[2] According to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Spanish explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries called it the Rio Buenaventura and the Magdalena.

[4] In fact, the river was regularly used by Canadian fur traders (such as Louis Feuilli and Jean Chapuis, as well as the Mallet Brothers) trying to establish contact with Santa Fe as early as 1752.

Pierre and Paul Mallet followed the entire length of the river in 1740, as did another expedition led by Fabry de la Bruyère in 1741.

[1] In 1818, the Quapaw tribe ceded all its land north of the Canadian to the United States, thus making this river the effective southern boundary of the new nation.

Captain Nathan Boone led a dragoon troop up the river to the 100th Meridian, which was then the western border of the United States.

[1] See also: Stephen H. Long's Expedition of 1820 The Treaty of Doak's Stand in 1820, made the Canadian River the northern boundary of the Choctaw Nation.

Travel along the road was sharply curtailed during the American Civil War, as Union and Confederate forces fought for control of Indian Territory.

[1] Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple led an expedition in 1853 to find a railroad route across Indian Territory.

However, the cumulative reports of Abert, Marcy, and Whipple changed public opinion about "The Great American Desert" and encouraged interest in developing the region.

The river rises on the east side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, around 9,600 ft (2,900 m) above sea level,[8] in remote southwestern Las Animas County, Colorado, roughly 1.5 mi (2.4 km) north of the New Mexico border.

[b] An upper tributary of the Vermejo River heads around 12,000 feet (3,700 m) in elevation in the Culebra Range and has a confluence with the Canadian south of Maxwell, New Mexico.

The canyon the river carves through eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle is the northern border of the Llano Estacado, separating it from the rest of the Great Plains.