The Kankakee-St. Joseph route was a favorite one for travelers returning from Illinois to the Great Lakes and Canada. The favorite early "outward" route was from the western shore of Lake Michigan into the Illinois River. Here were two courses: by way of either the Calumet or the Chicago River to the Des Plaines branch of the Illinois. The latter portage was best known and most used. Perhaps no one of the western portages varied more than this in length, as on the best authority it is asserted that sometimes no portage was necessary, and at others a portage of nine miles was necessary: "The Chicago--Des Plaines route involved a 'carry' of from four to nine miles, according to the season of the year; in a rainy spring season, it might not be over a mile; and during a freshet, a canoe might be paddled over the entire route, without any portage."[87] When Marquette reached the Des Plaines, known as "Portage River" because it offered a pathway to the Illinois, he was compelled to make a portage of only "half a league."[88] The course of this portage is practically the present route of the famous Drainage Canal which joins the Chicago River with the Des Plaines at Elgin, Illinois.
The most westernly portage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi was of the greatest importance in the earliest years of white man's exploration. The French were the first explorers, and they were at first barred from Lakes Ontario and Erie--which offered the shortest courses to the Mississippi, via the Ohio--by the ferocious Iroquois; whose hostility Champlain had quickly incurred, toward himself and his people. Driven around, as has been shown,[89] by way of the Ottawa to Georgian Bay, the longest route to the Mississippi became one of the shortest. From Georgian Bay it is a straight course to Green Bay, and so the portage between the Fox and the Wisconsin Rivers became one of the earliest as well as one of the most important in America. By this route the discoverers of the Mississippi were destined to come--for there were many who found and lost this river. First in the line came Radissou and Groseilliers, at the end of that fifth shadowy decade of the seventeenth century. These daring men, possessed of the desire "to travell and see countreys" and "to be knowne w^{ th} the remotest people," found the Fox-Wisconsin portage and passed down the Wisconsin to the Mississippi, probably in the spring or early summer of 1659[90]--arriving on that river eleven years before La Salle, and fourteen years before Joliet and Marquette, to whom the discovery of the Mississippi is usually ascribed.