Height of Land Portage - Inclusion in International Border

Inclusion in International Border

Following the American Revolution the Treaty of Paris set the international boundary between British North America and the United States along the line of water communication between Lake Superior and the Lake of the Woods. During the era of exploration there were three principal routes used by canoe brigades to connect these two lakes, all of which crossed the divide separating western Lake Superior from the Hudson Bay watershed:

• the Grand Portage route to Rainy Lake, which used the portage described in this article;
• to the east, the Kam–Dog–Maligne route used by early French explorer Jacques de Noyon in 1688, which headed north from the lake at the site of Fort William, Ontario up the Kaministiquia and Dog Rivers to Cold Water Lake, crossed the divide by Prairie Portage to Height of Land Lake, then went west by way of the Savanne, Pickerel, and Maligne Rivers to Lake La Croix where it joined the Grand Portage route; and
• to the west, the St. Louis–Vermilion route, which went from Lake Superior at Fond du Lac (the "end of the lake") near modern Duluth, Minnesota, up the St. Louis and Embarrass Rivers, across the height of land (by a portage which also bears the name Height of Land Portage) to Pike River and Lake Vermilion, then down the Vermilion River to the Grand Portage route.

Britain asserted that the westernmost St. Louis-Vermilion route was the usual line of water communications, while the United States advocated the easternmost Kam–Dog–Maligne Route. Following surveys in the early Nineteenth Century, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 fixed the route along the Pigeon River and the Height of Land Portage between North and South Lakes.

Since then the portage has been recognized as part of the border. "Free and open to the use of the citizens and subjects of both countries", it continues in its historic use as a footpath for the overland transport of canoes across the divide separating the Great Lakes Basin from the Canadian northwest.