The Grand Portage Highway of Furs

The waters you see here were once the interstate highway of the North American fur trade. For the voyageurs, everything began far to the east at the Grand Portage, an eight and a half mile footpath on the shore of Lake Superior that bypassed the waterfalls and rapids of the Pigeon River. From the seventeen eighties, the powerful North West Company, run out of Montreal, made that portage its inland headquarters.

From there brigades of paddlers pushed west along a chain of lakes and rivers, down the Loon River, across Namakan Lake, over portages into Rainy Lake, and down the very Rainy River that flows past this town, on their way to Lake of the Woods and the vast fur country beyond. At Rainy Lake the company set up a depot to shorten the long haul of the Athabasca brigade coming from the far northwest. The men split into two breeds.

The winterers, or north men, lived deep in the fur country, while the Montreal men, teased as pork eaters, ran the eastern lakes. By the early eighteen hundreds, once it was clear Grand Portage lay on the American side of the new border, the company moved its Lake Superior base northeast to Fort William. But the paddling route through these waters remained, and the border itself still traces it.