Located at the border of the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of Minnesota, the path is a relatively easy crossing of the Laurentian Divide separating the Hudson Bay and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watersheds.

The portage was used for centuries by Indigenous peoples for canoe travel, teaching it to European voyageurs and coureurs des bois who used it to access the fur trading posts in Rupert's Land.

In the Pre-Contact Era (before peoples of the First Nations first encountered European explorers), those natives had long used birchbark canoes as the principal means of travel in the thick boreal forest of the Quetico-Superior area.

Each newcomer would be sprinkled with a cedar bough dipped in water, and be made to swear that he would not allow another novice to pass that way without undergoing similar rites and that he would never kiss another voyageur's wife without her consent.

"Free and open to the use of the citizens and subjects of both countries",[15] it continues in its historic use as a footpath for the overland transport of canoes across the divide separating the Great Lakes Basin from the Canadian northwest.