The Rapids and the River, O-wash-ta-nong
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
Long before the city took its English name, the Grand River had another one. The Odawa people who lived along these banks called it O-wash-ta-nong, which translates roughly as far-away-water, a name that honored the river's remarkable length, reaching far into the interior of the Lower Peninsula before emptying into Lake Michigan just forty miles west of here.
The Odawa had been here since at least the late sixteen hundreds. They grew corn, melons, pumpkins, and beans in the river bottomland, and they fished the rapids that dropped roughly ten to fifteen feet through a stretch of exposed limestone shelves. Those rapids were the reason everything happened here. They were a natural meeting point, a place where canoes had to portage, where trails converged from multiple directions. Long before European contact, this bend in the river was a crossroads.
Anthropologists have found evidence of Hopewell culture in the Grand River valley dating back more than two thousand years. The Hopewell were not the Odawa's direct ancestors, but they used this same river corridor, burying their dead in earthen mounds and trading across a network that spanned much of eastern North America.
When French-Canadian fur traders arrived in the early eighteen hundreds, they came to the Odawa, not the other way around. Joseph and Madeline La Framboise established the first trading post here in eighteen oh six. Madeline was of mixed Ottawa and French descent, and she ran the business herself after her husband was killed. She expanded the operation throughout West Michigan and became one of the most successful fur traders in the region.
The city that eventually grew around these rapids took the name Grand Rapids, English for the falls on the Grand. The falls themselves were drowned when a series of milldam weirs went up in the late eighteen hundreds. After more than a century underwater, the rapids are now coming back. A major dam-removal project begun in two thousand nineteen aims to restore the river's natural flow through downtown, returning to this site something close to what the Odawa knew.
