the name Mississippi may have evolved from Mazinaw, a word of Algonquian origin. According to the late Selwyn Dewdney, an authority on native rock paintings, Mazinaw refers to the pictographs on Mazinaw Rock on the east side of Upper Mazinaw Lake. Perhaps Mazinaw-zeebi -- meaning "painted image river" -- was misinterpreted as Mississippi River. Another possibility is that the name evolved from Mississauga, the name of an Ojibwa band that migrated from the north shore of Lake Huron to the upper Mississippi River in the mid-1700s.
As curious as the origin of the name is the omission of the river from maps before 1816. Samuel de Champlain explored the Ottawa River in 1613, and is believed to have spent the winter of 1616 with the Hurons near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Yet none of his reports mention a tributary upstream from Chats Falls, and he did not portray it on any subsequent maps. Even during the 18th century, nary a squiggle was made for the Mississippi on any maps, nor was it mentioned in any reports I examined. For example, French mapmaker Guillaume Delisle did not include the Mississippi on his 1703 "Carte du Canada," yet he identified the South Nation and Rideau rivers to the east, and the Madawaska and Bonnechere rivers to the northwest.
When Britain took over what is now Eastern Ontario after 1763, its mapmakers portrayed only well-known features, excluding minor features if they had not been surveyed. Even Alexander McDonell -- the superintendent of location who directed immigrants to their lands in Eastern Ontario -- knew little of the Mississippi. In May 1816, he reported to an Upper Canada official that he had been "informed by the Indians and others that in the rear of the River Tay there was a much larger River which empties into the Ottawa." McDonell subsequently directed surveyor William Graves to investigate the river.
The first written reference to the name Mississippi was made in Graves' 1816 survey diary of Bathurst and Drummond townships. On July 16, he spelled it Mifsippy River, but he used four other spellings elsewhere in his diary and field book. (The long s [f] was sometimes used when a double s appeared in a word. I have retained it where it appeared in early 19th-century diaries and maps.) In another field book by one of Graves' assistants, the name was spelled Missisippi River. Then in 1817, surveyor John Ryder wrote Mafsassippa River in his diary of Beckwith and Goulbourn townships. The following year, a government map of eastern Upper Canada identified Rr Mifsifsippy.
The modern spelling first occurred on the 1818 map, "Sketch of the Rideau Settlement," but the name Mifsissippi Lake was given to what is now called Bennett Lake, west of Perth. An 1821 map of Bathurst District spelled both the river and lake Mississippi and assigned the same name to Bennett Lake. Silver Lake on Highway 7 was identified as West Mississippi Lake.
In 1823, engineer Samuel Clowes and surveyor Reuben Sherwood surveyed the Mississippi to determine its suitability for the proposed canal from Lake Ontario to the Ottawa River. But in their report to the Commission on the Improvement of Internal Navigation, they wrote, "the bed of the Mifsifsippy was far too elevated, and that as the lockage to attain and descend from the Summit Pound would be enormously expensive no Canal would be practicable in that direction." The canal was subsequently built on the Rideau River to the east.
By the 1870s and 1880s, lumbering was big business on the Mississippi, with stiff competition between companies. A long-standing dispute between two lumber barons influenced an important British law pertaining to the use of navigable waterways. The most prominent lumber baron on the river -- Peter McLaren of Perth -- produced about 100,000 board feet of lumber a day at his mill in Carleton Place. By 1886 he employed some 450 men in addition to other part-time woodcutters. To move his logs to market, he built several dams, sluices and slides along the Mississippi. He believed these improvements entitled him to prevent anyone else from running logs down the river. However, Boyd Caldwell -- another lumber baron with timber rights along the Mississippi and Clyde rivers -- won the approval of the Ontario government three times to drive his logs and square timber down the Mississippi. But the provincial permits were rejected by the federal government of Sir John A. Macdonald. So Ontario appealed to the Judicial committee of the British Privy Council which, until 1949, served as the final court of appeal for Canadians. In support of Caldwell's claim, the Privy Council endorsed the province's Rivers and Streams Bill in 1884, making it unlawful to monopolize a navigable waterway.
The lumber barons have long since disappeared from the Mississippi, but the river and the historic villages and towns along its course remain important in the lives of those who live and work in the area -- the farmers, woodsmen, merchants, professionals and others. And each summer, hundreds of tourists and cottagers flock to eastern Ontario's own Mississippi River and the many lakes in its beautiful valley.
