Nipigon

The Nipigon River flows south from its great inland lake to Lake Superior, a waterway through the forested country of the Ojibwe. In 1667 the Jesuit Claude Allouez travelled up the river with Indigenous guides to visit Nipissing people who had taken refuge at the lake after the wars of 1649–50. He celebrated Mass beside the river before continuing to their village.

French traders later established posts in the Nipigon country to obtain furs and compete with the English on Hudson Bay. One post stood near the northern end of Lake Nipigon, while the river connected the lake to Superior and the canoe routes of the Great Lakes. The North West Company maintained a post at the river mouth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before its union with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821.