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The portage — route, names, and measured lengths
The route: The portage began at a landing on the St. Joseph's west bank, below the bend — placed by George A. Baker's 1899 monograph for the Northern Indiana Historical Society at two and three-quarter miles northwest of the county courthouse, on the ground that is now Riverview Cemetery, 2700 Portage Avenue — and ran southwest across the low divide to three small ponds that were the nearest sources of the Kankakee. From those ponds a canoe was afloat in the Mississippi watershed. The trail between was worn deep enough to be photographed as a trench in 1895, and Baker's monograph — read in full for this section — fixes the landing, the southwest course and the pond basins, "still clearly defined" as he wrote, from the testimony of men who had walked it. The names the ground kept are the route's own: Portage Township, the county township the landing stands in, and Portage Avenue, the city street on its line.
The length, in its variants: No two centuries measure it the same, and the file carries the measures with their makers. La Salle's own account of December 1679 puts the head of the Kankakee — his river Seignelay — "only a league and a half" from the river of the Miamis, "and so our portage was not long." A French memoir of the following generation gives a portage of three leagues from the Miami village to "a very narrow little river." The 1881 Wabash-valley history of H. W. Beckwith describes about two miles of marshy ground between the St. Joseph and the head of the little lake — Lake Kankakee, as the early accounts name the headwater water — "where the elevation is so slight" that in wet seasons the crossing shrank toward a paddle. Baker's measured trail, the path as the nineteenth century walked it, is "a carrying place of between four and five miles." The spread is not an error to be averaged: the dry-season trail went around the wet ground the wet-season crossing went through, and the portage's length was a function of the water. What every measure agrees on is the strategic fact the French built on — this was among the shortest and easiest of the great carrying places, the low door between the lakes and the Illinois country.
The use: The portage was old when the French found it — a Miami and Potawatomi road between their river towns, used, in the historical society's seal inscription, by "the Miamis and Pottawatomies" of this region long before it was "made historic by the early explorers and missionaries." Its first appearance in European writing is the December 1679 passage told in the La Salle entry below. Louis Jolliet likely knew of it as early as 1673, on the return from the Mississippi voyage; whether Father Marquette crossed it on his last journey, in the spring of 1675, the record does not settle — Baker, following the authorities of his day, calls it "very probable," and this section prints it as that: the belief of the early historians, not a documented crossing. Through the French century the portage carried the Illinois trade; through the treaty century it carried agents, annuities and emigration parties; the road that replaced it — the Michigan Road, whose land grant came out of the 1826 treaty — crossed the same divide a few miles west. When the carrying stopped, the city the portage had sited remained.
Sources: George A. Baker, The St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage (Northern Indiana Historical Society, 1899; 3rd ed. 1958) — the landing's location, the southwest course to the three ponds, the four-to-five-mile trail, the 1895 trail photograph, the Marquette probability as the early authorities held it; La Salle's relation of the December 1679 voyage, as quoted in Baker and in Hiram W. Beckwith, History of Montgomery County / Historic Notes on the Wabash Valley (1881) — the league-and-a-half measure and the Seignelay naming; the Sabrevois memoir (1718), Wisconsin Historical Collections vol. 16 — the three-league measure from the Miami village; Hulbert, Historic Highways of America, vol. 7 (1903) — Jolliet's probable knowledge of the route by 1673; The History Museum, South Bend, fur-trade curriculum (after Baker) — the landing at present Riverview Cemetery, 2700 Portage Avenue.