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Before 1698 - 1794
The route: The first Fort Wayne trail was not built for pleasure or even for local travel. It was a portage, a carrying place, and it connected two worlds: from the St. Marys River, and so from the St. Joseph and the Maumee and Lake Erie beyond them, a traveler carried canoe and cargo overland to the Little River, which runs to the Wabash, and so to the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Fort Wayne was the only place on the most direct passage between Lake Erie and the Gulf where a trader bearing his wares had to leave the water and haul them overland, and that single fact is the founding fact of the city.
The ground: The best guess the record holds puts the eastern end at the great western bend in the St. Marys River near Swinney Park, or, in the wet season, near the present intersection of Portage Boulevard and Taylor Street, a small street on the city's west side that still carries the route's name. The western end stood in Aboite Township near the crossing of Hamilton Road and U.S. 24, at the headwaters of the Little River near Aboite Creek. The way between was usually about nine miles, says the News-Sentinel's Cityscapes history; Griswold's Pictorial History of 1917 puts the width of the land interruption at about eight miles. Both tellings are printed because both are the record; the actual track is lost, and there were probably several paths following high ground, changing with the season and the wetness of the year. The great drainage project of the 1880s, which emptied the 18,000-acre swamp in Aboite Township, destroyed what was left of the frontier ground the paths crossed.
Who held it: The portage was ancient, used by American Indians for thousands of years, and it was first noted by Europeans in 1698, though it may have been known to exist as early as 1632. For a time the Iroquois raided the country and drove the friendly tribes out, and the Maumee-Wabash portage was the last of the great Midwestern portages to be exploited. When the Iroquois were chased out in the 1690s, the Miamis were persuaded to return to the Three Rivers, rebuild their village of Kekionga at the confluence, and resume control of the portage. Control paid: the Miami levied a tribute on every canoeload of pelts and trade goods that crossed, and the wealth and prestige of the village grew on the toll of a path. Kekionga stood where the Lakeside section of the city now stands, and a shallow lake, since drained out of existence, reached southwest from the village toward present-day Waynedale and was navigable by canoe for part of the year, lengthening the water and shortening the carry when the season allowed.
Why it opens this section: Every later Fort Wayne trail is a variation on this one. The canal was dug to abolish the carry, and its towpath is a trail in this section. The greenway follows the rivers the portage connected. The state connector at the end of this section runs from a park named for a Potawatomi leader to a park on the Wabash the portage fed. And the newest nature preserve in the record, Eagle Marsh, sits in the old portage country on the divide itself. South Bend's trails section opens with its own ancestor, the portage path; Fort Wayne's ancestor is older in the record and larger in consequence, because this carrying place did not just precede the city. It caused it.
Sources:
- News-Sentinel, Cityscapes, "Coveted portage anchored early Fort Wayne" (the route, the ends, the nine miles, the 1698 note, the Miami return, the 1880s drainage).
- Bert J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana (1917), chapter II, "The Portage That Made Fort Wayne" (the eight-mile interruption).
- Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, The French and British at Three Rivers (1953) (Kekionga at the confluence, the drained lake, the tribute).
- The Floods historical marker, Headwaters Park (the land portage to the Wabash system).