Carrying boats and supplies overland

Usage examples of portage.

If he had ever been through these muskeg ponds before, he would not have forgotten the location of a portage.

They had no trouble finding the last portage from the chain of muskeg ponds, for it was easily observed when they approached it.

The incident at the muskeg portage was proof that Alphonse had made false pretense of his familiarity with this district.

Light canoes sometimes venture down this fatal gulf, to avoid the portage, unappalled by the warning crosses which overhang the brink, the mournful records of former failures.

Hence, in 1851, Muraviov established the factory of Nikolaievsk, near the mouth of the Amur, and those of Mariinsk and Alexandrovsk at either end of the portage connecting that river with the Bay of Castries.

September 26, steers his canoes up the shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie, where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the English traders of Hudson Bay.

MERCHANT PRINCES their retinues came from every corner of the HBCs former empire-Swampy Cree from Hudson and James bays, Saulteaux from Lake Winnipeg, Ojibwas from the Nipigon country, Sioux from the Portage Plains, and mighty warriors from the Peace and Athabasca valleys.

Frederick Whymper, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, stated on hearsay that the Chilcat Indians were believed occasionally to make a short portage across the Coast Range from salt water to the head-reaches of the Yukon.

We next crossed the Cascade Portage, which is the last on the way to the Athabasca Lake, and soon afterwards came to some Indian tents, containing five families, belonging to the Chipewyan tribe.

A mile portage connected Lake Bennett and Lake Linderman, and his last words he flung back after him as he resumed the trot.

Not all paths have evolved into railroads, but the railroads have followed practically all of these natural paths-- paths of the coureurs de bois, instinctively searching for mountain passes, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the easiest grades.

CHAPTER XII WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS The old French PORTAGE paths were also fruitful of cities on the edge of the Mississippi Valley, though the growth of these short paths was not-- with one notable exception--as luxuriant as that from the earth enriched of human blood and bones about the old French forts.

These portages, or carrying paths, which differ from the trails of the wood runners in that they are but short interruptions of the water paths and were not designed or laid out, as a rule, by the wild engineers of the forests and prairies but by human feet, lie across the great highway along which, before the days of canals, one might have walked dry-shod from the Atlantic to the Pacific--between the basins of the St.

There were, to be sure, still other portage paths than those across watersheds, and the most common were those that led around waterfalls or impassable rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on their journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing.

It was of such portages that Father Brebeuf wrote--portage paths passing almost continually by torrents, by precipices, and by places that were horrible in every way.