Indian war paths and trails to military roadways of the whites will command more elaborate study in a future volume.
The portage paths were among the most important of all classes of Indian thoroughfares, and will be treated more at length in an independent study. Their purpose and characteristics should be noted here. As the name implies, portage paths were the routes by which the Indians made their way between adjacent bodies of water. They were essentially the land paths of those who traveled by water, over which canoes and baggage were carried. These may be classified, according to the circumstance of their environment, into river portages, or carrying-places about unnavigable portions of a river, headwater portages, or the path between the heads of two or more rivers, lake and lake portages or lake and river portages, the carrying-places between two lakes or between a lake and a river.
The portages, as a rule, were the most strategic portions of the interior of the continent; in times of war they were continually watched and guarded, and in times
