La rivière Détroit n'est pas une rivière. C'est un détroit — running forty-four kilometres from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, and the name of the American city on its northern bank is simply that French word, worn down by three centuries of English.
Any Detroit River Boat Cruise Windsor sailing therefore departs from the south shore, in the one Canadian city that looks north to see the United States. The waterway carries a second distinction: it is the only river named both an American Heritage River, in 1998, and a Canadian Heritage River, in 2001.
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain on the north bank in 1701. Settlement crossed to the south side within a generation, laid out in French ribbon farms — narrow lots running back from the water so that every household held river frontage. That geometry still governs Windsor's street grid. Sandwich Towne, surveyed in 1797, sits on ground farmed since 1749, among the oldest continuously settled European ground in Ontario.
The current mattered more than the crossings. Through the 1840s and 1850s this water was the last obstacle on the Underground Railroad, and the shoreline opposite Detroit was the point of arrival; Sandwich First Baptist Church, raised in 1851 by people who had made that crossing, still stands a short walk inland. Seventy years later the traffic reversed. During American Prohibition an estimated three-quarters of the liquor entering the United States moved across this narrow channel, much of it distilled at Hiram Walker's Walkerville works, opened in 1858 and still legible from the water on Detroit River Boat Cruise Windsor tours.
The engineering arrived in a single decade. The Ambassador Bridge opened in 1929 with a 564-metre main span, then the longest suspension span on earth; the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel followed in 1930 as the first international vehicular tunnel anywhere. Downstream, the cable-stayed towers of the Gordie Howe International Bridge now close the frame, and all three remain fixed markers on any Detroit River Boat Cruise Windsor tour.
What remains is working water. Thousand-foot lake freighters pass within metres of the Windsor bank, bound for Lake Erie with iron ore and grain, while the glass cylinders of the Renaissance Center — finished in 1977, 221 metres tall — hold the far skyline that anchors every Detroit skyline cruise. Peche Island lies at the river's mouth, once Hiram Walker's private estate, uninhabited now. A Detroit River Boat Cruise Windsor route reads the whole of it as one continuous page: two countries, one current, no border visible on the surface.
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