Chapter 23

“Le Portage” and the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway

Living in a northern Wisconsin river town, I frequently get caught up in the history of the old white pine lumbering days, when shanty boys and river pigs populated the northwoods. Armed with axes and crosscut saws, peaveys and cant hooks, the lumberjacks converted the vast old-growth pines into logs that eventually became lumber to fuel America's growth in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This history is relatively recent and close at hand. The white pine logging era lasted until the early 1900s in some parts of the north. It's easy to find remnants of those days in and around the towns that lumbering built. In some locations on northern public forestlands it is still possible to find the old, gray, decomposing stumps of virgin white pine or hemlock felled during the early logging days.

It's also easy to forget that another hugely important industry left its mark on Wisconsin history: the fur trade—at one time one of the largest commercial enterprises in the world. The fur trade was an industry that, as with lumbering, was full of incredible peril and hardship. The North American fur trade began centuries before the first old-growth northern Wisconsin white pines were felled by the logger's ax.

I was reminded of Wisconsin's role in the development and expansion of the fur trade one day during the summer when I finally had the opportunity to take a side trip off Highway 51 near Portage, Columbia County, and visit the Indian Agency House. I had passed the signs promoting the historic site for years while on my way to somewhere else, always in a hurry. One day, traveling by myself and finding a little time on my hands, I pulled off the highway and followed the small signs leading to the place.

I had a hazy idea in my mind that Portage was an important place geographically because the headwaters of the Fox River came pretty close to the Wisconsin River there, and Indians and early fur traders had used a portage, or trail, between the two rivers as the final leg of a journey from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River watershed. I hadn't realized just how important the portage really was until I stopped at the Indian Agency House and began to learn about the hundreds of years of history that were made there.

The Indian Agency House was built in 1832 very near the Fox-Wisconsin portage and across the Fox River from Fort Winnebago.1 Major David E. Twiggs and three companies of United States infantry had begun construction of the fort four years earlier to protect the portage itself, enabling travelers and traders to safely move from the Great Lakes via Green Bay, up the Fox River, across the portage, and down the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi.² The necessity of a fort at the portage was due to a short-lived but bloody conflict between settlers and the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), known as the Red Bird Uprising, which had ended in 1827 after the surrender of Ho-Chunk chief Red Bird, the uprising's leader.³

The Indian Agency House was built as a residence for the first Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, John Kinzie, and his wife, Juliette. Kinzie had been an agent of the American Fur Company and was selected to become the region's first Indian agent because of his familiarity with Indian culture and his ability to speak several Native American languages.⁴ His primary role at the agency was to administer the U.S. government's treaty obligations after the close of conflict with the Ho-Chunk and to serve as a mediator in local disputes and conflicts.⁵

Kinzie first arrived at Fort Winnebago in 1829 and probably stayed in one of the crude cabins built there.⁶ The adventurous Juliette, whom Kinzie married in 1830, accompanied her husband to the fort shortly after their wedding.⁷

The Kinzies traveled from Green Bay to Fort Winnebago by way of the Fox River. The expedition to the fort was probably a colorful affair, as the Kinzie party included soldiers, French-Canadian voyageurs, and an Indian guide.

In her historically important book about her experiences at Fort Winnebago, Wau-Bun, The Early Day in the Northwest, Juliette Kinzie described the boat that would take them to their new home: “It was a moderate-sized Mackinac boat, with a crew of soldiers, and our own three voyageurs in addition, that lay waiting for us—a dark looking structure of some thirty feet in length. Placed in the centre was a framework of slight posts, supporting a roof of canvas, with curtains of the same, which might be let down at the side and ends, after the manner of a country stage-coach, or rolled up to admit light and air.”⁸

After arriving at the fort, the couple lived for a time in a rough log building that had served as temporary barracks for soldiers.9 The structure had been moved to near where the Indian Agency House was eventually built. Juliette described it as having “a very rough and primitive appearance.”¹⁰ Finally, in November 1832 the “comfortable dwelling” that had been promised to the Kinzies by the government was completed. The Indian Agency House was a well-built two-story structure with spacious and comfortable rooms, a fitting place for the fine furniture, including a piano, that Juliette had brought with her from the east.

Unfortunately, Juliette enjoyed the new house for only eight months. While John and Juliette were interacting with the Indian tribes of the Wisconsin frontier, the Kinzie family (John's widowed mother and his brothers and sisters) was establishing a claim to 102 acres along the Chicago River near Lake Michigan in the burgeoning settlement of Chicago.¹¹ John Kinzie resigned his position with the government in order to move to Chicago to help with the subdividing and sale of the property—the geographic center of what would become one of the largest cities in the nation.¹² On July 1, 1833, the Kinzies left the Indian Agency House and Fort Winnebago, never to return.

Remarkably, the Indian Agency House has survived through more than 170 years and still sits on its original foundation, accurately restored and impeccably maintained by the National Society of Colonial Dames of America since the 1930s.

The American presence at the Fox-Wisconsin portage is just one relatively recent chapter in the portage's long and colorful history.

Though Native Americans had utilized the portage for untold millennia, the portage was first “discovered” by Europeans in 1673 when missionary Pierre Marquette and explorer, trader, and trapper Louis Joliet became the first recorded non-natives to traverse the two-mile link between watersheds.

After “annexing” the Upper Great Lakes region in 1671, the French increased efforts to explore the vast territory that they were claiming. With the goal of locating a route to the Great River, the Mississippi, Marquette and Joliet set out in 1673 with a commission from the governor of Quebec. With five companions in two birch bark canoes, the explorers traveled down Lake Michigan to the French post at Green Bay and then up the Fox River to the Mascoutin Indian village, which at that time marked the farthest west of French exploration in Wisconsin.¹³

In his journal of the expedition, Marquette describes their travel through the Fox River to the portage:

We knew that, at three leagues from Maskoutens, was a river which discharged into Missisipi [sic]. We knew also that the direction we were to follow in order to reach it was west-southwesterly. But the road is broken by so many swamps and small lakes that it is easy to lose one's way, especially as the river leading thither is so full of wild oats [wild rice] that it is difficult to find the channel. For this reason we greatly needed our two guides, who safely conducted us to a portage of 2,700 paces, and helped us transport our canoes to enter that river; after which they returned home, leaving us alone in this unknown country, in the hands of Providence.14

Their traversing of the Fox-Wisconsin waterway, the first use of “Le Portage” by Europeans, was an enormous step toward French exploration and domination of the Mississippi River watershed. The narrow, swampy strip of land became increasingly important in the fur trade, as it allowed the French greater access to western fur trading regions—many a voyageur reached the Mississippi by way of the Fox-Wisconsin route.

The fur trade was big business, and it fueled intense competition among European nations with colonial designs on North America. European powers played out global conflicts and quest for empire in the woods and waters of North America. The British, in particular, were fighting for their share of the lucrative fur trade. The oftentimes bloody conflicts between the French and British, collectively known as the French and Indian Wars, promoted alliances between various Indian tribes and rival European powers and greatly influenced the use of the Fox-Wisconsin portage.

In the midst of hostilities, beaver pelts poured into Montreal, the result of so many young men of New France being lured into the fur trade by profits and the prospect of alliances with Indian women.¹⁵ In an attempt to reign in the growing glut of pelts and declining profits, the French suspended the beaver trade in the Great Lakes and canceled the issuance of trading licenses in 1696.¹⁶

At the end of trade restrictions in 1715, the French greatly expanded their presence, building ten new fur posts in the Western Great Lakes.¹⁷ However, continued conflict with Wisconsin's Fox Indians hampered France's successes. The Fox had fled their original homeland in Michigan and settled along the Fox River between the portage and Lake Winnebago in the mid-1600s.18 It was in Wisconsin that they became a powerful force.

The independent Fox, antagonistic to the French, took advantage of their position on the Fox River by endeavoring to obtain complete control of the waterway.¹⁹ The formidable warriors basically closed the Fox-Wisconsin trade route to the French by the 1690s and charged heavy tolls to any adventurous, illegal fur trader who dared to pass through Fox territory.²⁰

Closure of the Fox-Wisconsin trade route necessitated the establishment of alternative routes to the Mississippi by the French, leading to the development of routes originating from Lake Superior.²¹ However, portages were control points for the waterborne commerce that the fur trade depended on, and the French would not stand for Fox interference. Years of bloody and savage war between the Fox and the French began in 1712 and degenerated into a war of genocide, with the complete annihilation of the Fox an official French objective.²²

After a French massacre of the Fox in which more than five hundred men, women, and children were killed in 1730, the once proud and strong Fox were destroyed, their numbers just a shadow of what they once had been.²³ Fur traders could once again use the Fox-Wisconsin waterway in relative safety.

French domination of the fur trade was in a decline after the Fox Wars, as Britain began to make inroads into the Great Lakes fur trade.²⁴ After the conquest of New France by Britain and the signing of a peace treaty in 1763, the Fox-Wisconsin portage passed to British control.

British, French, and Indian traders used the Fox portage all through the time period of the American Revolution. Although no battles were fought there during the Revolution, in 1780 a contingent of British soldiers traveled via the Fox portage en route to attack the Spanish settlement of St. Louis.²⁵ The soldiers spent several days in the area preparing for the expedition. The attack was repulsed.

Some years later another British military operation, this one directed against Americans, utilized the Fox-Wisconsin waterway to reach the Wisconsin River. After the Revolution and up until the end of the War of 1812, the far-flung frontier outposts in Wisconsin were only nominally under the control of the United States. When the Americans built a small fort at Prairie du Chien in 1814, the British assembled a force of 120 soldiers and 150 Indian allies to capture it.²⁶ Leaving Green Bay in June, the largest military force to move through the portage since the French regime floated down the Wisconsin to successfully take the fort.27

The War of 1812 eventually led to the establishment of American rule in the Old Northwest permanently, and the Fox portage passed firmly to American control. To maintain its control in Wisconsin, the United States built forts, including Fort Howard at Green Bay and Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien in 1816.²⁸

Twelve years later construction began on Fort Winnebago, bringing us back to the time of John and Juliette Kinzie and the Indian Agency House. However, Kinzie's era really signaled the end of the frontier in Wisconsin. As lead mining displaced the fur trade as Wisconsin's chief industry in the early 1800s, European immigrants poured into the state. A little more than a decade after Kinzie's tenure at Portage, Wisconsin became the thirtieth state of the Union.

Today, the Indian Agency House may be the best-preserved fragment of the vast history of the Fox-Wisconsin portage, and it is well worth a visit. From the front yard of the house, one can look toward the old portage trail and easily imagine the black-robed French missionaries, explorers, voyageurs, fur traders, Indian warriors, British soldiers, and American settlers that once traversed the two-mile link between rivers over the course of two centuries.