Grand Portage

Historic settlement in Cook County, northeast Minnesota; population (2000) 560. It is situated at the eastern tip of the Arrowhead Region, on Lake Superior.

It is the start of a 14-km/9-mi route that avoids the falls of the lower Pigeon River, on the Ontario border. Long used by American Indians, this trail became in the 18th-century key to the North West Company's fur operations, and was the crucial connection between the eastern Great Lakes and Montréal and the rivers and lakes of northwest Canada. The earliest settlement in Minnesota, it saw heavy traffic from the 1770s until 1802, when the North West Company moved operations north to the Kaministiquia River at Fort William (now Thunder Bay), Ontario, to keep the trade route within British territory. Today Grand Portage is a National Historic Site, with a reconstructed northwest-central post.