René Bréhant de Galinée was a member of the

Society of Saint-Sulpice The Society of Priests of Saint-Sulpice (french: Compagnie des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice), abbreviated PSS also known as the Sulpicians is a society of apostolic life of Pontifical Right for men, named after the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, ...

(Sulpician Order) at

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...

and an explorer and missionary to the Native Americans. In 1670, he and

François Dollier de Casson François Dollier de Casson (1636 – 27 September 1701) was born in France into a wealthy bourgeois and military family. He began his adult life in the army which he left after three years to continue his studies and become a priest. After beco ...

were the first Europeans to make a recorded transit of the

Detroit River The Detroit River flows west and south for from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie as a strait in the Great Lakes system. The river divides the metropolitan areas of Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, Windsor, Ontario—an area collectively refe ...

. His map of the trip demonstrated that the

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lakes ...

were all connected. The

Galien River The Galien River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed May 19, 2011 stream in the southwest region of the U.S. state of Michigan. The river begins at the outlet of Dayton ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

is named for him. École secondaire Père-René-de-Galinée French Catholic secondary school in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

is named after him.

References

*''Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography'' * * * * 1645 births 1678 deaths French Roman Catholic missionaries Roman Catholic missionaries in New France Sulpician missionaries {{NewFrance-stub