In the case of the Great Lakes, winds and changing water-level soon became understood and governed travel. Parties journeying from Mackinaw to Illinois or the Mississippi would hold to the western coast of Lake Michigan, for here they were favored by the winds, and proceeded southward by the Fox-Wisconsin portage or the Chicago-Illinois portage. In returning they would, under ordinary circumstances, choose the Kankakee-St. Joseph portage which would obviate the necessity of stemming the Illinois or Wisconsin and crossing Lake Michigan. The more direct route to the head of the Maumee was not discovered or appreciated until later. Thus traffic, on the lakes at least, was not on the bee line that it is today, and thus it was that portage paths and straits were famous meeting-places and camping spots.[12] Straits, in many cases, may be classed with portages; often a portage was necessary only in one direction. On the rivers the same portages were usually the routes of parties ascending and descending, but on such a stream as the St. Lawrence they were frequently different; descending _voyageurs_ "shot" many rapids about which it was necessary to make a portage when ascending.
As a meeting place the portage must have been anticipated with an interest inconceivable to us who know comparatively nothing of woodland journeying. Eager eyes were often strained to catch first sight across the water of the opening where the portage path entered the woods. And when this opening was lost to the sight of the departing traveler, the last hope of meeting friends had vanished. What this meant in a day when friends were few and far to seek and enemies quite the reverse, it would be difficult even to hint. Even in the good old colonial days in the heart of New England, friends met at the tavern, when a neighbor was to make a little journey on horseback, to drink his health. Pioneers moving from New York City to what is now Utica spent an afternoon previous to starting in prayer with clergymen.[13] What, then, did partings and meetings mean in the earliest days on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence--when every rapid was a danger and every wood concealed an enemy?[14] Letters were sometimes left hanging conspicuously on trees at portages.