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 PREFACE

HE little portage pathways which connected the heads of our rivers and lakes or offered the voyageur a thoroughfare around the cataracts and rapids of our rivers were, as the subtitle of this volume suggests, the "Keys of the Continent" a century or so ago. The forts, chapels, trading stations, treaty houses, council fires, boundary stones, camp grounds, and villages located at these strategic points all prove this. The study of these routes brings one at once face to face with old-time problems from a point of view almost never otherwise gained. The newness and value of reviewing historic movements from the standpoint of highways is strikingly emphasized in the case of portage paths. While studying them, one seems to rise on heights of ground like those these pathways spanned—and from that altitude, gazing backward, to get a better perspective of the