Tahquamenon and the Whiskey-Colored Rivers of Hiawatha

The Tahquamenon River runs roughly ninety-four miles through the eastern Upper Peninsula before emptying into Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior. The water is the color of dark tea, stained by tannins leached from the cedar and spruce swamps the river drains. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the Tahquamenon in The Song of Hiawatha, his eighteen fifty-five narrative poem that drew on Ojibwe oral tradition while getting a great deal of it wrong. The poem made the river famous to people who had never visited it and contributed to the naming of the national forest that now covers most of the watershed.

The upper falls of the Tahquamenon drop about fifty feet over a lip two hundred feet wide, making them the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi River by volume, after Niagara Falls. The lower falls split around a midstream island in a series of smaller cascades that can be reached by rented rowboat from the state park. Both falls are within Tahquamenon Falls State Park, not the Hiawatha, but the vast majority of the river's watershed lies within national forest land, and the quality of the water depends on the health of the forest around it.

The Hiawatha's river systems have been the subject of ongoing wild and scenic river designations and habitat restoration work. The Ontonagon, the Pine, the Presque Isle, and sections of the Tahquamenon itself are managed for the cold, clear, tannin-rich water quality that sustains brook trout and wild rice beds downstream. The spruce-tamarack swamps that filter the water are also the habitat of the Canada lynx, a federally threatened species that uses the UP as its southernmost range in the eastern United States. The Hiawatha is simultaneously a working timber forest and the last place in the lower forty-eight where lynx tracks appear in the snow.