Betsiamites

Betsiamites lies on the north shore of the lower Saint Lawrence, at the mouth of the Betsiamites River, which comes down from the Laurentian highlands through forest and rapids. The name is usually traced to the Innu word Pessamit, meaning a place with lampreys or sea eels. For the Innu, the river was a highway into the interior and the estuary a source of fish and sea mammals.

Indigenous people had lived at or visited the site for centuries before Europeans came. Early in the seventeenth century Samuel de Champlain recorded an Innu village on the North Shore, shown on his map of 1632 as the Bersiamites. In the French period the Innu came to trade at posts along the coast, and Jesuit missionaries followed them. A trading post was established at the mouth of the Betsiamites River in 1733 by Gilles Hocquart. It passed to the North West Company's lease, and when the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company merged in 1821 the Hudson's Bay Company ran it until the lease expired the following year; it regained the lease in 1831. Most Innu families still spent much of the year in the forest hunting caribou, beaver and bear.