Re: [Paddlewise] Re : BTU per passenger moved

  Jim Tibensky:

> Our longest portage, to get back to the original topic, was nine miles!
> (Canada was still on the English system of measurement in those days.)
> So not all the Voyageur Highway portages are easy.

Nine miles is the length of the Grand Portage trail from the fur trading
post at Grand Portage, Minnesota, to the Pigeon River. I skied it once
many years ago, but I have never hiked or portaged it.

I think all the portages in Minnesota are at least documented, if not
widely known. Those on the border between Minnesota and Ontario are
mostly, if not entirely, still in use, as they are part of the Boundary
Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota and Quetico Provincial Park in
Ontario. I have myself carried a canoe over many of them.

Such was the importance in the 19th century of the waterway along the
border that the Webster-Ashburton treaty, which confirmed the border in
its present location, specifically granted to the citizens of Canada and
the USA the right to use the customary portages along the border
regardless of which side of the border the portages happened to be.

(The Treaty of Paris in 1783 established the border along the primary fur
trade route west of Lake Superior. On that basis, some Canadians tried to
claim all of Minnesota north of the St. Louis River, which is just south
of Duluth. The Americans counterclaimed that the Kaministikwia River just
southwest of Thunder Bay was the true border. Hence the need for the
Webster-Ashburton treaty of the mid-1800s.)

Chuck Holst
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