The Grand Portage Story

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This book tells the compelling history of the legendary fur trade crossroads in northern Minnesota where Indian and European cultures have competed with and accommodated each other for nearly three centuries.

“The Great Carrying Place”–in Ojibway, the Kitchi Onigaming–is the 8.5-mile canoe portage linking Lake Superior to the waterways along the border of Minnesota and Ontario. In the 1600s French explorers and traders, who first called the trail Grand Portage, adopted it as a vital route to the west. There, in the late 1700s, the British North West Company built the headquarters from which it dominated the North American fur trade for decades.

Today Grand Portage National Monument lies within the boundaries of the Grand Portage Reservation of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.