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Updated: June 23, 2025
Fair, warm. Very weak to-day. Our stuff so light now we can take all but canoe at one trip over portage. Have just crossed portage from lake by yesterday's camp, to other lakelet N.W. Boys gone back for canoe. I sit here and write. Very rough portaging here, all rocks and knolls. Little clear lakes between. Have to put canoe into water every 40 rods or so.
Ahead of them was another shore, and they reached this at last. Where the mysterious canoe had vanished, none could tell. Days upon days, they travelled with incredible labour, now portaging over a stubborn country, now, placing their lives in hazard as they shot down untravelled rapids. One day on the Black Wing River a canoe was torn open and its three occupants were thrown into the rapids.
Our food was the same as on the day previous, with the addition of some mossberries and cranberries we found on the barren ridge over which we crossed. It was another day of hard portaging on stomachs crying for food, and when we pitched our camp we were so exhausted that we staggered like drunken men.
The moment the poles were lifted the canoe stopped its forward movement, and if they were not quickly set again it began to slip back with the current. At last the water became too shallow and rough and we went ashore. Here the portaging began, and I climbed up over the ice-banks and walked along the shore.
They do the housework, it is true, but all the heavy labour beyond their strength is done by the men. Examples of this are seen in the frightful toil of hunting, canoeing, and portaging, besides a multitude of kindred small tasks, such as making snowshoes, bows, arrows, and canoes.
There were about a hundred Iroquois Indians who had been engaged as guides and boatmen, and these were to precede the expedition and arrange for the portaging and crossing the rivers before the arrival of the troops.
The bottoms of the boats were considerably the worse for wear, owing to our difficulties in the first canyons. We got some thin oak strips and nailed them on the bottom to help protect them, when portaging. Sliding the boats on the scouring sand and rough-surfaced rock was hard on the half-inch boards on the bottom of the boats.
Indeed, La Salle in one of his letters refers to the portaging here of canoes past an "oak grove and across a flooded meadow." The tree of which he speaks, with two canoes clumsily drawn upon it by the savages, to mark the beginning of the portage at the Wisconsin, has gone, but a monument of red granite now stands there with the names of Marquette and Joliet upon it.
The northern tripper has the choice between five methods of circumventing "white waters," and his selection depends upon the strength of the current: first, paddling; second, poling; third, wading; fourth, tracking; and fifth, portaging. You are already familiar with the method of paddling, and also with that of portaging, and a description of poling will shortly follow.
While they are shiftless and lazy, they also undertake the frightful toil of hunting and portaging. Although improvident, they have learned to dry a stock of meat and put up a scaffold of white fish for winter use. As a tribe they are mild and inoffensive, although they are the original stock from which the Apaches broke away some hundreds of years ago before settling in the south.
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