November 10. Repairing the boats and airing the bales which had got wet. Sent back to Petit Rocher for the provisions, which had been left there to lighten the boats. After this the river began to rise on account of the heavy rains, and snow and cold weather also came on, which increased the difficulties of the journey.”
From the returns of Henry Du Vernet, second Lieutenant of Artillery, the number of perogues used by Hamilton was forty-two, and of batteaux (“and a very large French one”), ten. Ten two-wheeled carts were employed at the portage, two carriages “with 4 wheels for the Batteaus,” and four “with 2 wheels for the peroques.”[82]
The St. Joseph River, emptying into Lake Michigan, was one of the earlier important roundabout routes to the Mississippi. The eastern fork headed with the Wabash, and with a short portage was the route La Salle described as being “within two leagues” of the Miami of Lake Erie. This St. Joseph-Wabash portage was extremely important, but was roundabout, and was probably abandoned at a comparatively early date.
The southern branch of the St. Joseph heads near the northwest branch of the Kankakee, a tributary of the Illinois, near South Bend, Indiana. This historic path has been made the subject of a monograph by Secretary George A. Baker of the Northern Indiana Historical Society.[83] The seal of this Society is appropriately inscribed: “This region before the advent of the white man was occupied by the Miamis and Pottawatomies. It was made historic by the early explorers and missionaries who used the Kankakee-St. Joseph River Portage.” A few of Mr. Baker’s paragraphs should be included in this catalogue:
“Shortly after Easter Sunday, 1675, the sick and disheartened priest, Father Jacques Marquette, left the Indian village of Kaskaskia to return to his beloved St. Ignace by a new route, which many eminent authorities believe to have been via the Kankakee River. In that case it is very probable that he and his two faithful attendants, Pierre Porteret and Jacques, made use of the portage between the Kankakee and St. Joseph Rivers—a carrying place of between four and five miles. The portage landing on the St. Joseph River is two and three-quarters miles northwest of the court house, at South Bend, St. Joseph County, Indiana, and the portage extends in a southwesterly course to three small ponds which were the nearest sources of the Kankakee. The basins of these ponds are still clearly defined.... The earliest mention of this historic route is found in the writings of Father Louis Hennepin, Henry de Tonty and Réné Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who first made use of it ... in December, 1679. We are led to believe, however, that Louis Jolliet, companion of Marquette and co-discoverer of the Mississippi, knew of this portage as early as 1673.
“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 wth 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.