The Long Portage

Seen by the side of the road west of Cable, Wisconsin.  There's no wayside rest and really little reason why anyone would stop to investigate.  By this point people have driven a long way and are almost at their lake cabin.

Heck, even I drove straight by for fifteen years before my curiosity got the better of me.  Was that boulder and cement construction method the sign of a CCC project?

Here's a close up of the bronze plaque which needs a bit of cleaning up to be sharp and legible again.

It reads:

NEAR THIS SPOT RAN THE OLD OJIBWAY INDIAN TRAIL BETWEEN CHEQUAMEGON BAY OF LAKE SUPERIOR AND THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.  THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY THE CABLE TUESDAY CLUB OF CABLE, WISCONSIN 1936

So, this was a portage - a short land bridge between waterways - that could link the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.  Handy if you want to paddle from Duluth to New Orleans.  But who would care about that sort of thing?

Well, trade back and forth between various Native American groups was extensive if mostly done in small amounts of high value items.  A birch bark canoe is not a cargo container ship.  Copper, shells, pipestone and so forth.  Once the Europeans came along things got busier.  Europe wanted furs.  The native peoples wanted metal tools, firearms, and sadly, whiskey.

The portage was used by French traders going back as far as the 1600s.  Jonathan Carver crossed it in 1767.  And an Indian Agent named Henry Schoolcraft, who left us a detailed account of the portage from 1831.  

While looking at various material relating to the portage I found this interesting hand drawn map that is held by the State Historical Society:

As it dates from 1936 I assume it's creator, a certain Robert Hanson, was one of the members of the "Tuesday Club".  And although the detail is not good in this copy it  alludes to markers in the plural, so perhaps there is another one somewhere along the route.  It indicates that they were placed in June of 1936.

As we are dabbling in geocaching these days it seems like a good place to set up a series of points along the portage.  It will be much easier for modern travelers who are not lugging canoes and bundles of beaver furs.