What is "portages"

Usage examples of "portages".

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.

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.

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.

Celoron tells of the mending of boats at the end of his Chautauqua portages, and that statement, with other like incidents, has led one authority to picture the birches--those beautiful white and golden trees of the sombre northern woods that gave their cloaks to the travellers who asked and shivered till they grew others--stripped of their bark where those paths came down to the streams.

In the afternoon I walked over that first and most famous of the French portages, but not content with that, I walked on into the night along the Wisconsin, that I might see the river as the explorers saw it.

That appreciation and expression of the beautiful is something that the French explorers in that other world--the valley reached of the pioneers of the seeing eyes and the understanding hearts--have carried and will continue to carry over those same portages, to give that virile life of the west some of those higher satisfactions of which this daughter of the portage is the prophetess.

The water path from Belle Isle, Labrador, to the Gulf of Mexico was open, with only short portages at Lachine and Niagara and of a few paces where the Fox all but touches the Wisconsin, the Chicago the Des Plaines, or the St.

They filled twenty-three canoes in a procession that was halted by shipwreck, by heat, by lack of rain and by too much rain, by difficult portages, and damage to the canoes.

In less than five days they made more than thirty-five portages, some of which were three leagues long.

Louis, at the most important portages, and at the places where the French forts once stood.