Saint Louis River
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Saint Louis River is a river in Minnesota that flows into Lake Superior. The largest river to flow into the lake, it is 179 miles (288 kilometers) in length and starts near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota. The river's watershed is 3634 square miles (9412 km²) in area. Near the Twin Ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin, the river becomes a freshwater estuary.
According to Warren Upham, he records the Ojibwe name of the river being Gichigami-ziibi (Great-lake River). He also records:
The river was probably so named by Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye (1685-1749), who was a very active explorer, in the years 1731 and onward, of the vast country from Pigeon River and Rainy Lake to the Saskatchewan and Missouri Rivers, establishing trading posts and missions. The king of France in 1749, shortly before the death of La Vérendrye, conferred on him the cross of St. Louis as a recognition of the importance of his discoveries, and thence the name of the St. Louis River appears to have come. On Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin's map (1688) and Philippe Buache's map (1754), it is called the Riviére du Fond du Lac, and the map by Gilles Robert de Vaugondy (1755) and Jonathan Carver's map (1778) are the earliest to give the present name.
In the mid 20th century, the St. Louis River became one of the most heavily polluted waterways in the state. Holling Clancy Holling, in his 1942 book Paddle to the Sea, illustrated the polluted state of the St. Louis River. By 1975, the river became an Environmental Protection Agency Area of Concern. The river began to be cleaned up when a new wastewater treatment facility was completed in 1978 as part of the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District. Through the 1980s and 1990s, additional cleanups took place, and the river is now significantly less polluted.
