Wisconsin's Maritime Trails

Wisconsin's Maritime Trails. Early Water Routes. The Fox River has served as a highway for the movement of people and goods for thousands of years. Archaeologists working along the Fox River in De Pere uncovered two-thousand-year-old pottery that demonstrates trade with communities in Illinois. Another site near Kaukauna yielded stone tools and pottery from as far away as New York state., One can trace the spread of European influence along the Fox-Wisconsin River system from Jean Nicolet's 1634 landing near Green Bay to Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette's 1672 discovery of the "Great River," already known to Natives as "Messipi." Yet Europeans were not exploring the unknown - their guides were following transportation routes that were old when Nicolet traveled them., In an attempt to exert stronger control over Native American groups, the United States government set up a series of forts along the Fox-Wisconsin River system. Fort Howard was built at the mouth of the Fox River., The Fox River not only provided an important trade route, but also a home for a number of different communities that lived around present-day Green Bay. Archaeology along the Fox River tells many stories of this region's occupants. At one site, archaeologists have identified evidence of Native American settlements extending back thousands of years. Later evidence at the same site indicates a seventeenth-century village where Native Americans and Europeans traded goods. Descendants of those traders lived there into the nineteenth century., Native American dugout and birchbark canoes were efficient and well-suited for traveling and gathering food along Wisconsin's lakes and rivers., European fur traders in Wisconsin adapted Native American birchbark canoes to their own needs, exchanging lightness for cargo capacity. With larger canoes, portages such as the one connecting the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers required many more men.