Portage Paths: The Keys of the Continent

by Archer Butler Hulbert

As a meeting place the portage must have been anticipated with an interest inconceivable to us who know comparatively nothing of woodland journeying. Eager eyes were often strained to catch first sight across the water of the opening where the portage path entered the woods. And when this opening was lost to the sight of the departing traveler, the last hope of meeting friends had vanished. What this meant in a day when friends were few and far to seek and enemies quite the reverse, it would be difficult even to hint. Even in the good old colonial days in the heart of New England, friends met at the tavern, when a neighbor was to make a little journey on horseback, to drink his health. Pioneers moving from New York City to what is now Utica spent an afternoon previous to starting in prayer with clergymen.[13] What, then, did partings and meetings mean in the earliest days on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence—when every rapid was a danger and every wood concealed an enemy?[14] Letters were sometimes left hanging conspicuously on trees at portages.

The social nature of the portage camping ground is illustrated by the meetings—friendly and otherwise—between the Indian retinues of the many travelers who encamped here. When Céloron journeyed from Quebec to the Ohio Valley with his leaden plates, he paused at one of the portages to allow his Indian allies to jollify with certain comrades whom they met here.[15] There are cases where such meetings resulted more seriously than mere drunken sprees.[16]

The meeting-place was also the famous camping ground. To reach the portage path the tired paddler bent every energy as the red sun lay on the horizon. Two landings were thus saved. Here the ground around either end of the path had been cleared and trodden hard by a thousand campers, and if wood was scarce in the immediate locality there was abundance at no great distance. No one familiar with camping need be told the advantages, natural and artificial, to be found on an old camping ground.

But here it should be noted that the shortest portage between any two bodies of water was rather an arbitrary line, at least theoretically so. It was chosen as a good site, not for staying, but for passing. Usually it traversed some sort of watershed, more or less distinct; on either side low ground, marshes, and swamps were not uncommon. In many instances the length of the portage path varied inversely with the stage of the water. Some portages were a mile long in wet seasons and ten miles long in dry. Where this was true the country through which the path ran was not altogether suitable for camps nor for villages, which the camps on important portages often became. Often, however, the nature of the country was favorable for habitation, and at many portages the camps became permanent. At such points Indian villages were sometimes found; but as a rule portages were not largely inhabited unless they were defended, and that was not until the era of military occupation.

The portages were frequently used as burying grounds by the Indians, and beside the little paths around the rapids of the river lies the dust of hundreds swept away to their death by the boiling waters. The portages were not infrequently on high, dry ground, favorable for interment.

Here, too, on the portages the toiling missionaries were wont to pause and erect their crosses and altars. In the long journeys back and forth from Quebec to the land of the Hurons, for instance, the portage paths of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence became familiar ground; where one had raised an altar another would be glad to pray. There were silent, holy places on these little roads by which we run noisily today—we who know little of the suffering, the devotion, and the piety of those who first walked and worshiped here.

The missionaries called the Indian trails “Roads of Iron” to suggest the fatigue and suffering endured in their rough journeys. If the ordinary trail was a Road of Iron, what of the portage path—which so often led over cliffs and mountain spurs in going around a waterfall or rapid? But these were not the most difficult portages. There were many carrying places which, uniting heads of streams or lakes, ran over high mountains, through the most impenetrable fastnesses—paths fit only for mountain goats. Yet up these rough steeps the missionaries of the Cross, soldiers, and traders forced their way, slipping, sliding, seizing now and again at any object which would offer assistance. Many of these climbs would tax a person free of baggage in this day of cleared fields and hills; fancy the toil of the old-time voyageurs weighed down by canoes, provisions, and baggage, assailed by the clouds of insects which greeted a traveler in the old forests, and perhaps enduring fears of unseen enemies and unknown dangers.

Then there was the stifling heat of the primeval forests. Our present day notion of forests is diametrically opposed to old-time experience. To us, the forest is a popular symbol of restful coolness; formerly they were exhausting furnaces in the hot season, where horses fell headlong in their tracks and men fainted from fatigue. We wonder sometimes that pioneer armies frequently accomplished only ten or twelve miles a day, sometimes less. But these marches were mostly made in the months of October and November—the dryest months of the year in the Central West—and the stifling heat of the becalmed forest easily explains both slowness and wearing fatigue. It was the heat that all leaders of pioneer armies feared; for heat meant thirst and at this season of the year the ground was very dry. Many a crazed trooper has thrown himself into the first marsh or swamp encountered and has drunk his fill of water as deadly as any bullet.

All this applies with special force to portages, as all know who have essayed mountain climbing in the stifling heat of a windless day. All that marching troops have endured, the brave missionaries and those who came after them suffered on the carrying place with the additional hardship, often, of climbing upward in the heat rather than marching on level ground. When attempting to gain some idea of the physical effort of old-time traveling, the cost of crossing a difficult portage must be considered as the most expensive in time and strength. The story of Céloron’s climb up from Lake Erie to Lake Chautauqua, Hamilton’s struggle through the beaver dams and shoals of Petite Rivière on the Maumee-Wabash portage route, Arnold’s desperate invasion of Canada over “The Terrible Carrying Place” on the Kennebec-Chaudière route, and the history of the difficulties of the Oneida portage at Rome, New York, present to us pictures of the portages of America that can never fade from our eyes.

At the ends of many of the portage paths were to be found busy out-door work-shops in the old days of pirogues and canoes. The trees nearby and far away stood stark and white against the forest green, having lost their coats of bark; many were fallen, and others were tottering. Here and there were scattered the refuse pieces of bark and wood. The ends of portage paths were famous carpenter shops.[17] There were humble libraries here, too. It was while wintering on the Chicago portage that Marquette wrote memoirs of his voyages.