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ALPENA — One of Alpena’s defining natural features is that a river runs through it.

Yet no one alive today has seen that river.

What we see today are dams and impoundments. The river lies submerged under them.

And what a river! Alpena was once the site of perhaps the Lower Peninsula’s wildest reach of white water. Many, many generations of Native Americans were deeply familiar with that wild river. Let’s take a step back in time and see if we can imagine the river they experienced.

For thousands of years, the roar told Native Americans they were nearing the falls of the “Thunder River” and its cornucopia of food — walleye, suckers, and, best of all, the huge lake sturgeon, just one of which would feed the clan for at least a week.

The river mouth bugled the sound of the river’s cascading rapids for miles into the bay, signaling through veils of fog or darkness to Native canoers that they were nearing the river mouth. Whether by land or canoe, the roar guided tribal clans to the feast.

Later, the roaring rapids told early sailors when they were nearing Alpena and the many treacherous reefs of Thunder Bay.

Those are no ordinary rapids. We are talking serious whitewater, the kind that gets the adrenaline pumping among whitewater rafters. The Thunder Bay River’s lower 10 miles is, for Michigan, an exceptionally high-gradient reach of river, dropping almost 100 feet over limestone beds, from an elevation of 673 feet above sea level at the inflow to Nine-Mile Reservoir (Lake Winyah) to Lake Huron’s average elevation of 577 feet, a descent of 9.6 feet per mile. Gradient is highest under Four-Mile impoundment, where it peaks at about 20 feet per mile, with individual rapids of near 30.

There is a plaque on the side of the drawbridge control room on the 2nd Avenue Bridge commemorating that the Thunder Bay River “(b)y the Treaty of Saginaw … became a part of the boundary of the territory thereby ceded to the United States” by the Anishinaabe Native people (Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi) that signed the Treaty of 1819.

In fact, the Thunder Bay River also marked the southeastern border of the land area ceded in the 1836 Treaty of Washington with the Anishinaabe. I find it interesting and perhaps informative that Native Americans’ signatory to both treaties identified the Thunder Bay River as their territory. There must have been something special about the Thunder Bay River that Native peoples of both treaties recognized.

The feature of the river that was so important was, principally, the rapids of the lower river.

Native people called it the “Thunder River.” The roar of those cascades, especially during the spring floods, was the most likely inspiration for the name.

There are other name-origin theories. Catherine Marie Huston Herron, in her essay, “A History of the Place Names of Alpena County,” has a few theories for the name: “Long before the coming of the white man, these Indians had a name for their own portion of Lake Huron. They called it ‘An-a-ma-kee,’ Thunder Bay, the name being derived from an old legend that the waters of this bay were peculiarly affected by electrical storms.” Other origins noted by Ms Herron: “… the thundering sound made by the waves plunging into cavernous recesses worn under an overhanging cliff of harder rock at a point extending into the bay. The Indians called this spot ‘Aw-pe-na-sing,’ meaning Partridge Point. The native village at the mouth of the ‘An-a-ma-kee-zebe,’ or Thunder River, was called by the Indians ‘An-i-mi-kee’, the partridge.”

Presumably, the signature explosion of grouse wing beats represented the “thunder,” though I doubt the sound of a grouse flushing could compete with the roar of the rapids.

The most compelling and authoritative explanation for the river’s name is given by Mr. Sam Jay, a tribal elder who is the historic preservation director for the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians in Manistee:

“OK, the 1819 Treaty goes up to Thunder Bay,” he said in an interview with Christine Witulski, executive director of the Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan, on Aug. 9, 2019. “Thunder Bay is called ‘Thunder Bay’ not because of a lot of storms, it was called that because of the river. The ‘Animikikazibi,’ the thundering river, which cascaded down and roared as it came down. And you could hear it as you were approaching on the lake … that was the ‘Bay of Thunder,’ where the thundering was … Because of the way the water worked out, it was a highly prized fishing area. And so the Anishinaabe, which would be the Ottawa, the Chippewa, and Potawatomi, would all go there to fish. At various (seasons), you know, the spring and the fall, and they would share the area.”

To Native Americans, the rapids meant food. The rapids would have been very attractive spawning sites for Great Lakes fish and became a focal point for Native fishing during spring spawning runs. Fast-moving rivers with hard (rock) substrates are sought out by several species of Great Lakes fish as spawning habitat. The eggs are deposited in crevices between rocks, in beds of gravel formed by the fish to protect the eggs, or deposited on the rocks, to which they adhere.

Lake sturgeon are of the latter type of spawner, whose eggs are designed to stick to rock in especially fast water. Pre-colonial Lake Huron hosted hoards of lake sturgeon, walleye, suckers, and some races or strains of river-spawning whitefish and lake trout. Those fish from Lake Huron concentrated in the rapids during spawning, making them especially vulnerable to harvest by Native people. Great Lakes fish would have been most available during spring — April through early June is a major spawning period for some species — and could have constituted a crucial high-protein food resource to Native people emerging from the trials and food deprivation of winter.

In April, long-nose suckers would have been the first Great Lakes fish to arrive in the rapids, followed closely by white suckers. (March and April Is, of course, also the time maple sap runs, the season of sugar gathering, another ingredient of that season of plenty). Walleye would have run the rivers shortly after the suckers.

The final and most anticipated act would have been the sturgeon runs, which began in late May and continued into June. Those big guys, sometimes exceeding 100 pounds in weight, could ascend even the strongest currents, depositing their eggs in areas too rapid for other species that might have eaten their eggs. Lake sturgeon were so plentiful that Native people, even without sophisticated equipment, could corral and capture them.

Because those spawning runs were so vulnerable to fishing, some were diminished or extirpated by overharvest when colonial settler numbers swelled and they brought to the rapids their more sophisticated fishing gear. Later, dams were built. High gradient is needed to efficiently produce electric power — the greater the fall (hydraulic head in hydroelectric parlance), the more power that can be generated. Therefore, the impoundments covered most of the highest-quality spawning rapids, and, in particular, the high-gradient rapids required for successful sturgeon reproduction.

Loss of suitable spawning habitat, principally from inundation by dams, remains the principal limitation to recovery of Lake Huron’s lake sturgeon today.

The only remaining rapids of the lower Thunder Bay River is between Four-Mile Dam and the backwaters of Lake Besser. Drive onto Four Mile Road and you can see it. The gradient of that stretch is around five to six feet per mile, enough to rate it as rapids, but not as cascading white water. Those rather gentle rapids below the dam are ideal habitat for sucker, walleye, lake trout, whitefish, and smallmouth bass spawning. Richard Clute (recently retired Besser Museum anthropologist) told me he found evidence of a Native camp west of North Bagley Street, near the north bank of the Thunder Bay River, suggesting fishing occurred here.

Now, imagine the tailwater of Four-Mile Dam, the channel flowing over bedrock and divided by islands, but with a series of one- to two-foot drops, composing a mile-long cascade, dropping at the rate of 15 to 30 feet per mile. That would be a pretty good representation of what the river underneath the Four-Mile impoundment would have looked like to Native Americans as recently as the late 1800s.

The distance from the dam of Four-Mile Impoundment to Norway Dam measures 1.02 miles. Water depth at the lower end of Four-Mile Impoundment, right off the dam, is 21 feet. That means, very simply, that the river drops in elevation 21 feet over the 1.02-mile stretch, or 21 feet per mile. Most commercially rafted whitewater rivers have gradients between 25 and 50 feet per mile. The average gradient of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is actually relatively low for adrenalin freaks, at just under eight feet per mile. That’s because there are long, pond-like stretches interrupted by major rapids. The major rapids of the Colorado can reach close to 20 feet per mile.

Would the Thunder Bay River be considered whitewater? Yes, as regards gradient of some discrete sections of river, but the most hair-raising white-water rivers are also confined in narrow canyons. The canyon walls act like a fire hose in concentrating the discharge into sometimes intensely swift passages that might reach current speeds of 10 miles per hour or more. The Thunder Bay River beneath Four-Mile Impoundment does not seem to be confined, but, instead, is spread over a wide channel. It is best described as a series of cascades. That is perfect water for sturgeon spawning.

There is another limestone outcrop that forms rapids beginning and upstream of where Ninth Street Dam is located (under Lake Besser). That series of rapids probably continues upstream to about the Chisholm Street (U.S.-23) bridge.

I don’t know how far upstream of the dam the rapids continued or how rugged they were. That stretch may have actually had a shallow canyon confining the channel, which would have amplified its whitewater character.

That stretch of rapids would also have been good sturgeon spawning habitat. Between the steeper rapids, where the gradient and velocity were lower, would have been habitat used by walleye, whitefish, suckers, and lake trout for spawning.

Frank Krist Jr., during his graduate research, found evidence of Native camps near the cemetery on the south bank of the river, just upstream of the Lake Besser rapids, suggesting Native fishing occurred here.

Before the dams, that series of rapids produced a sound akin to thunder, especially during spring snowmelt. Because sound carries well over water, it is likely the sound of these rapids would have carried out into the bay, perhaps for up to 10 miles. Native people and sailors navigating in fog might have been comforted to know their location on hearing the thundering of the “Thunder River.”

The thunder has been silenced, but the boulder fields and rock falls that produced that thunder remain under the placid waters of Alpena’s three reservoirs.

Jim Johnson is a retired Great Lakes fisheries biologist and trustee and chair of the Fishery Heritage Project at the Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan.