Tuesday, May 31st, found me loading my father’s old, white Jeep. The roof was edged with narrow rain gutters, to which my homemade roof-rack was clamped. My baidarka was strapped to the rack. Rain gutters have disappeared, for looks or aerodynamics, I don’t know which, from new cars, including the one I owned at the time. So I borrowed the Jeep. My father and brother Mark would retrieve it during my trip, and my father would meet me with it in Oshkosh at the finish of my paddle.
I started for Portage after supper. I had schemed to avoid biting river insects, but had forgotten about their gentler lake relatives. On the Highway 41 Bridge over Lake Butte des Morts, I was reminded of the biting insects’ littoral kith and kin. Swarms of lake flies writhed over the road, so thick that at first I mistook them for smoke. As I plowed through the first swarm, my windshield went pale green in bug massacre. It was as if I had driven through a green cloud burst. I quickly exhausted all my windshield washer fluid. That night I needed an ice scraper to reveal glass and chrome, Jeep body and kayak, from beneath the green carnage.
Other than the insect miasma, the trip was without incident, and I arrived at the Super 8 Motel in Portage at 10:30 p.m. I would launch the next morning on the Fox, at the northern takeout point of the old portage. I slept well enough, knowing that the weather, finally warming, would allow an early start from the portage.
The Ho-Chunk Indian Nation had been established at the old portage long before Europeans began exploring the Upper Fox. It was not until 1673 that Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette portaged between the rivers. Later, a succession of traders built posts at the portage, beginning with Laurant Barth in 1792, and ending with Francois LeRoi.1 LeRoi built a home near the Fox River take-out in 1819 to headquarter his portage business.2 By 1828, U.S. soldiers had arrived to erect Fort Winnebago (Winnebago being the English name for the Ho-Chunk), and bought LeRoi’s cabin.3
Jefferson Davis, destined for the presidency of the Confederacy, was stationed at Fort Winnebago and later, in 1831, at Fort Crawford, Wisconsin. His assignment in Wisconsin involved him in the aftermath of the 1832 Black Hawk War. However, he did not cross paths with young Abraham Lincoln, who led an Illinois militia company into Wisconsin during the war.4 Fort Winnebago was garrisoned until 1845, by which time the need of a military post had faded with the advancing settlement of whites.5 The fort was soon followed by town. The city of Portage, established in 1854, is the third oldest non-Native American settlement in Wisconsin.6
I would put in half a mile downstream from Fort Winnebago, at a point where the remnant of the Portage Canal enters the Fox. This canal between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers opened in 1856, and paralleled the 2,700-pace Wauon Trail. The canal ended 10,000 years of canoe carrying and began an era of steamboats. Between the 1850s and the early 1900s, steamboats carried passengers and freight up and down the Fox. In all, about 250 steamboats plied the river. Their top speed barely exceded ten miles per hour7, which would be several times the speed that I would paddle my baidarka.
When the railroads arrived in 1857, the canal and river were quickly eclipsed in economic importance.8 The last steamer burned in 1922.9 The canal was closed by the government in 1951 for lack of commercial use, and was mostly filled in.10 All that remained was a stub running north from the canal’s first lock to the Fox River. Downstream on the Fox, as the river falls gently on its way to Oshkosh and Lake Winnebago, were a series of decommissioned locks along with low dams. That would be my course.
1. City of Portage, Wisconsin. History. Accessed November 6, 2011. http://www.ci.portage.wi.us/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={779D162D-6887-4486-80CE-AB9F9C199419}.
2. Columbia County Tourism Committee. Surgeon’s Quarters. Accessed November 6, 2011. http://www.valuworld.com/usa/wi/supermall/County/Columbia/columbiatourism/trips_tours/antiques/link2_surgeons.htm.
3. City of Portage, Wisconsin. Id.
4. Wisconsin Historical Society. Historic Diaries: Black Hawk War Documents - Preface. Accessed October 23, 2011.
5. Explore Wisconsin.com. Columbia County Attractions. Accessed November 6, 2011. http://www1.explorewisconsin.com/countypages/Columbia.asp.
6. Explore Wisconsin.Com. Portage, WI: Where the North Begins. Accessed November 6, 2011. http://www1.explorewisconsin.com/communitypages/portage.asp>.
7. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 11. Trails Books, 1998.
8. Explore Wisconsin.com. Columbia County Attractions. Id.
9. Svob, Mike. Id.
10. Explore Wisconsin.com. Columbia County Attractions. Id.
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