Grand Portage: The Great Carrying Place | Minnesota Fur-Trade History Hike + Real-Time POV

At the far northeastern corner of Minnesota, where the forest meets the cold blue water of Lake Superior, an ancient trail climbs away from the shore. The Ojibwe call this place Gichi Onigaming, the Great Carrying Place. In this real time walk we follow the trail down toward the lake, step inside the reconstructed North West Company fur trade depot, stand in its Great Hall, visit the canoe warehouse and its great birchbark canoe, and look out over the water that once carried the trade of half a continent. Along the way we tell the story of the portage, the voyageurs and the summer Rendezvous, the fur trade that ran on it, and the Anishinaabe homeland it has always been. Filmed in early October, as the north woods begin to turn.

ABOUT THIS PLACE
Grand Portage National Monument sits at the very tip of Minnesota, in Cook County, on the North Shore of Lake Superior and within the Grand Portage Indian Reservation. Its name comes from the Ojibwe Gichi Onigaming, the Great Carrying Place. Below the site, the lower Pigeon River drops through a run of impassable falls and rapids, so for generations travelers left the water and carried their canoes and loads overland. That route is the Grand Portage, a foot trail about 8.5 miles long, running from Lake Superior up to Fort Charlotte on the navigable river above the falls. Long before Europeans arrived, this was Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe, homeland, and the trail was their road between summer homes on the lake and winter hunting grounds inland. In the 1700s the fur trade, driven by European demand for beaver felt, followed that same route into the interior. In 1784 the North West Company of Montreal built its inland headquarters here, at the lake end of the portage. Each summer the depot hosted the great Rendezvous, where the Montreal brigade voyageurs, the mangeurs de lard or pork eaters, met the hivernants or winterers coming down from the interior, and trade goods were exchanged for the year of furs. The reconstructed depot preserves a wooden stockade, the Great Hall, a kitchen, and a canoe warehouse. When the new international border was drawn along this old water route and left Grand Portage on the American side, the company chose to move, and by 1803 it had shifted its headquarters about fifty miles north to Fort William, in what is now Thunder Bay, Ontario. The site was authorized as Grand Portage National Monument in 1958, and it is cared for today by the National Park Service together with the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whose Ojibwe Heritage Center tells the story in the community's own voice. This is, and always has been, Anishinaabe homeland.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Grand Portage
0:50 Where in the World
1:26 The Great Carrying Place
2:04 Anishinaabe Homeland
2:40 The Portage Trail
3:15 The Fur Trade
3:52 The North West Company
4:29 The Great Rendezvous
5:07 The Depot
5:44 The Great Hall
6:17 Trade Goods
6:51 The Canoe Warehouse
7:24 Lake Superior
7:57 The Border, 1803
8:36 A National Monument
9:17 Keep Exploring

Music: "Earth Prelude" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY).

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Видео Grand Portage: The Great Carrying Place | Minnesota Fur-Trade History Hike + Real-Time POV канала Fru World Explorer