Historic Brule-St.Croix Portage Stream

This low-quality silent movie was taken in Northwest Wisconsin with my 2.0 megapixel mini-camera and starts out looking “upstream.” This is the inlet to an unnamed pond (glimpsed at the very end of the movie) whose outlet farther toward the south is “St. Croix Creek” – one of the tributaries of the St. Croix River which eventually empties into the Mississippi.

At least through the 1830s, this stream served as the pond’s second outlet (it flowed in the opposite direction!) and was a contributing branch of the Brule River which flows northward to Lake Superior. Notable among the early American explorers who portaged through this very spot between the two river systems was cartographer and engineer Lt. James Allen of the Schoolcraft-Allen Expedition of 1832 which fixed the true position of the source of the Mississippi River and vaccinated hundreds of Native Americans. In my humble opinion, the presently-unnamed pond should be named after Allen whose classic map labels the pond as “small source lake from which the water runs both ways.”

Music is from Handel’s “Water Music.”

More info about the Brule portage area is here:

http://www.jlindquist.com/mapsupp3.html

And my Mississippi source video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4M27vnxUM0

Duration : 0:1:4

[youtube NINohz7MCSE]