(Plaque Location: on Highway 11 (where the watershed crosses the highway, about 14 km northwest of Kenogami Lake)
"The height of land known as the Artic Watershed crosses Highway 11 at this point. North of here, water drains into Hudson Bay; rivers, lakes and streams to the south flow into the Great Lakes.
As the northern wilderness came under development, the erratic line of the watershed defined territorial boundaries. It marked the southern limit of Rupert's Land, the vast territory granted to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670.
Two centuries later, it formed the northern boundary of lands ceded to the Crown by the First Nation Ojibwa in the Robinson-Superior Treaties of 1850.
[Ontario Heritage Foundation, Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation]"
A drainage basin (also known in North America as a watershed) is a region of land where water from rain or snowmelt drains downhill into a body of water, such as a river, lake, dam, estuary, wetland, sea or ocean. The drainage basin includes both the streams and rivers that convey the water as well as the land surfaces from which water drains into those channels. The drainage basin acts like a funnel - collecting all the water within the area covered by the basin and channeling it into a waterway. Each drainage basin is separated topographically from adjacent basins by a ridge, hill or mountain, which is known as a water divide or sometimes a watershed (in those parts of the world where the drainage basin itself is not called a watershed).