Mapping the Chicago Portage: Seventeenth-Century Explorations by Jolliet, Marquette, La Salle, and Joutel

Abstract

On their return to Canada in 1673, Louis Jolliet’s group became the first Europeans documented to have passed from the Mississippi River watershed to the Great Lakes watershed via the Chicago Portage. This carrying place, between the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers, would remain a politically and commercially important location during the fur trade era. A podcast by a group of Chicago historians, writers, and artists has promoted the assertion that a route south of Chicago, different from that recognized as one of only two National Historic Sites in Illinois, was actually the Chicago Portage Region used by such explorers as Louis Jolliet, Father Jacques Marquette, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and Henri Joutel. However, the accounts of the seventeenth-century French travelers confirm the 1928 work that established the location of the portage region and served as the foundation for its designation by the National Park Service in 1952.