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December 1679 — the first documented crossing
The voyage: René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, came to this river in the late fall of 1679 by water, from the lake. At the river's mouth he built the post he called Fort Miami — a palisaded storehouse at present St. Joseph, Michigan, Michigan ground, named here because the expedition staged from it. On 3 December 1679, in Timothy Howard's county-history account of the relations, the whole party — thirty-three persons in eight canoes, thirty workmen and three Récollet friars among them, with Henri de Tonty and Father Louis Hennepin in the company — left the fort and paddled up the river of the Miamis toward the portage the Native people had described to them, seventy or seventy-five miles upriver. They missed it. The fleet passed the carrying place undiscovered, went on upriver, and had to come back down to find the landing — the first written lesson in how low and featureless the divide is. On the morning of 5 December, by Hennepin's relation as the county histories quote it, the party joined at the portage, where Father Gabriel de la Ribourde "had made the day before several crosses upon the trees, that we might not miss it another time": the first marks the written record leaves on this city's ground are blazes on portage trees.
The crossing and the naming: La Salle's own relation, preserved in the Margry papers and quoted by every history of the portage since, gives the crossing its measure and the far river its first French names: the river Seignelay — his name for the Kankakee, in honor of Colbert's son — "rises in a plain in the midst of much boggy land," and "is only a league and a half distant from that of the Miamis, and so our portage was not long. We marked the way from place to place, with some trees, for the convenience of those we expected after us; and left at the portage, as well as at Fort Miami, a letter giving directions." The Kankakee's Native name in the party's hearing was some form of Theakiki — Hennepin's "The-a-ki-ki," from which, the county history says, the modern name insensibly grew. From the ponds the party descended the Kankakee to the Illinois and into the country that expedition was built to claim, leaving the portage behind them as a documented route: written, measured and marked. La Salle used it again, and his May 1681 council at the valley's Miami town — treated in the peoples entry above — made the portage's country a working part of the French interior system within eighteen months of the crossing.
Sources: Hennepin's relation and La Salle's relation of the 1679–80 voyage (Margry, Découvertes et établissements des Français), as quoted in Baker, The St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage (1899), and Howard, History of St. Joseph County, vol. 1 (1907) — the 3 December departure, the eight canoes and the party's count, the missed portage, the 5 December crosses, the league-and-a-half measure and the Seignelay naming, as those accounts print them; Beckwith (1881) — the Hennepin portage passage and the "league and a half" text.