The plain which the
path crosses seems to the eye as level as a table. Undoubtedly before the
tipping of the bed of the lakes the water flowed over this path. 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.
At the other end of the now macadamized "path" there is a little red
bridge that leads across the Fox to where a portage fort grew later into
an important trading-post; but now there is no trace of those monuments of
war and trade. There is a farmhouse on their site whose tenants are in
fear only of drought and early frosts. A canal crosses this little isthmus
and once it interlocked the east and west, the arctic plains with the
subtropic cane fields; but it has given over its work to the railroads,
having served, however, I have no doubt, to water the roots of the
beautiful town that bears the generic name of all those places where
burdens were borne between waters.
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