Grand Portage National Monument, Minnesota

Located 25 miles from Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the northwest end of Lake Superior, this is a land wooded and remote, though not without interpretive infrastructure. It was here, a few miles south of the Pigeon River, where the settlement of Grand Portage was established in the late 18th century, and became the largest fur-trading post in the Great Lakes at the time. The community was a fortified compound, operated by the North West Company, based out of Montreal, the capital of the fur trade. This was the landing for the Grand Portage, an 8.5 mile-long trail for carrying canoes around the waterfalls and rapids of the Pigeon River. At the other end of the portage, fur trade routes on rivers and lakes branched as far as the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. The site is now a National Monument, run by the National Park Service, with a visitor center. There is also a reconstruction of the fort which operated from 1784 to 1803, when the international boundary was established north of here, and the British Canadian North West Company was forced to move its operations north of the border.

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