The portage from the St. Croix to it begins on marsh, ascending in a hundred yards or so, to an elevated sandy plain, which has been covered, at former times, with a heavy forest of the pinus resinosa; that having been consumed, there is left here and there a dry trunk, or _auk_, as the Indians call it. The length of the portage path is 3,350 yards, or about two miles. At this distance, we reach a small, sandy-bottomed brook, of four feet wide and a foot deep, of most clear crystalline cold water, winding its way, in a most serpentine manner, through a boggy tract, and overhung with dense alder bushes. It is a good place to slake one's thirst, but appears like anything else than a stream to embark on, with canoes and baggage. Nobody but an Indian would seem to have ever dreamed of it. Yet on this brook we embarked. It was now six o'clock in the evening. By going a distance below, and damming up the stream, a sufficient depth of water was got to float the canoes. The axe was used to cut away the alders. The men walked, guiding the canoes, and carrying some of the baggage. In this way we moved slowly, about one mile, when it became quite dark, and threatened rain. The voyageurs then searched about for a place on the bog dry enough to sleep on, and came, with joy, and told me that they had found a kind of bog, with bunches of grassy tufts, which are called by them _tete de femme_. The very poetry of the idea was something, and I was really happy, amid the intense gloom, to rest my head, for the night, on these fair tufts. The next morning we were astir as soon as there was light enough to direct our steps. After a few miles of these intricacies, we found a brisk and full tributary, below which, the descent is at once free, and on crossing the first narrow geologic plateau, the rapids begin; the stream being constantly and often suddenly enlarged, by springs and tributaries from the right and left. To describe the descent of this stream, in detail, would require graphic powers to which I do not aspire, and time which I cannot command. We were two days and a part of a night in making the descent, with every appliance of voyageur craft. It was after darkness had cast her pall over us, on the evening of the 4th of August, before we reached still water. The river is then a deep and broad mass of water, into which coasting vessels from the Lake might enter. Some four miles from the foot of the last rapids, it enters the Fond du Lac of Lake Superior. Some time before reaching this point, we had been apprised of our contiguity to it, from hearing the monotonous thump of the Indian drum; and we were glad, on our arrival, to find the chief, Mongazid,[198] of Fond du Lac, with the military barge of Lieut. Allen, left at that place on our outward trip, which he had promised to bring down to this point. [198] From _mong_, a loon, and _ozid_, his foot. The name is in allusion to the track of the bird on the sand.