Marais des Cygnes, meaning "The Marsh of the Swans," took its French name from an Osage name that meant the same thing. In 1828, Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy brought a group of Indians to examine the area as a possible relocation site for eastern and Great Lakes tribes, and he called the river "Miry Desein" or "Miry Swan." The river also entered literature and legend: Longfellow had Evangeline travel here in search of Gabriel La Jeunesse and camp near the river in what would later become Kansas, and a story tells of two thwarted Indian lovers turning into swans. The river is formed in the northeast part of Lyon County by the junction of One Hundred Forty-Two and Elk Creeks, then flows generally east across Osage and Franklin counties, through the southwest corner of Miami County and the northeast corner of Linn County before entering Missouri, where it becomes the Osage. In Kansas it is about 150 miles long, with the Osage adding another 300 miles in Missouri. Near Ottawa, a gentle ford at Hickory Street, one block east of Main Street, was first used by Indians and later by white settlers, and became known as the Ohio City ford to distinguish it from Fort Scott Crossing, where the Fort Scott-California Trail crossed the river a few miles to the east; Ottawans still used this ford until flood control levees were built in the 1960s. On June 30, 1866, the Wyandotte Gazette reported that a ferry boat had been put on the river at the new Ottawa town site, and the first known ferryman, Charles Robbins, became remembered for joking that a man with only a dime was just as well off on the far bank. Crossings later included three Main Street bridges: an 1868 suspension bridge said to be the first west of Cincinnati, an 1883 steel truss bridge, and a 1926 concrete bridge, followed by a fourth bridge built in the early 1980s. In 1883, S.F. Beeler bought a sidewheeler steamboat, the Gertie, named for his daughter Gertrude, to carry excursion passengers on the river during the annual Ottawa Chautauqua Assembly in Forest Park. Floods long disrupted life along the river, beginning with the recorded "Big Water" of 1844 and including the great flood of 1951; after that disaster, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers controlled the river with dikes, flood gates, and reservoirs such as Lake Pomona and Lake Melvern, though later floods, including those of 1961, 1993, and 1998, still marked life along its banks.