Hauling boats for short periods over land was a common practice called a portage. It was a necessary practice for waterborne transportation, since a portage was meant to make a short overland trip to connect two disconnected water routes. A portage would mean dragging the boat up on land, unloading all of the trade goods, supplies, and food, hauling it on your back to the next embarkation point, and doing the same with the boats themselves. Often this would mean several back and forth trips, and could be especially grueling for lengthier portages.

Luckily for most fur traders, the majority if your travel would have been in lightweight birchbark canoes, rather than the bigger, heavier, stouter Mackinac boats. Those became more common in the early 19th century and were used mostly in well-established trade routes with well-known and well-used rivers, lakes and portage points. But that didn't make it easy by any means. Even for established routes, like the "pork eater" route between Montreal and Mackinac, which involved either an upriver paddling along the St. Lawrence (the "southern route) or the river-to-lake-to-river-to-lake multiple portage route up to northern Lake Huron (the northern route) could involve a dozen or more portage points along a journey that took a month to complete. And that route was considered easy by most fur traders!

---

Fur, Fortune and Empire by Eric Dolin is a good start for further reading.

Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade by Carolyn Podruchny is a deep and interesting follow up.