"
Excepting the portage paths farther up the valley, notably that of St.
Esprit, and important chiefly as fur-trading paths, there remains but one
other historic portage path across the ridge of stone and swamp and
prairie from which are pendent, on the one side, all the silver streams of
the Mississippi Valley and, on the other side, all the Great Lakes and all
the rivers that flow into them.
This remaining path is the tenuous trail through the fields of wild onions
that led from the river or creek called Chicago (the Garlic River--Riviere
de l'Ail) into a stream that still bears a French name but of a
pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept--the Des Plaines. This
path, too, traversed a marsh and flat prairie so level that in freshet the
water ran both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran from the
lake to the gulf. But it has been hallowed beyond all others of these
trails, for it was beside this portage that Marquette suffered through a
winter, detained there by a serious sickness when on his way to minister
to the Illinois Indians a hundred miles below.
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