Manitoulin District

Whitefish River First Nation (Ojibwe: Adikamegoshii-ziibiing) is an Ojibwe First Nation in Manitoulin District, Ontario. It is a member of the United Chiefs and Councils of Manitoulin. Its reserve is located at Whitefish River.

The reserve is one of the few subdivisions of Manitoulin District that is not on Manitoulin Island or its surrounding islands. This mainland peninsula is also a corridor for Ontario Highway 6 and the only bridge to Manitoulin Island.

In June 2023, during National Indigenous Peoples Day, the first monument to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women east of Winnipeg was erected outside the reserve's community centre. It was designed by Indigenous artists from Orillia, Ontario-based Signature Memorials and was jointly funded by the federal and Ontario governments.

The district has an area of 3,107.13 square kilometres (1,199.67 sq mi), making it the smallest district in Ontario. It is in the northern part of Lake Huron, separated from the mainland by the North Channel to the north and by the Georgian Bay to the east. 

Espanola (2016 census population 4,996) is a town in Northern Ontario, Canada, in the Sudbury District. It is situated on the Spanish River, approximately 70 kilometres (43 mi) west of downtown Sudbury and just south of the junction of Highway 6 and Highway 17. The town is where the first experimental rules for the sport of ringette were created in 1963 by Mirl Arthur "Red" McCarthy using a group of local high school girls. Today, Espanola is considered "The Home of Ringette," while North Bay, Ontario, is considered the "Birthplace of Ringette" though the title of "birthplace of Ringette" is often shared by both. 

The name "Espanola" has been attributed to a story which dates back to the mid-18th century. The story goes that a First Nations Ojibwa tribe met a man who had travelled far from Spain. The Spanish man named Frise Espagnol married a local Anishinaabe (First Nations) of a family living near the mouth of the river, and he taught her and their children to speak Spanish. Later, when the French voyageurs and coureurs des bois came upon the settlement and heard fragments of Spanish spoken by the local natives, they remarked "Espagnole," which had been later anglicized to "Espanola," and the river was named the Spanish River. 

Keep On Trucking'

Blind River Camping Site

Becky Confectionery 

Ontario Highway 17 & Wawa

Wawa is a township in the Canadian province of Ontario in the Algoma District. Formerly known as the Township of Michipicoten, named after a nearby river of that name, the township was officially renamed in 2007 for its most significant and best-known community of Wawa, located on the western shores of Wawa Lake.

This area was first developed for fur trading. In the late 19th century, gold and iron ore were found and mined, leading to the region's rise as the steel industry developed in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. From 1900 to 1918, the Helen Mine had the highest iron ore production of any mine in Canada.

The Red Dog Inn is located directly on the Trans-Canada Highway 17 and in downtown Terrace Bay. 

Thunder Bay KOA Camping

Thunder Bay is a city in and the seat of Thunder Bay District, Ontario, Canada. It is the most populous municipality in Northwestern Ontario and the second most populous (after Greater Sudbury) municipality in Northern Ontario; its population is 108,843, according to the 2021 Canadian Census. Located on Lake Superior, the census metropolitan area of Thunder Bay has a population of 123,258 and consists of the city of Thunder Bay, the municipalities of Oliver Paipoonge and Neebing, the townships of Shuniah, Conmee, O'Connor, and Gillies, and the Fort William First Nation.

European settlement in the region began in the late 17th century with a French fur trading outpost on the banks of the Kaministiquia River. It grew into an important transportation hub, with its port forming an essential link in shipping grain and other products from western Canada through the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the east coast. Forestry and manufacturing played essential roles in the city's economy. They have declined recently but have been replaced by a "knowledge economy" based on medical research and education. Thunder Bay is the site of the Thunder Bay Regional Health Research Institute.

On 1 January 1970, the City of Thunder Bay was formed by merging the cities of Fort William, Port Arthur, and the geographic townships of Neebing and McIntyre. The city takes this name from the immense Thunder Bay at the head of Lake Superior, known on 18th-century French maps as Baie du Tonnerre (Bay of Thunder). The city is often referred to as the "Lakehead" or "Canadian Lakehead" because of its location at the end of Great Lakes navigation on the Canadian side of the border.

Fort William was a city in Ontario, Canada, located on the Kaministiquia River at its entrance to Lake Superior. It amalgamated with Port Arthur and the townships of Neebing and McIntyre to form the city of Thunder Bay in January 1970. Since then, it has been the largest city in Northwestern Ontario. The city's Latin motto was A posse ad esse (From a possibility to an actuality), featured on its coat of arms designed in 1900 by town officials, "On one side of the shield stands an Indian dressed in the paint and feathers of the early days; on the other side is a French voyageur; the cent[re] contains a grain elevator, a steamship and a locomotive, while the beaver surmounts the whole." 

Fort William and Grand Portage were the two starting points for the canoe route from the Great Lakes to Western Canada.

Kamanistigouian, as a place, is first mentioned in a decree of the Conseil Souverain de la Nouvelle-France dated 23 August 1681 instructing one of two canoes to make known the king's amnesty to coureurs de bois. However, the Kaministiquia River is depicted on the 1671 "Carte des Jésuites" as "R. [rivière] par où l'on va aux Assinipoualacs à 120 lieues vers le Nord-Ouest."In late 1683 or spring 1684, Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, established a trading post near the mouth of the Kaministiquia River. French authorities closed this post in 1696 because of a glut in the fur market. In 1717, a new post, Fort Kaministiquia, was established by Zacharie Robutel de la Noue at the river mouth. This post appears on 18th-century French maps by Royal hydrographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin as "Fort Caministogoyan". The post was abandoned in 1758 or 1760 during the British conquest of New France. 

The fur trade was quickly re-established, with most people using Grand Portage. By 1784, Montreal merchants and their "wintering partners" had formed the North West Company (Nor'Westers). The North West Company continued to use Grand Portage as their centre of operations after the area was ceded to the United States after the colonists' victory in the American Revolution. Following the signing the Jay Treaty of 1794 between Great Britain and the United States, which acknowledged American control of the area, the North West Company required a new midway transshipment point between their inland posts and Montreal. The partners needed to meet and exchange furs and supplies without being subject to American taxation.

In 1803, the Nor'Westers abandoned Grand Portage and established a new fur trading post on the Kaministiquia River on land acquired from the Ojibwe by written agreement on 30 July 1798. The post was named Fort William in 1807 after William McGillivray, chief director of the North West Company from 1804-1821. After the North West Company union with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in 1821, the fort lost its raison d'être because most trade shifted to York Factory on Hudson Bay. It became a minor HBC fur trading post. The original site disappeared under the development of Canadian Pacific Railway railroad tracks and coal piles in the 1880s. A replica of Fort William was built further upstream on the Kaministiquia River at Pointe de Meuron, a former military staging location named after Lord Selkirk's Swiss de Meuron Regiment. It is now known as the Fort William Historical Park.

Lake Superior