Saganaga Lake lay along the Border Route, an ancient travel route between Lake Superior and the interior waters of Lac La Pluie, or Rainy Lake, often called the Voyageur's Highway. From the late-17th century through the early-19th century, it formed an important linkage in a worldwide commercial system involving both European and Native American participants. Beginning in the 1730s, the rise of the Border Lakes fur trade sent countless voyageurs, canoes, and thousands of tons of trade goods along this corridor. At the height of the British Northwest Company from ca. 1779 to 1802, trade goods typically reached the company's Grand Portage depot east of Lake Saganaga in 40-foot-long birch bark Montreal canoes carrying 3 tons of cargo across the open waters of the Great Lakes. After the Grand Portage, the cargo was repackaged into smaller North canoes better suited to the varied water conditions and frequent portages of the route into the Pays d'en Haut, or Upper Country, of Canada's interior.