Jacques de Noyon
Canadian explorer
Jacques de Noyon (12 February 1668 – 12 May 1745) was a French Canadian explorer, sergeant and coureur des bois. He is the first known European to visit the Boundary Waters region west of Lake Superior.
Jacques de Noyon was born on 12 February 1668, in Trois-Rivières, New France. His family moved to Boucherville not long after.
In 1688, de Noyon and three others traveled from the Montreal area to Fort Caministigoyan on Lake Superior, located at present-day Thunder Bay, Ontario. From there they traveled inland up the Kaministiquia River. His group followed the Indigenous canoe route over the Laurentian Divide, past the present-day site of Atikokan, Ontario, through what is now Quetico Provincial Park and Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota. He built a fort, established ties to the local Assiniboine people, and spent the winter on the shore of Rainy Lake. There is some question as to whether de Noyon in fact made it as far as Lake of the Woods or not.
According to the waymarker on Rainy Lake Lookout on the north side of Noden Causeway about 6.5 km east of Fort Frances,
"Jacques de Noyon was the first white man to explore this region.
The public source identifies “Jacques de Noyon” as canadian explorer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Jacques, Noyon and Canadian.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacques de Noyon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.