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The seventeenth century to the present street map
The descent: Every trail in this section descends from a footpath. The oldest documented trail on this ground is the portage between the St. Joseph River and the Kankakee — the carrying place where travelers left the river at the bend and walked overland to the next water. Its full record — La Salle's passage in 1679, the landing on the river's west bank, and the trail's length as the sources give it, a range and never a single settled figure — is told in Before the City, the Land & the Tribes, and it is not retold here. What belongs to this section is the descent. The landing the record fixes stands today at Riverview Cemetery, 2700 Portage Avenue; the street name carries the path. The county's own trail interpretation makes the same connection two townships east, where Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park names one of its trails the Portage Trail and prints the definition on its trail map for walkers: "A PORTAGE was a footpath used to connect waterways." The paved systems that follow were built for bicycles and snowmobiles, but the idea they execute — a maintained path along and between this county's waters — is the portage's.
Sources:
- Before the City, the Land & the Tribes (this history's own banked account of the portage, its landing, and its measured lengths).
- St. Joseph County Parks, Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park trail map (the Portage Trail's name and the map's printed "Trail Trivia" definition).