Saint Lawrence River

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Saint Lawrence River
Map of the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Watershed
Origin	Lake Ontario
Mouth	Gulf of Saint Lawrence/Atlantic Ocean
Basin countries	Canada (Ontario, Quebec) United States (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Wisconsin)
Length	1,197 km (744 mi)
Source elevation	250 m (820 ft)
Avg. discharge	10,400 m³/s (367,328 ft³/s)
Basin area	1,030,000 km² (397,683 mi²)

The Saint Lawrence River (In French: fleuve Saint-Laurent) is a large west-to-east flowing river in the middle latitudes of North America, connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. It is called Kaniatarowanenneh ("big waterway") in Mohawk. It traverses the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and forms part of the provincial boundary between Québec and Ontario and part of the international boundary between Canada and the U.S. state of New York.

1 Geography
2 History
3 Names
4 Literature
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Geography

The Saint Lawrence River originates at the outflow of Lake Ontario at Kingston, Ontario. From there, it passes Brockville, Cornwall, Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec City before draining into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the largest estuary in the world. It runs 3,058 kilometres (1,900 mi) from the furthest headwater to the mouth (1,197 kilometres or 744 mi from the outflow of Lake Ontario). The furthest headwater is the North River in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota. Its drainage area, which includes the Great Lakes and hence the world's largest system of fresh water lakes, has a size of 1.03 million square kilometres (390,000 mi²). The average discharge at the mouth is 10,400 cubic metres per second (367,000 ft³/s).

The river includes Lake Saint-Louis south of Montreal, Lac Saint-François at Salaberry-de-Valleyfield and Lac Saint-Pierre east of Montreal. It surrounds such islands as the Thousand Islands near Kingston, the Island of Montreal, Île Jésus (Laval), Île d'Orléans near Québec City, and Anticosti Island north of the Gaspé.

Lake Champlain and the Ottawa, Richelieu, and Saguenay rivers drain into the St. Lawrence.

[edit] History

The first European to navigate the St. Lawrence was Jacques Cartier, who on 9 June 1534, first sighted the river and also claimed New France for Francis I. Until the early 1600s, the French used the name Rivière du Canada to designate the Saint Lawrence upstream to Montreal and the Ottawa River after Montreal. The Saint Lawrence River served as the main route for exploration of the North American interior from Europe.

The St. Lawrence was formerly continuously navigable only as far as Montreal because of the Lachine Rapids. The Lachine Canal was the first to allow ships to pass the rapids; the Saint Lawrence Seaway, an extensive system of canals and locks, now permits ocean-going vessels to pass all the way to Lake Superior.

In the late 1970s, the river was the subject of a successful environmental campaign (called "Save the River"), originally responding to planned development by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The campaign was organized, among others, by Abbie Hoffman, who at the time was on the run under the pseudonym of Barry Freed.

Saint Lawrence River along the New York-Ontario border

[edit] Names

Occasionally, the French name fleuve Saint-Laurent is wrongly translated as Saint Lawrence Seaway since it uses the word fleuve and not rivière. However, the word fleuve means a large river, which runs to the ocean or sea. There is no word in English that distinguishes this type of a river from others, and thus is appropriately translated by river. The seaway is a system of artificial canals and is called in French la voie maritime du Saint-Laurent.

The source of the North River in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota is considered to be the source of the Saint Lawrence River. Because it crosses so many lakes, the water system frequently changes its name. From source to mouth, the names are:

[edit] Literature

The St-Lawrence River is at the heart of many Québec novels (Anne Hébert's Kamouraska, Réjean Ducharme's L'avalée des avalés), poems (in works of Pierre Morency, Bernard Pozier), and songs (Leonard Cohen's Suzanne, Michel Rivard's L'oubli). The river has also been portrayed in paintings, notably by the Group of Seven. In addition, the river is the namesake of Saint-Laurent Herald at the Canadian Heraldic Authority.