Pembina River
Map
This roughly 380 km long river flows from the Rocky Mountains and into the Athabasca River at a point approximately 140 km north of Edmonton.
Explorer David Thompson mentions the river in 1810: we crossed the the Pembinaw River of forty yards in width.1 This pronunciation is a European distortion of the Cree word “neepinmenan”, or summer berry.2
In this despatch from 1862, Douglas mentions a passage in Mackenzie’s narrative of the overland Journey from Canada, which relates that a valuable seam of Coal crops out on the Pembina.
  • 1. Tracey Harrison, The Place Names of Alberta, vol. 3, Central Alberta (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994), 195.
  • 2. Ibid.
Mentions of this place in the documents
The Colonial Despatches Team. Pembina River. The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871, Edition 2.0, ed. The Colonial Despatches Team. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria. https://bcgenesis.uvic.ca/pembina_river.html.

Last modified: 2020-03-30 13:22:16 -0700 (Mon, 30 Mar 2020) (SVN revision: 4193)