St. Clair River

About

St. Clair River, Michigan — 1796 Walpole Island First Nation, Chippewa. The river's story begins long before any treaty line. This was the homeland of the Anishinaabe — the Ojibwe and Odawa — who used the St. Clair as a primary travel corridor, fishing ground, and gathering place. The Bkejwanong Anishinaabek, whose name means 'where the waters divide,' have lived along the river for over 10,000 years. The Walpole Island First Nation (Bkejwanong) and the Sarnia First Nation maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights to this water today, a framework first shaped by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and the 1807 Treaty of Detroit.

In 1796 the founding of Walpole Island First Nation on the Ontario side established the first First Nations reservation in the region. The 1842 Treaty of Washington ceded the Walpole Island reserve; more than a century and a half later, the 1995–2015 Bkejwanong Treaty restored 12,000 acres of the original reserve.

Then came the timber. Beginning around 1830, the St. Clair became the principal artery for the Saginaw Valley lumber industry, and its watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s. During the peak years between 1880 and 1910, an estimated ten billion board feet of timber floated down its waters toward Lake Erie. The Port Huron and Marine City sawmills, running from roughly 1850 to 1910, turned the river into an industrial engine. The first Blue Water Bridge construction, undertaken between 1892 and 1911, and the exhaustion of the white-pine stands around 1910 marked the end of the log-choked era and the rise of large-scale shipping.

The twentieth century was hard on the water. Between 1920 and 1970 the river ran heavily polluted with industrial waste. The 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement identified the scope of the problem, and the long recovery followed. The 2010-present St. Clair River Binational Strategy, a joint US–Canada effort, has addressed more than a hundred years of logging, industrial, and agricultural impacts. The 2010–2024 St. Clair River Area of Concern cleanup — a $200M-plus investment — has remediated contaminated sediment, restored more than 1,000 acres of wetland, and reconnected fish habitat. The 1990–2024 remediation program has removed over 50 contaminated sites, and the 2014–2024 Aamjiwnaang First Nation cleanup ranks among the largest indigenous-led environmental restorations in Canadian history. The 2015 Michigan Clean Water Plan and the 2019 Great Lakes St. Lawrence Water Resources Compact were the major recent outcomes.

Today the channel that once carried logs carries ships — more than 5,000 transits a year — and anglers. The St. Clair is a premier walleye and sturgeon fishery, and the 2018–2024 Lake St. Clair walleye population sits at a 50-year high. Paddlers know the corridor through its designated water trails, including the Island Loop Route and the Blueways of St. Clair, threading the delta marshes where the river hands its water off to the lake.