Rapides-des-Joachims is a municipality and village in western

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, part of Pontiac County in the Outaouais region. The village is situated on Rapides-des-Joachims Island (''l'île de Rapides-des-Joachims'') on the Ottawa River, about 100 km northwest of Fort-Coulonge. It is also known as Swisha. Rapides-des-Joachims is isolated from the rest of Quebec's road network because the only paved road link to the village is through

Rolphton, Ontario Laurentian Hills is a municipality in Eastern Ontario, Canada, on the Ottawa River in Renfrew County. It surrounds (by land) Deep River on the Ontario side of the river. The town is home to the Nuclear Power Demonstration nuclear power plant. Th ...

. It is the only community on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River between

Sheenboro Sheenboro is a village and municipality in the Outaouais region, part of the Pontiac Regional County Municipality, Quebec, Canada. It was formerly known as Sheen-Esher-Aberdeen-et-Malakoff. Its territory stretches along the north shore of the Ot ...

and

Témiscaming Témiscaming is a city located at the south end of Lac Témiscamingue on the upper Ottawa River in the Témiscamingue Regional County Municipality of western Quebec, Canada. Also nearby is Lake Kipawa. It is the administrative headquarters o ...

. Because it is also isolated from Quebec's telecommunications network, the community is part of Rolphton's telephone exchange area, and is consequently served by Ontario's

area code 613 Area is the quantity that expresses the extent of a region on the plane or on a curved surface. The area of a plane region or ''plane area'' refers to the area of a shape or planar lamina, while ''surface area'' refers to the area of an open ...

rather than Quebec's area code 819.

History

The site had long been inhabited by the

indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

before Europeans arrived. The explorers and

voyageurs The voyageurs (; ) were 18th and 19th century French Canadians who engaged in the transporting of furs via canoe during the peak of the North American fur trade. The emblematic meaning of the term applies to places (New France, including th ...

of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would travel on the Ottawa River to the west and at the foot of the rapids, they would have established a resting place and may have given it the name of an explorer. It was a busy place during the seventeenth century, when a mission post was set up along the river where a

Hudson's Bay Company The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC; french: Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson) is a Canadian retail business group. A fur trading business for much of its existence, HBC now owns and operates retail stores in Canada. The company's namesake business di ...

trading post had been established at the foot of the "Long Rapids", as they were called at the time. But the place was called ''Rapides des Joachims de l'Estang'' in a memorandum of 1686 by Jacques-René de Brisay, Governor of New France, to Marquis de Seignelay, and named ''Portage de Joachim de l'Estan'' on a map of Franquelin of 1688. Another document from 1699 shows ''Joachim de l'Estang''. The ''Joachims'' are sons of Michel Mathieu Brunet dit Lestang, colonist who arrived in New France on 20 August 1657. However, both in Quebec and in Ontario, the name Swisha, Sweshaw, or Shesha Rapids has also long been used for this location as a map of 1790 indicates. Swisha is an obvious distortion of the French pronunciation of "Joachim". In 1863, Stanislas Drapeau described ''Rapides des Joachims'' and ''Rapides des Deux Joachims'' as "the most important place for navigation on the Ottawa River and flourished thanks to the logging industry." By 1871 it had become a small village complete with a

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...

office of the

Montreal Telegraph Company The Montreal Telegraph Company was the first significant telegraph company in Canada. In 1847, early telegraph pioneer Orrin S. Wood was recruited to be president of the company, which rapidly established telegraph lines to Toronto and Quebec City ...

. The river steamers had to stop here because it was the head of navigation on the Ottawa River. In 1886 the Oblate Fathers built a frame church in the village, which was used until 1922, when a new church was built. In 1948, the construction of a dam and hydro-electric station began and the rapids which gave the town its name disappeared. The municipality was incorporated in 1955 when it was formed out of the Sheen-Esher-Aberdeen-Malakoff United Townships. It adopted its present name of Rapides-des-Joachims, which had already been assigned to the post office created about 100 years earlier in 1853. Its first mayor was J.H. Madore. Subsequently in 1960, the territory of the former Aberdeen Township was added to the municipality.

Geography

The municipality covers a vast sparsely populated area characterized by boreal forest, lakes, and streams. Prior to the construction of a hydro-electric dam in 1950, the village's site was not an island. The rising water flooded the old river bed from the north through Lake McConnell.Kennedy, Clyde C. ''The Upper Ottawa Valley, Renfrew County Council'', Pembroke, 1970. The dam can be bypassed on one of the Ottawa Navigable Waterway bypasses, connecting the Pembroke stretch of the Ottawa River to the upstream section to Mattawa.

Climate

Rapides-des-Joachims has a

humid continental climate A humid continental climate is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, typified by four distinct seasons and large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and freezing ...

with four distinct seasons. Summers are warm to hot, with significant rainfall. Winters are cold for its low latitude, with significant snowfall.

Demographics

Population

Language

Economy

Since Rapides-des-Joachims provides access to vast tracts of wilderness, including ZEC Dumoine, it depends largely on the hunting and fishing business. It is the long-time base of a charter float plane company (Air Swisha, formerly Bradley Air Service/First Air), operating a

de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver The de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver is a single-engined high-wing propeller-driven short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft developed and manufactured by de Havilland Canada. It has been primarily operated as a bush plane and has been use ...

. The economy depends also on logging and the Commonwealth Plywood Mill.

Local government

List of former mayors: * Gérald Dagg (... –2005) * Dale Lévesque (2005–2009) * James Gibson (2009–2021) * Doug Rousselle (2021–present)

References

External links

Pontiac MRC GatewayVirtual Museum - Swisha Project
{{authority control Municipalities in Quebec Incorporated places in Outaouais