Portage Paths: The Keys of the Continent

Transcriber’s Note: Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected except for narratives and letters included in this text. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the text body. Also images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break, causing missing page numbers for those image pages and blank pages in this ebook.

THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY CLEVELAND, OHIO 1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903 BY The Arthur H. Clark Company ALL RIGHTS RESERVED





The little portage pathways which connected the heads of our rivers and lakes or offered the voyageur a thoroughfare around the cataracts and rapids of our rivers were, as the subtitle of this volume suggests, the “Keys of the Continent” a century or so ago. The forts, chapels, trading stations, treaty houses, council fires, boundary stones, camp grounds, and villages located at these strategic points all prove this. The study of these routes brings one at once face to face with old-time problems from a point of view almost never otherwise gained. The newness and value of reviewing historic movements from the standpoint of highways is strikingly emphasized in the case of portage paths. While studying them, one seems to rise on heights of ground like those these pathways spanned—and from that altitude, gazing backward, to get a better perspective of the military and social movements which made these little roads historic.
The difficulty of treating such a broad subject in a single monograph must be apparent. Portages are found wherever lakes or rivers lie, and our subject is therefore as broad as the continent. It is obvious that in a limited space it is possible to treat only of portages most used and best known—which most influenced our history. These are practically included in the territory lying south of the Great Lakes between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. Historically, too, we are taken back to the early days of our history when America was coextensive with the continent, for the important portages were those binding the St. Lawrence with the rivers of New England, and the tributaries of the Great Lakes with those of the Mississippi.