“The portage landing ... is just to the east of the big red barn, on the Miller property, south of the residence, and at the foot of a beautiful ravine declining gently from the high ground. At the water’s edge, stretching back at least one hundred feet, is a low sandy terrace of recent formation. The approach to this picturesque ravine is obscure and hard to locate from the river; the view being obstructed by the forest trees. Many of the original trees are still standing ... many red-cedars, the latter evidently being the progeny of a grand old cedar, a stately monarch of the portage landing, which reaches to the height of over sixty feet, with a girth of more than eight feet at its base.... The trunk ... has been covered by the sand and soil washed from above, to a depth of between seven and eight feet.... Recently, June, 1897, the soil around the old cedar was removed and the measurements as stated were made. As the trunk was laid bare ... three great blaze-marks [were found], forming a rude cross, made by a wide-bladed axe, such as were in common use in the French colonies. Here was what we had suspected, one of the witness trees marked no doubt in early days to locate the portage.”[84]

Fort St. Joseph was located on the opposite side of the river from a Pottawatomie village, which was on the portage trail. The location of this fort and Indian settlement is never unanimously estimated to have been less than about sixty miles from the mouth of the St. Joseph River; Father Marest wrote Father German from “Cascaskias” November 9, 1712: “... we ascended the river Saint Joseph, in order to make a portage at 30 [20?] leagues from its mouth.”[85]

This important route from Illinois to Detroit was first fortified by the building of the earliest “Fort Miami,” near the mouth of the St. Josephs of Lake Michigan, by La Salle in 1679. “But this fort,” Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites writes, “was destroyed by La Salle’s men in 1680. Father Jean Mermet, then at the river [St. Joseph] mouth, writes La Mathe Cadillac, April 19, 1702, that he proposes to establish a mission ‘three journeys,’ or about sixty miles up river, ‘near a stream [Illinois] which is the source of the Ouabache,’ where there is a portage of half a league (Margry, v, p. 219). In 1711, Father Chardon had his mission sixty miles above the mouth. By 1712, there appears to have been a French military post at this mission. Charlevoix, in a letter dated ‘River St. Joseph, Aug. 16, 1721,’ writes, describing his approach to the fort from Lake Michigan: ‘You afterward sail up twenty leagues in it [up the St. Josephs River] before you reach the fort, which navigation requires great precaution.’... The evidence is ample, that the fort on the St. Josephs, from about 1712 to its final destruction during the Revolutionary war, guarded the portage between the river of that name and the Kankakee, on the east bank of the St. Josephs, in Indiana, a short distance below the present city of South Bend.”[86]

The Kankakee-St. Joseph route was a favorite one for travelers returning from Illinois to the Great Lakes and Canada. The favorite early “outward” route was from the western shore of Lake Michigan into the Illinois River. Here were two courses: by way of either the Calumet or the Chicago River to the Des Plaines branch of the Illinois. The latter portage was best known and most used. Perhaps no one of the western portages varied more than this in length, as on the best authority it is asserted that sometimes no portage was necessary, and at others a portage of nine miles was necessary: “The Chicago—Des Plaines route involved a ‘carry’ of from four to nine miles, according to the season of the year; in a rainy spring season, it might not be over a mile; and during a freshet, a canoe might be paddled over the entire route, without any portage.”[87] When Marquette reached the Des Plaines, known as “Portage River” because it offered a pathway to the Illinois, he was compelled to make a portage of only “half a league.”[88] The course of this portage is practically the present route of the famous Drainage Canal which joins the Chicago River with the Des Plaines at Elgin, Illinois.

The most westernly portage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi was of the greatest importance in the earliest years of white man’s exploration. The French were the first explorers, and they were at first barred from Lakes Ontario and Erie—which offered the shortest courses to the Mississippi, via the Ohio—by the ferocious Iroquois; whose hostility Champlain had quickly incurred, toward himself and his people. Driven around, as has been shown,[89] by way of the Ottawa to Georgian Bay, the longest route to the Mississippi became one of the shortest. From Georgian Bay it is a straight course to Green Bay, and so the portage between the Fox and the Wisconsin Rivers became one of the earliest as well as one of the most important in America. By this route the discoverers of the Mississippi were destined to come—for there were many who found and lost this river. First in the line came Radissou and Groseilliers, at the end of that fifth shadowy decade of the seventeenth century. These daring men, possessed of the desire “to travell and see countreys” and “to be knowne w^th the remotest people,” found the Fox-Wisconsin portage and passed down the Wisconsin to the Mississippi, probably in the spring or early summer of 1659[90]—arriving on that river eleven years before La Salle, and fourteen years before Joliet and Marquette, to whom the discovery of the Mississippi is usually ascribed.

But though these men passed over this route to the discovery of the Mississippi, they were not the first white men to traverse it. Jean Nicolet, the first of Europeans, came over this course in 1634, but did not descend the Wisconsin.[91]

Two score years later the bold missionaries, Joliet and Marquette, entered the Fox River and came to Maskoutens, “the fire Nation.” “Here,” wrote Marquette, “is the limit of the discoveries which the french have made, for they have not yet gone any farther.” Of Radissou and Groseilliers no memory was left among the savages, and of them Marquette had never heard. “No sooner had we arrived,” Marquette wrote in his Journal, “than we, Monsieur Jollyet and I assembled the elders together; and he told them that he was sent by Monsieur Our Governor to discover New countries, while I was sent by God to Illumine them with the light of the holy Gospel. He told them that, moreover, the sovereign Master of our lives wished to be known by all the Nations; and that in obeying his will I feared not the death to which I exposed myself in voyages so perilous. He informed them that we needed two guides to show us the way; and We gave them a present, by it asking them to grant us the guides. To this they very Civilly consented; and they also spoke to us by means of a present, consisting of a Mat to serve us as a bed during the whole of our voyage. On the following day, the tenth of June two Miamis who were given us as guides embarked with us.... We knew that, at three leagues from Maskoutens, was a River which discharged into Mississippi. We knew also that the direction we were to follow in order to reach it was west-southwesterly. But the road is broken by so many swamps and small lakes that it is easy to lose one’s way, especially as the River leading thither is so full of wild oats that it is difficult to find the Channel. For this reason we greatly needed our two guides, who safely Conducted us to a portage of 2,700 paces, and helped us to transport our Canoes to enter That river; ... Thus we left the Waters flowing to Quebeq, 4 or 500 Leagues from here, to float on Those that would thenceforward Take us through strange lands.”[92]

By the feet of such undaunted heroes the Fox-Wisconsin portage path was made hallowed ground. But the importance of this route, in the days when Georgian Bay was the entering point of the French into the Great Lakes, did not rapidly diminish; through all pioneer history, when Mackinac and Detroit were the key of the Lakes, this route to the Mississippi was important. For instance, in the fur trade of the West and of Wisconsin in particular, this portage was of utmost moment.[93] In the preceding pages this matter of the fur trade on portages has not been sufficiently suggested; it is, however, a subject on which important and exhaustive histories should be written. The portages were, in numerous instances, the keys of the fur trade.

In the Revolutionary War, the Fox-Wisconsin portage bore a more or less important part in British plans of gaining the alliance of the Indians of the upper Mississippi Basin.[94] The awakening in the Northwest is evidenced by the increasing importance of this pathway in the War of 1812.[95] This was the route of British trade with the Mississippi Indians until the very last.[96] The commercial and economic history of this route, the establishment of Fort Winnebago, the question of government ownership of land, the improvement of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, the Military Road across the portage, the days of the Durhams boats, and the building of the canal make this route more interesting than any other west of Niagara.[97]

It would be a serious omission not to include in this catalogue at least a mention of the portages which completed the line of communication along the chain of the Great Lakes—or from the St. Lawrence across to the extremity of Lake Superior. The importance of the portage from the Ottawa to Lake Nipissing and French River has been fully suggested, in our emphasis of the use of the Ottawa route, by which the French avoided the Iroquois and gained the western lakes. The historic and economic phase of the Niagara River offers a magnificent untouched field for historic study. The series of forts and their varying flags which defended this key of the Lakes; the struggle for their possession; the portage routes here that were of such vital importance to all the West; the earliest systems of transportation around Niagara Falls; the supplementary roundabout routes, such as up Grand River; and finally, the building of the Welland Canal, offer a splendid topic for study and field work. At the extremity of Lake Superior was the Grand Portage, which joined the Great Lakes with Hudson Bay, by way of Pigeon River and the Lake of the Woods. It was first found by Radissou and Groseilliers in 1662, fortified in 1737, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century was “the Headquarters or General Rendezvous, for all who trade in this part of the world.”[98]

In concluding this review of portage paths the author finds a final opportunity to offer a plea for the wide study of historic sites and for placing there monuments of some kind for the purposes of identification before it be all too late.

We cannot realize in the slightest degree the great interest that will be felt in our historical beginnings one, two, and three centuries from now, as our nation grows richer and hundreds give themselves up to the study of the past where ten can do so today. It is fair to believe that we cannot realize how precious every relic and every accurate piece of information—every monument and tablet—will seem when at last the days of Braddock and Johnson, Washington and Clark and Wayne are lost in three hundred years of change and evolution. Therefore we cannot fully realize the precious duty that falls upon the present generation—and upon us particularly.

The reason is evident: within a generation there will not be left in our land a single son of one of the genuine pioneers of, for instance, New York or Ohio. Even those of the second generation remember with really little distinctness and accuracy the days of which their fathers told; often their stories are entirely unreliable. This very fact is in itself alarming, and is it not then the duty of all interested persons to secure immediately every item of information from such of that second generation as are found to be accurate and clear? In every State there are a hundred historic sites for which, in time, people generally will be inquiring. We speak easily of Fort Necessity and Fort Bull and Fort Laurens—but where are they? The sites of these historic embankments are known today, but of the New York and Pennsylvania sites doubts are beginning to pass current. The location of Fort Laurens—the first American fort built west of the Ohio River—is pretty definitely known. It is fair to say that in a generation or two the spots, if left unmarked, will never be located correctly. A small stone, with a plain legend, costing a mere trifle, would insure the future against such a misfortune.

The subject of portage paths naturally suggests the matter of locating historic sites and marking them for the reason that so many such points were on these portages. A mere catalogue of the forts mentioned in preceding pages prove this conclusively. Add to these the mission houses, trading stations and treaty houses here erected and we have a sum total of vitally important historic sites which could be equalled only by looking to the river valleys. And very frequently indeed the real significance of many a fort at a river’s mouth lay in the fact that at that river’s head lay a strategic carrying place. What else did Fort Defiance, Fort Venango, Fort Oswego, Fort Niagara, Fort Miami on the St. Joseph mean?

These portage routes should be presented to all local and State historical societies as important fields of study in the very immediate present if the many historic sites here are to be correctly marked. They are easy fields of investigation because as a rule a great amount of geographic lore is treasured up in a small compass; many a portage, like the Oneida portage at Rome, New York, was not over a mile in length; yet here are the sites of at least half a dozen forts, some of them of world-wide renown. Take the famous portage at Fort Wayne, Indiana, from the Maumee (St. Mary) to the Wabash (Little River); the field here is of great importance yet the ground to be covered is exceedingly limited. A few dollars invested in slight monuments could now establish markers along this route with some degree of accuracy and conscientious satisfaction. Later on this will not be possible. Each year lessens the probability of accuracy, takes from the neighborhood one and another of the aged men who would be of assistance, changes more and more the face of the landscape—in short tends to rob all future students of something of real value that we might confer upon them.

It may be due to a lack of antiquarian enthusiasm on the part of the present writer, but he is strongly of the opinion that our historical societies are losing an invaluable amount of information and data by not seizing the advantage of the advice of pioneers’ sons who are now living concerning the location of historic sites; not a little money is being expended here and there on archæological research which would produce exactly as fruitful returns a generation from now as it does today. The stone pipes and hammers will be found in as good condition in 1925 as 1903 but there are a hundred important sites that can never be marked correctly after a score of men now over seventy years of age have passed away. At a recent centennial celebration on the site of one of the most important forts in the entire West the old fortress was reconstructed with life-like accuracy under scholarly direction. It was necessary, however, because of inundations of the neighboring river, to draw in one of the bastions. It will not be many years before the entire topography of that site will be altered by the same destructive force, unless it is stayed, and when the second centennial of the day when Mad Anthony Wayne unfurled his flag in the face of the British from the walls of Fort Defiance is celebrated, there is a question whether the site of that fort will be above or below the river’s tide.

A pig-sty at Fort Recovery, Ohio, marks the Fort Recovery angle of the famous Greenville Treaty line. Underneath the pen lies the stone which marks the angle and the site of that historic fort and, consequently, St. Clair’s battle-ground. The line runs twenty-one miles westward to the pillar raised on Loramie Creek, the historic site of the old French trading post in 40° 16´ north latitude 7° 15´´ west longitude; at the other angle on the Muskingum River the site of Fort Laurens is also a matter of record. In this way, it is true, many points of interest have a definite location but this is true in only a few cases. The writer, recently returning from a tour through Illinois on George Rogers Clark’s old route to the conquest of Vincennes took his notes at once to Madison, Wisconsin to revise them from the correspondence carried on by Lyman C. Draper, a generation ago, with the oldest residents of Illinois concerning Clark’s route. The remarkable contrast between testimony obtainable now and that secured a generation ago could not have been more strikingly impressive. Indecision, indefiniteness, inaccuracy grow more and more pronounced as the days draw by and an actual experience such as this compels one interested in our country’s development to cry out against permitting more time to be lost.

Pennsylvania has set a good example in forwarding a minute study of her frontier forts, two large volumes having been published by that state on the subject. There are signs that there is an awakening interest in definitely locating and marking historic sites. It need not be an expensive work. It is certainly an important one. And the courses of the important carrying places should be early considered.

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