The most modern schools are being
developed and maintained by the public, and the University of Notre Dame
and the College of St. Mary look across the river to this portage field
and city.
One might have passed this portage so difficult to discern, as La Salle
did, and yet have found another way to the lower Mississippi, with a short
portage from this same stream to the Wabash River. A still shorter way
than any of these, and doubtless known to La Salle from his first years of
wanderings in the eastern end of the Mississippi Valley, led from the west
end of Lake Erie up the Maumee and then by portage to the Wabash and the
Ohio. This was the path that Celoron followed homeward on his memorable
plate-planting journey. But the portage was so long that he burned his
shattered canoes near the source of the Miami and was furnished with boats
at the French fort near the headwaters of the Maumee. The hostility of the
Iroquois, as we have seen, made perilous to the French in the earlier days
this path, so important among Indian highways as often to be called the
"Indian Appian Way.
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