"The portage landing ... is just to the east of the big red barn, on the Miller property, south of the residence, and at the foot of a beautiful ravine declining gently from the high ground. At the water's edge, stretching back at least one hundred feet, is a low sandy terrace of recent formation. The approach to this picturesque ravine is obscure and hard to locate from the river; the view being obstructed by the forest trees. Many of the original trees are still standing ... many red-cedars, the latter evidently being the progeny of a grand old cedar, a stately monarch of the portage landing, which reaches to the height of over sixty feet, with a girth of more than eight feet at its base.... The trunk ... has been covered by the sand and soil washed from above, to a depth of between seven and eight feet.... Recently, June, 1897, the soil around the old cedar was removed and the measurements as stated were made. As the trunk was laid bare ... three great blaze-marks [were found], forming a rude cross, made by a wide-bladed axe, such as were in common use in the French colonies. Here was what we had suspected, one of the witness trees marked no doubt in early days to locate the portage."[84]
Fort St. Joseph was located on the opposite side of the river from a Pottawatomie village, which was on the portage trail. The location of this fort and Indian settlement is never unanimously estimated to have been less than about sixty miles from the mouth of the St. Joseph River; Father Marest wrote Father German from "Cascaskias" November 9, 1712: "... we ascended the river Saint Joseph, in order to make a portage at 30 [20?] leagues from its mouth."[85]
This important route from Illinois to Detroit was first fortified by the building of the earliest "Fort Miami," near the mouth of the St. Josephs of Lake Michigan, by La Salle in 1679. "But this fort," Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites writes, "was destroyed by La Salle's men in 1680. Father Jean Mermet, then at the river [St. Joseph] mouth, writes La Mathe Cadillac, April 19, 1702, that he proposes to establish a mission 'three journeys,' or about sixty miles up river, 'near a stream [Illinois] which is the source of the Ouabache,' where there is a portage of half a league (_Margry_, v, p. 219). In 1711, Father Chardon had his mission sixty miles above the mouth. By 1712, there appears to have been a French military post at this mission. Charlevoix, in a letter dated 'River St. Joseph, Aug. 16, 1721,' writes, describing his approach to the fort from Lake Michigan: 'You afterward sail up twenty leagues in it [up the St. Josephs River] before you reach the fort, which navigation requires great precaution.'... The evidence is ample, that the fort on the St. Josephs, from about 1712 to its final destruction during the Revolutionary war, guarded the portage between the river of that name and the Kankakee, on the east bank of the St. Josephs, in Indiana, a short distance below the present city of South Bend."[86]