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T

housands of tributaries, streams, springs and small lakes contribute to the headwaters of the North River system. Most of them seem to bubble right out of the ground as though the Laurentian Mountains were a place where water itself was created. This extraordinary system ties the whole lower Laurentians together in its sustaining web, belying the arbitrary-sounding name that it bears. Ironically the North is the southernmost river in the Laurentians. It is also the least navigable and generally runs at a higher elevation. The most common approach to the river's basin today is from Montreal and Laval. Crossing the flat plain of the St. Lawrence Valley the Laurentian mountains look like a wall in the distance. Once you climb out of the plain, you cross the North River and move ever higher, past St. Jerome, to Ste. Adele, but never far from the river. As you continue northwest, you climb another 600 feet to reach the elevation of Ste. Agathe where you will find that the river has formed many lakes. Another 300 feet will get you to St. Faustin where the river is gone and all you can find are creeks running into large clean lakes. At that point you will be on a ridge known as the St. Narcisse Moraine that runs from above the Red River basin all the way to Québec City.

Beyond the ridge, you descend rapidly into the valley of the Red and Devil Rivers. Within a very few miles, you are in St. Jovite, and you have dropped 900 feet, finding yourself at the same elevation as Ste. Adele. You have crossed the divide between the North River basin and the Red River basin. From the top of this ridge, the waters run in two directions, one through the mountain lakes that form the headwaters of the North, and the other, quickly down to the Devil and Red River valleys.

For well over sixty thousand years the Laurentide Ice Sheet pushed and scraped the hilltops of the Laurentians towards the southeast leaving the higher peaks polished and rounded beneath one mile and a half (2 km) of ice. Eleven thousand years ago, this glacier was in retreat and most of the lower Laurentians was free of ice, but then the ice sheet rallied and for a 500 year period it oscillated indecisively south of the Red River Valley until finally melting back and leaving the St. Narcisse Moraine, a wall sitting on the hilltops above the valley. Water held behind that ridge had to find a different route to the Ottawa River and in the process was captured in rocky basins as it meandered through the hills towards the southwest. The high mountain ridge that so clearly marks the southern wall of the Red River Valley also forms a barrier to the northwest wind forcing the weather systems to climb into the hills as they follow their course to the southeast, dumping precipitation onto the rocky upper reaches of the North River basin.

Clear mountain lakes spill from one to the other through the rounded rocky hills. Running through Val Morin to Ste. Adele it forms exciting waterfalls and whirlpools, skirting around mountain ridges then joining the Doncaster River in Mont Rolland and pushing on towards St. Jerome.

When humans, the Weskarinis of the Algonquin people, moved into the area vacated by the ice, they came from the northwest, along the Ottawa and up its tributaries. Confronted by the St. Narcisse Moraine, they only rarely climbed through it into the hills. Instead they returned each summer to the teeming plenty of the Ottawa, and whereas they met the Iroquois who came up from the St. Lawrence, they left a large no-man's land between them.

The mouth of the river, the place where all of its tributaries join and flow into the Ottawa, was the first part of the system to develop, and although we think of the North River basin as being dotted with communities, crisscrossed by bridges and flowing through old dams, evidence of abandoned mills, in fact the first Europeans to see it came from the Ottawa. To them, it was just a fairly average sized river that they had occasion to follow a little ways until they found a waterfall. These early visitors, most likely engaged by Charles Joseph d'Ailleboust of Argenteuil near Paris, surveyed the newly created seigneury in the early part of the 18th century. It is doubtful they could have done it before the Great Peace that was signed between the Iroquois and French in 1701, even though the Argenteuil seigneury was created in 1685. Arriving from the Ottawa, these surveyors made their way along the river to Iles aux Chats and found that the next five miles of river ran practically straight towards the north- east. They came to a great waterfall and dutifully marked this feature on their map, calling it La Chute. A little further up, they found another tributary that joined the river from the west. Thus the long stretch became the North River and the new tributary, the West River. Over the next hundred years, as mills grew, powered by the flow of the river, milling lumber and grinding grain, each new community adopted this name and no-one ever challenged or changed it.

Ref: A History of Lachute by G. R. Rigby with special thanks to Derek Anderson for pointing out the St. Narcisse Moraine.

Joseph Graham has written a book that features a select number of stories of Laurentian places and how they got their names. To learn more, click here.

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This material may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the author. © Joseph Graham