Once beyond the Niagara portage Céloron's attention was turned to the rival routes from Lake Erie to La Belle Rivière. There were at least five passageways well-known to the Indians. Of these the French knew very little, for, having found the Mississippi, they had been less interested in this branch of it. But now that the English were claiming and even settling the land along its half-known shores it was time they were enforcing their claims. So Céloron made for the first portage southward in order to strike the Ohio on its headwaters. This was the Chautauqua Lake portage from Chautauqua Creek--which the French knew as "Rivière aux Pommes"--six miles by land from the present Barcelona, New York, to Lake Chautauqua. From the seventeenth to the twenty-second of July was spent in making the difficult march over what has long been known as the "Old Portage Road." Bonnécamps, who accompanied Céloron, wrote: "The road is passably good. The wood through which it is cut resembles our forests in France."[22]
Céloron went his way, having given great prominence to the Chautauqua portage, indirectly suggesting that it was the most convenient pass from Lake Erie into the disputed Ohio Valley. It remained for another to mark a more practicable course.
Céloron's report to his governor was thoroughly alarming, and a French force under M. Marin was sent from Montreal in 1752 to fortify the route to the Ohio River and to erect forts to hold that river itself.
After looking over the formidable Chautauqua route, Marin moved along the shore of Lake Erie to "Presque Isle" (Erie, Pennsylvania), where the French had made a settlement as early as 1735. Marin chose to make this twenty-mile portage from Presque Isle to "Rivière aux Boeufs" the armed route of French aggression into the Ohio Valley, in preference to the shorter but more tedious and more uncertain Chautauqua pass. At the northern end of the portage he built Fort Presque Isle and at its southern extremity Fort Le Boeuf.[23] The arrival of the French upon the headwaters of the Allegheny will forever be remembered by the new and significant name Washington now gave Rivière aux Boeufs--which the stream still bears--French Creek. Marin, who hurried on down the Allegheny building Forts Machault (Venango) at the junction of Rivière aux Boeufs and the Allegheny, and Duquesne at the junction of Allegheny and Monongahela, should have named the Youghiogheny "English Creek." When once on the way, the time taken by the French and English to reach the key position of the West--Pittsburg--varied inversely as the length of the portages they had to traverse. It will be remembered that Washington in his first campaign of 1754 explored carefully the Youghiogheny River in the hope that the road he had just opened from the Potomac at Cumberland, Maryland to the "Great Crossings" (Smithfield, Pennsylvania) might after all be a portage path between Atlantic waters and the Mississippi system. He found the Youghiogheny useless.[24] The English route to the Ohio was practically an all-land route; Braddock received a little help from the Potomac but did not even attempt to use any western river, nor did Forbes in 1758 or Bouquet in 1763. The Monongahela, downward from Redstone Old Fort (Brownsville, Pennsylvania), at the end of Burd's road, began to be used in the Revolutionary period, and in pioneer days was a famous point of embarcation for western travelers.