Red River Trails

They gave the Selkirk colonists and their neighbours, the Métis people, an outlet for their furs and a source of supplies other than the Hudson's Bay Company, which was unable to enforce its monopoly in the face of the competition that used the trails.

Free traders, independent of the Hudson's Bay Company and outside its jurisdiction, developed extensive commerce with the United States, making Saint Paul the principal entrepôt and link to the outside world for the Selkirk Settlement.

The threat diminished after completion of transcontinental trade routes both north and south of the border, and the transportation corridor through which the trails once ran declined in importance.

That corridor has now seen a resurgence of traffic, carried by more modern means of transport than the crude ox carts that once travelled the Red River Trails.

Isolated by geology behind the rugged Canadian Shield and many hundreds of miles of wilderness, settlers and their Métis neighbours had access to outside markets and sources of supply only by two laborious water routes.

Both routes required navigation of large and hazardous lakes, shallow and rapid-strewn rivers, and swampy creeks and bogs, connected by numerous portages where both cargo and watercraft had to be carried on men's backs.

The West Plains Trail had originated with Native Americans, and before the ox cart traffic it connected the fur-trading posts of the Columbia Fur Company.

[25] In what is now southeastern North Dakota, the trail veered to the south-southeast to close with the Red River at Georgetown, Fort Abercrombie, and Breckenridge, Minnesota, all of which came into existence in consequence of the passing cart traffic.

[26] From Breckenridge, the trail continued upstream along the east bank of the Red and Bois des Sioux Rivers to the continental divide at Lake Traverse.

[32] In later years, trains consisting of hundreds of ox carts were sent from Kittson's post at Pembina, just inside U.S. territory and safely outside the reach of the Hudson's Bay Company.

One such bloody confrontation in the summer of 1844 (caused by an attack by Métis carters on Dakota hunters) occurred when that year's expedition of free traders were in Saint Paul.

In Minnesota, the trail was joined by a route coming from Pembina to the northwest, and continued south on a level prairie in the former lakebed of prehistoric Lake Agassiz.

[40] The final lap of the trail to Saint Paul, which had replaced Mendota as the principal entrepôt for the cart trade, continued along the sandplain on the east bank of the Mississippi.

Shorter than the competing West Plain Trail, it became the route of the large cart trains originating from Pembina when well-known trader Henry Sibley retired from the fur trade in 1854.

This link skirted the west slope of the Leaf Mountains and joined the East Plains routes at Elbow Lake or near the Otter Tail River.

As the area became settled during Minnesota's territorial and early statehood days, the routes were improved, stagecoach service was instituted, towns were established, and permanent settlement began.

[50] In fact, the company itself all but abandoned the York Factory route for heavy trade in 1857, and instead shipped its own traffic in bond through the United States and over the Red River Trails.

[51] The principal export from the Red River settlements was fur,[52] but as the colony passed from a subsistence economy to one producing more than could be consumed locally the agricultural surplus was also sent south by ox cart.

[53] As settlement developed the trails became a "common carrier" for all manner of goods that could be carried by ox cart, including lamps and coal oil to burn in them, fine cloth, books,[49] general merchandise, champagne, sheet-metal stoves,[54] disassembled farm machinery and at least one piano,[55] and a printing press and other accoutrements for the first newspaper in the Fort Garry region.

The axles connected two spoked wheels, five or six feet in diameter, which were "dished" or in the form of a shallow cone, the apex of which was at the hubs, which were inboard of the rims.

One trader from the north called his host city "a wretched little village" where "drinking whisky seems to occupy at least half the time of the worth[y] citizens", while the rest were "employed in cheating each other or imposing upon strangers.

[75] After about three weeks of trading, the "wild" carters from the north, now laden with goods, took their leave of the "den of blackguards" that was Saint Paul, returning to what they felt was a more civilized world.

First flatboats and then shallow-draft steamboats ascended the Minnesota River to Traverse des Sioux and upstream points, where they were met by cart brigades travelling the West Plains Trail.

Some local roads follow their routes; depressions in the landscape show where thousands of carts once passed, and even after a century and a half of winters and springs freezing and thawing the land, there are still places where soils remain compacted and resistant to the plow.

The trails also gave settlers of that colony and their Métis neighbours a route for migration as well as a highway for trade that was not dependent on the Hudson's Bay Company.

The United States sent military expeditions along the route of the trails to assert national interests in the face of the continued British presence in the northwestern fur posts on soil which the U.S. claimed.

[93] At a time when a sense of Canadian nationality was tenuous in the northwest, that region relied on the Red River Trails and its successor steamboat and rail lines as an outlet for its products and a source of supplies.

[94] An active Manifest Destiny faction in Minnesota sought to exploit these commercial ties as a means of acquiring northwestern Canada for the United States.

This trade now coursing up and down the valleys of the Red and Mississippi rivers more than fulfils Lord Selkirk's predictions made nearly two centuries ago; while he first sought access over U.S. territory for the succour of his nascent colony, now commerce in manufactures and commodities goes in both directions.

[98] When we contemplate the mighty tide of immigration which has flowed towards the North these six years past, and has already filled the valley of the Upper Mississippi with settlers, and which will this year flow over the height of land and fill up the valley of the Red River, is there no danger of being carried away by that flood, and that we may thereby lose our nationality?This petition is reproduced in Kernaghan, Hudson's Bay and Red River Settlement (1857), pp.