14 
BULLETIN OF TH E NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
in his book L' Acadie, ii. 1849, 128-150, has some very interest- 
ing and historically valuable notes made in connection with a 
survey across its upper course, and Dashwood’s Chiploquorgan, 
1871, 97, 131, has mention of hunting trips for caribou on 
the bogs near its head. But further than these, and a few 
notes in the Supplement, I can find nothing worthy of mention. 
The place nomenclature of the river presents nothing of 
special interest, all of the names, as the map will show, being 
of the simple obvious descriptive sort. Only the name 
Washademoak is Indian though its meaning is still 
uncertain; and that, although its original name, is now 
practically displaced by Canaan for the river, the progress 
of the change being easily followed through the maps. The 
name persists, however, for the Lake through which the river 
enters the Saint John. 
The river rises in the eastern part of New Brunswick on 
that minor watershed of the central plain which is followed 
approximately by the Intercolonial Railway. The country 
here, like practically all of that in which the river flows, is 
underlaid by the soft gray sandstones of the Carboniferous age. 
The actual source of the river, which I have not seen, lies 
in the Big Canaan Bog crossed by the railroad at a height of 
about 240 feet above the sea, the same bog giving origin to 
the main Buctouche. Thence it flows northerly through flat 
upland and meadows as a small brown sluggish stream, 
crossing the highway as a brown running brook, and enters 
a great natural meadow. Here it makes an abrupt reverse 
turn and then swings to the westward, after which, as a 
narrow Stillwater stream, it winds greatly for two or three miles 
through the largest and finest natural meadow known to me 
in New Brunswick, one fully visible from the railroad which 
crosses it on a high fill. These meadows, of course, were 
originally beaver ponds, in which all of the trees were killed 
by the standing water and replaced by grass when the dams 
were abandoned. Here comes in the Fork Stream, just 
below which, it is said, the old Indian portage started to the 
Buctouche. Then the enlarged stream keeps the same 
