On the shore of Oronto Bay began the most popular gateway to the Flambeau Trail, also known as the Montreal River Trail, the only route inland into the dense virgin forest until the late 1880’s. The trail was an ancient Indian trading and war route connecting LaPointe on Madeline Island to Lac du Flambeau, ninety miles to the south. Its first forty-five miles formed a portage, an overland bridge linking Lake Superior to navigable river ways to the south. When fur trading grew lively in the late 1700’s to satisfy European demand for beaver fur hats, the trail became the highway over which trade goods were exchanged for fur pelts. On this shore, French Canadian voyagers moved cloth, gunpowder, and other trade goods brought by canoe from the trading post at LaPointe into eighty pound tote packs and carried them over the difficult “120 pause” portage, named for the number of times they stopped to rest, about every one-half mile. In return, millions of dollars of beaver pelts from the Northwest Trading Company post at Lac du Flambeau were carried back to this point for shipment to LaPointe, Quebec, and finally Europe.