Mucking Across the Savanna Portage
7 Jan
The latest issue of the Minnesota DNR’s Conservation Volunteer magazine features THIS interesting story by Gustave Axelson about the Savanna Portage.
Currently preserved as a State Park, the Savanna Portage was once an important — and roundly unloved — link in the historic canoe-based transportation routes through the area. The six mile carrying place connected the Great Lakes watershed with that of the Mississippi River.
Travelers intending to make the crossing between the two great drainages approached upstream either via the West Savanna River, a Mississippi River tributary, or the East Savanna, a tributary of the St. Louis River which flows into Lake Superior.
Axelson quotes 1830s traveler Douglass Houghton’s description of the portage’s swampy nature — savanna refers to the marshy grasslands that confounded both canoe and foot travel — to convey its hardships on the era’s voyageurs …
“We arrived at a small knoll of dry ground which is called the commencement of the portage where we took breakfast. The voyageurs soon after commenced carrying the goods … They frequently sank with loads nearly to the hip in mud and water.”
