The Fox-Wisconsin Waterway: The Continent's Interstate
Near Green Bay, Wisconsin
Pull up a map of North America and trace your finger from the Atlantic coast westward through the Great Lakes. You arrive here, at the bottom of Green Bay, at the mouth of the Fox River. Continue upriver through the chain of lakes, Winnebago, Butte des Morts, Puckaway, and eventually you reach a village called Portage, where the Fox River comes within about two miles of the Wisconsin River.
Lift your canoe. Walk it across. Set it in.
The Wisconsin flows southwest to the Mississippi. The Mississippi flows south to the Gulf. That path, from Green Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, was the continent's interior highway for nearly two centuries.
Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet used it in sixteen seventy-three on their expedition to map the Mississippi. Fur traders followed it for generations. Jesuit missionaries followed the traders.
The portage at present-day Portage, Wisconsin was to the seventeenth-century interior what an interstate interchange is today. Green Bay controlled the eastern terminus of that route. Everything moving west flowed through this bay.
Everything moving east came back through it. Fort La Baye existed to hold that chokepoint. The fierce Fox-French Wars of the seventeen twenties and thirties were fought, at root, over who got to tax the passage.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal, completed in eighteen forty-eight, gave Chicago a competing southern route. Railroads arriving in the eighteen fifties made the canoe highway obsolete. But for two hundred years, Green Bay was where the continent turned.
