Montreal River

About

Montreal River, Wisconsin Michigan — 1880s Iron Mining, 1840s-1880s Mining, 1990s-2010s Montreal Trail 50-mi Hurley. For paddlers reading conditions, the Montreal is a gauged river. USGS station 04060993 records a long-term average of 346 cubic feet per second, and the run comes into its own between roughly 170 and 525. The river is broken into recognizable pieces along its length: the Full River, the Montreal River Canyon, the stretch from Nylund Road down to Saxon Falls Dam, and the upper reach from Highway 2 at the Wisconsin/Michigan state line to Nylund Road. Together they trace a corridor that hugs the border the whole way to Lake Superior.

Geography gives the Montreal its identity. It draws its course as the boundary between Wisconsin and Michigan in Iron County, flowing north until it reaches Lake Superior. That places it on the western edge of the Upper Peninsula and within the Gogebic Range, the iron-bearing country that would define the region's fortunes. The river is a tributary of Lake Superior, and its watershed forms part of the larger Great Lakes system.

Long before survey lines split the valley, the Montreal flowed through the ancestral territory of the Menominee, the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), the Potawatomi, and the Sauk. The river served as a primary travel corridor, a hunting ground, and a gathering place. That older claim was overwritten in stages by treaty. The stretch of country entered American hands as part of the mineral lands ceded to the United States under the Treaty of 1842 with the Chippeway Indians — a cession that set the stage for everything that came after.

What came was iron. Four decades after the treaty, the Montreal Mine, an underground iron operation in the Gogebic Range near Montreal, Wisconsin, was working its shafts by the 1880s. For a time the river valley belonged to the ore beneath it. The same decades put the forests to work as well: the Montreal was logged from the 1860s through the 1920s to feed the Wisconsin white-pine and hardwood industry, its drives and sawmills running until the pine stands were exhausted and state forestry conservation took hold. Between the mines and the mills, the towns strung along the river — Hurley, Montreal, and Ironwood — took their shape and their livelihoods.

The modern river is a recovering one. Since 2010, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, working with Montreal Watershed partnerships and the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts. Streambank stabilization projects ran from 2015 through 2024, and native fish restocking — brook trout and walleye among them — followed from 2017 through 2024. The iron has largely given way to quieter pursuits: the Montreal still anchors Hurley, Montreal, and Ironwood, but anglers now follow it for its brook trout and walleye, making it a favored fishing destination on the western edge of the Upper Peninsula. Where ore once defined the river's worth, current and catch define it now.