The Headwaters of the Maumee River

The Headwaters of the Maumee River. . , The Saint Mary's River and the St. Joesph River converge in Fort Wayne to form the Maumee River. The most important geographical feature of the area is the short distance overland between the Three Rivers system, which eventually flows to the Atlantic, and the Wabash system, which eventually flows to the Gulf of Mexico. This came to be the "portage, or carrying place, over which travelers could transport their cargoes from one system to the next. This natural crossroads attracted the Native Americans for thousands of years. It later attracted the European explorers and traders and the American pioneer settlers who continued to develop the area as a transportation and communications center. Chief Little Turtle of the Miami Nation expressed its importance eloquently at the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 when he called it "that glorious gate…through which all the words of our chiefs had to pass from north to south and from east to west.", At the end of the last Ice Age, 12.000 years ago, the retreating glacier of the Wisconsin Lobe left a unique continental divide that deflected the waters of the St. Joseph and the St. Mary's rivers toward the east into the glacial Lake Maumee and the waters of the great Wabash River system toward the west and the Mississippi River. In time, Lake Maumee became the center of the Great Black Swamp which extended throughout northwestern Ohio to Lake Erie; the Maumee River was the drainage for this ancient swamp, and for centuries it was the only highway through it., It is not known who named the rivers, but they probably were given their European names by an early, Catholic priest who passed through the area. The nearby statue is dedicated to that early churchman. The first clergyman known to have passed through the area was the Reverend Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamps, a professor of hydrography at the Jesuit College of Quebec, who visited the confluence of the rivers in 1749 on a scientific expedition.