Lake Timiskaming sits at the northwest corner of the Ottawa River, the point where the waterway bends from a westward course to flow southeast toward Montreal. This geography made the lake a natural midpoint on the fur trade's most important route: from James Bay south through Moose Factory, up the Abitibi River, across Lake Abitibi, over a portage, and down into Lake Timiskaming, then southeast along the Ottawa River to the markets of Montreal. The entire journey took roughly forty days by canoe. Whoever controlled The Narrows controlled the route. The first European trading post appeared around 1680 at the mouth of the Montreal River, built by the Compagnie du Nord to counter the English at Hudson Bay. The Iroquois Confederacy destroyed it in 1688. When the post was rebuilt in 1720 at The Narrows, it occupied Obadjiwan Point, a location that combined strategic advantage with the deep Algonquin connection to the waterway.

For decades, the post depended on the trapping expertise of Algonquin families, who harvested beaver and other furs from the surrounding boreal forest and brought them to trade. Paul Guillet dominated the trade until 1750. After the fall of New France, various free traders operated at the lake until the North West Company established a monopoly in 1795. When the Hudson's Bay Company absorbed its rival in 1821, Fort Temiscamingue became an HBC post, a status it held for decades. A Roman Catholic mission was established on the site, later relocated to the Ontario shore of the lake in 1863. The mission included a presbytery for the Oblate fathers, a small hospital run by two Grey Sisters of the Cross, and eventually a frame church. The Oblate Fathers of Mary Immaculate held the property from 1955 until Parks Canada acquired it in 1970.

The most striking feature of the site is not archaeological but arboreal. A grove of eastern white cedar stands on the escarpment above the lake, each trunk contorted into spirals and knots by the relentless winds that funnel through The Narrows. The trees are over a century old, a pure stand rare in Quebec, and the forest floor beneath them has an otherworldly stillness. European visitors nicknamed it the Enchanted Forest, but the Algonquin understanding runs deeper. According to tradition, ancestors are buried at the foot of these woods, and their spirits live on in the twisted branches. The trees curve and bend, the story goes, because the elders dance. The grove sits within a broader landscape of three distinct natural zones: a plateau, steep escarpments, and lowlands along the shore, together supporting twenty different forest stands and plant species characteristic of the Laurentian maple and Upper St. Lawrence forest regions.

Declared a National Historic Site in 1931, the site was formally renamed Obadjiwan-Fort Temiscamingue to honor the Algonquin heritage that predates European contact. In 2019, Parks Canada struck its first agreement with an Indigenous group to co-manage a national historic site, partnering with the Timiskaming First Nation to operate the property. Today, visitors walk interpretive trails through the Enchanted Forest, explore exhibits at a modern visitor center, and attend reenactments that illuminate three centuries of cultural exchange at this strategic narrows. Of the fort itself, little physical trace remains, but the landscape tells the story clearly enough: the pinch of the shorelines, the canoe-friendly water, the cedars twisting in the wind. The Algonquin knew this was a gathering place long before the first French trader arrived, and it remains one still.