Portage Paths: The Keys of the Continent

by Archer Butler Hulbert

An interpreter of Champlain’s, Etienne Brulé, was the first to push west of “Mer Douce” and bring back descriptions that seem to fit Lake Superior. This was in 1629. Five years later Nicollet drove his canoe through the Straits of Mackinaw, discovered the “Lake of the Illinois”—Lake Michigan—and from Green Bay went up the Fox and crossed the strategic portage to the Wisconsin. He affirmed that if he had paddled three more days he would have reached the ocean!

Though Lake Erie was known to the French as early as 1640 it was not until 1669 that it was explored or even approximately understood. In September of that year the two men who rank next to Champlain as explorers, La Salle and Joliet, met on the portage between Lake Ontario and Grand River, and discussed the question of what the West contained and how to go there. They had heard of a road to a great river and they both were men to do and dare. They parted. Joliet went to Montreal, having converted the two Sulpitian missionaries Galinée and Dollier to his belief that the western road would be found by passing to the western lakes. They therefore left La Salle and went up through the Strait of Detroit, and Galinée made the first map of the Upper Lakes now in existence.

La Salle on the other hand, believing a story told him by the Senecas, held that the road sought lay to the southwest, and it is practically agreed today that he passed from near Grand River across Lake Erie southward, and entered the stream which was later known as the Ohio, and passed down this waterway perhaps to the present site of Louisville, Kentucky. If modern scholarship in this case is correct, La Salle was the discoverer of the sweeping Ohio, having come to it over the Lake Erie-Rivière aux Bœufs portage, or the Lake Erie-Chautauqua portage. There is little reason to believe he ascended the Cuyahoga and descended the Tuscarawas and Muskingum as has been feebly asserted. The Ohio, if it was at this time actually discovered by La Salle, remained almost unknown for nearly a century.

In 1672 Frontenac detailed Joliet to make the discovery of the Mississippi and the adventurer went westward to Mackinaw where he met Marquette. The two went down Green Bay, up the Fox, and across the portage to the Wisconsin; on June 17, 1673, they entered the Mississippi River. Returning, they ascended the Illinois and (probably) the Kankakee; crossing the portage to the St. Joseph they were again afloat on Lake Michigan.

The indomitable La Salle built a vessel of sixty tons on Lake Erie in 1679—the “Griffin,” first craft of her kind “that ever sailed our inland seas above Lake Ontario.” In her La Salle was to sail to near the Mississippi; part of this ship’s cargo comprised anchors and tackling for a boat in which the explorer would descend the Mississippi and reach the West Indies. The “Griffin” was lost, but her builder pushed on undismayed to the valley of the Illinois River. Late in 1679 he built Fort Miamis at the mouth of the St. Joseph, and in December he passed up that river and over the portage to the Kankakee which Joliet and Marquette had traversed six years before. “Passing places soon to become memorable in western annals ... he finally stopped at a point just below the [Peoria] lake and began a fortification. He gave to this fort a name that, better than anything else, marks the desperate condition of his affairs. Hitherto he had refused to believe that the “Griffin” was lost—the vessel that he had strained his resources to build, and freighted with his fortunes.... But as hope of her safety grew faint, he named his fort Crèvecœur—‘Broken Heart.’”[10]

Leaving here his thirty men under Tonty to build a new boat, and sending Hennepin to the Upper Mississippi, the indomitable hero set out for Canada to secure additional material for his new boat. Ascending the Kankakee he crossed the portage to the western extremity of Lake Erie and passed on through the lakes to Niagara.

Fort Crèvecœur was plundered and deserted, but La Salle, in the winter of 1681-82 was again dragging his sledges over the portage to the Illinois on his way to the great river which he, first of Europeans, should fully traverse, “but which fate seemed to have decreed that he should never reach.” On the ninth of the following April the brave man stood at last at its mouth, and beside a column bearing the arms of France, a cross and a leaden plate claiming all the territory from which those waters came, he took possession of the richest four million square miles of earth for Louis XIV. “That the Mississippi Valley was laid open to the eyes of the world by a voyageur who came overland from Canada, and not by a voyageur who ploughed through the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico from Spain, is a fact of far-reaching import. The first Louisiana was the whole valley; this and the Lake-St. Lawrence Basin made up the second New France ... the two blended and supplemented each other geographically....”[11] The second New France was united to Louisiana by hinges; these hinges were the portage paths which joined them.

The importance of these routes of travel did not by any means pass when once the explorers and missionaries had hurried over them and brought back news of the lands to which they led. The economic history of these routes is both interesting and important, and should be considered, perhaps, before reviewing their military significance.

As we have had occasion to notice, straits and portages were famous meeting places. La Salle and Joliet met between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; Joliet and Marquette met at Mackinaw. All routes converged on these narrow land and water courses, while on the broad lakes sojourners passed each other at short distances unwittingly. For in the old days of canoes the coming and going routes varied with a thousand circumstances. Of course the traveler’s general rule was to reach quickest waters flowing toward his destination. If he was making for the mouth of the Mississippi from Montreal his best route would be to turn south from Lake Ontario to the first easterly head of the Allegheny River, in preference to pushing further west to the head of any of the other tributaries of the Mississippi. Following the same rule, the route from Quebec to the Kennebec Valley was by way of Moosehead Lake; the return route was by way of the Dead River. A person returning from the “Falls of the Ohio” (Louisville, Kentucky) to Canada would, other things being equal, make for the nearest head of a stream flowing into Lake Erie.

In the case of the Great Lakes, winds and changing water-level soon became understood and governed travel. Parties journeying from Mackinaw to Illinois or the Mississippi would hold to the western coast of Lake Michigan, for here they were favored by the winds, and proceeded southward by the Fox-Wisconsin portage or the Chicago-Illinois portage. In returning they would, under ordinary circumstances, choose the Kankakee-St. Joseph portage which would obviate the necessity of stemming the Illinois or Wisconsin and crossing Lake Michigan. The more direct route to the head of the Maumee was not discovered or appreciated until later. Thus traffic, on the lakes at least, was not on the bee line that it is today, and thus it was that portage paths and straits were famous meeting-places and camping spots.[12] Straits, in many cases, may be classed with portages; often a portage was necessary only in one direction. On the rivers the same portages were usually the routes of parties ascending and descending, but on such a stream as the St. Lawrence they were frequently different; descending voyageurs “shot” many rapids about which it was necessary to make a portage when ascending.