Savanna Portage State Park - Savanna Portage

Savanna Portage

The plain in the old lakebed provided a low-grade but very swampy overland route across the divide between the East and West Savanna Rivers. Wolf Lake, source of the East Savanna, is only about 800 yards (730 m) east of Savanna Lake on the West Savanna. As Wolf Lake and the upper East Savanna are very swampy, the route selected for the portage trail departed from the river further downstream, shortening the distance to be traveled through the bog. The portage, some 6 miles (9.7 km) long, starts in the swamp and then goes west in a wooded upland to reach the West Savanna.

Long used by Native Americans, it became a thoroughfare between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley for explorers, missionaries, and fur traders. Travelers from the east exited Lake Superior near Fond du Lac ("head of the lake", where Duluth is now located), and ascended the steep, rocky, and difficult gorge of the lower Saint Louis River, which falls some 450 feet (140 m) from the location of Carlton, Minnesota, through what is now Jay Cooke State Park to its outlet at the lake. Above Carlton travelers proceeded upstream through quieter stretches to the location of Floodwood, Minnesota, where they turned southwest up the sluggish East Savanna River in the bed of Glacial Lake Upham. Coming to a small rise, the travelers commenced the portage, which in its eastern reaches was marshy, mosquito-infested, and among the most unpleasant and even tortuous of all the routes taken by the voyageurs. Struggling waist-deep through the morass of the "boundless swamp", travelers eventually reached a hardwood forest, through which the trail ran to the West Savanna River, which drains to Big Sandy Lake and the Upper Mississippi.

The portage likely was used by Europeans as early as 1679, when Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut visited a Sioux village at Big Sandy Lake during his exploration of the Lake Superior region and the Upper Mississippi. Among the portage's users were fur traders who operated in the upper Mississippi valley. Some went no further than the American Fur Company's large regional trading post on Big Sandy Lake operated by William Aitkin in the 1820s and 1830s, the years of peak usage of the route. Explorers and scientists crossing the portage included David Thompson, British explorer of Canada and North West Fur Company cartographer, in 1798; Zebulon Pike, early explorer of the American west, in 1805; Lewis Cass, American general and explorer, in his unsuccessful 1820 search for the source of the Mississippi River; Henry Schoolcraft, geologist and explorer, who accompanied Cass in 1820 and led an expedition in 1832 to find the Mississippi's source; Joseph Nicollet, French geographer and cartographer of the Upper Mississippi, in 1836; and Laurence Oliphant, a British explorer and writer, in 1854. Tourists such as Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who crossed in 1863, also used the portage.

When the Northern Pacific Railroad, building west from Duluth, reached nearby McGregor in 1870, the portage fell out of use for through traffic, but continued to be used for local trade and access to the interior. The trail's location was traced and marked in 1926 and in the 1940s through the 1960s, and with the use of archaeological techniques, it was more precisely marked in 1981. Much of the route is now maintained as a hiking trail.