Red River Trails

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The Red River Trails were a network of ox cart routes connecting the Red River Colony (the Selkirk Settlement) and Fort Garry in British North America, with the head of navigation of the Mississippi River in the United States. The trails went from what is now Winnipeg in the Canadian province of Manitoba across the international border and by a variety of routes across what is now the eastern part of North Dakota and western and central Minnesota to Mendota and St. Paul on the Mississippi.

Travellers began to use the trails by the 1820s, with the heaviest use from the 1840s to the early 1870s, when they were superseded by the railways. Until then, these cartways provided the principal and most efficient means of transportation between the Red River Colony and the outside world. They gave the Selkirk colonists and their neighbors, 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 provided by use of 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 trade developed by and along the trails connecting Fort Garry with Saint Paul stimulated commerce, contributed to the settlement of Minnesota and North Dakota in the United States, and accelerated the settlement of Canada to the west of the rugged barrier known as the Canadian Shield. For a time this cross-border trade even threatened Canada's control of its western territories. 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 oxcarts that once travelled the Red River Trails.

Contents 1 Origins 2 Development of the routes 2.1 West Plains Trail 2.2 Woods Trail 2.3 East Plains Trail 3 Commerce 4 Life on the trail 5 End of the trails 6 Significance 7 See also 8 References 8.1 Notes 8.2 Sources 8.2.1 Books and pamphlets 8.2.2 Websites

[edit] Origins

In 1812, Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, started a colony of settlers in British North America where the Assiniboine River joined the Red River of the North at the site of modern Winnipeg.^[1] Although fur posts were scattered throughout the Canadian northwest and settlements of Métis fur traders and bison hunters were located in the vicinity of Selkirk’s establishment,^[2] Selkirk's colony was the only agricultural settlement between Upper Canada and the Pacific Ocean. Isolated by geology behind the rugged Canadian Shield and many hundreds of miles of wilderness, settlers and their Métis neighbors had access to outside markets and sources of supply only by two laborious water routes.

The first, maintained by the Hudson's Bay Company (in which Lord Selkirk was a principal investor), was a sea route from Great Britain to York Factory on Hudson Bay, then up a chain of rivers and lakes to the colony, 780 miles (1250 km) from salt water to the Assiniboine.^[3] The alternative was the historic route of the rival North West Company's voyageurs from Montreal through Lake Huron to Fort William on Lake Superior. Above Superior this route followed rivers and lakes to Lac la Croix and and west along the international border through Lake of the Woods to Rat Portage, and then down the Winnipeg River to the Red.^[4] The distance from the Selkirk settlement to Lake Superior at Fort William was about 500 miles (800 km), but Lake Superior was only the start of a lengthy journey to Montreal where furs and supplies would be transshipped to and from Europe.^[5] Neither of these routes was suitable for heavy freight. Lighter cargoes were carried in York boats to Hudson Bay or in canoes on the border route. Both routes required navigation of large and hazardous lakes, shallow and rapid-strewn rivers, and swampy creeks, connected by numerous portages where both cargo and watercraft had to be carried on men's backs.

But geology also provided an alternate route, albeit across foreign territory. The valleys of the Red and Minnesota Rivers lay in the beds of Glacial Lake Agassiz and its prehistoric outlet Glacial River Warren; the lands exposed when these bodies of water receded were flat plains between low uplands covered by prairie grasslands. At the Traverse Gap, only a mile (1.6  km) of land separated the Bois des Sioux River, a source stream of the Red (which flowed north to Hudson Bay) and the Little Minnesota River, a source stream of the Minnesota River (tributary to the Mississippi, which flowed south to the Gulf of Mexico). The valley floors and uplands of the watercourses along this gently graded route provided a natural thoroughfare to the south. The eyes of the colonists therefore turned to the new United States, both as a source of supplies and an (illegal) outlet for their furs.^[6]

[edit] Development of the routes

The rich fur areas along the upper Mississippi, Minnesota, Des Moines, and Missouri Rivers were exploited by independent fur traders operating from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. These traders established fur posts in the Minnesota River valley at Lake Traverse, Big Stone Lake, Lac qui Parle, and Traverse des Sioux. The large fur companies also built posts, including the North West Company's stations at Pembina and St. Joseph in the valley of the Red River. The paths between these posts became parts of the first of the Red River Trails.

In 1815, 1822, and 1823 cattle were herded to the colony from Missouri by a route up the Des Moines River Valley to the Minnesota River then down the Red River to the Selkirk settlement.^[7] In 1819, following a devastating plague of locusts which left the colonists with insufficient seed even to plant a crop, an expedition was sent by snowshoe to purchase seed at Prairie du Chien.^[8] It returned by flatboat up the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers and down the Red River Valley, arriving back at the settlement in the summer of 1820.^[9] In 1821, five dissatisfied settler families left the colony for Fort Snelling, the forerunners of later tides of migration up and down the valley between the two nations.^[10] Two years later in 1823, Major Stephen Harriman Long was the first official U.S. representative to reach Pembina; his expedition came by way of the Minnesota and Red Rivers.^[11] These early expeditions on the watersheds of these two streams were among the earliest known through trips on the route of the first Red River Trail.

[edit] West Plains Trail

The West Plains Trail from the Red River Settlement went south, upstream along the Red River's west bank to Pembina, just across the international border. Pembina had been a fur-trading post since the last decades of the eighteenth century.^[12] From there, some traffic continued south along the river, but most cart trains went west along the Pembina River to St. Joseph near the border and then south, or else cut the corner to the southwest in order to intercept the southbound trail from St. Joseph. This north-south trail paralleled the Red River about thirty miles (50 km) to the west.^[13] By staying on the uplands west of the Red River, this route avoided the swampy bottomlands and the tributary stream crossings in the lakebed of Glacial Lake Agassiz which the river drained.^[14]

In what is now southeastern North Dakota, the trail veered to the south-southeast to close with the Red River at Georgetown, Minnesota, Fort Abercrombie, and Breckenridge, Minnesota, all of which came into existence in consequence of the passing cart traffic.^[15] 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. Some traffic went along the lakeshore through the Traverse Gap on the continental divide, then down either side of Big Stone Lake, source of the Minnesota River,^[16] while other carters took a short cut directly south from the Bois des Sioux across the open prairie through modern Graceville, Minnesota thereby avoiding the wet country in the Traverse Gap.^[17]

The trail continued on intertwined routes down both sides of the valley of the Minnesota River past fur posts at Lac qui Parle and downstream locations, and the Upper Sioux and Lower Sioux Indian Agencies and Fort Ridgely, all established in the 1850s. From Fort Ridgely, the trail struck across the open prairie to the Minnesota River at Traverse des Sioux near modern-day St. Peter, Minnesota, where the furs and goods were usually transshipped to flatboats.^[18] In later years, most cart trains crossed to the east bank and proceeded northeast along the wooded river bottoms and uplands to Fort Snelling or Mendota, where the Minnesota River joined the Mississippi.^[19]

The Minnesota trail originated with Native Americans, and before the oxcart traffic it connected the fur-trading posts of the Columbia Fur Company.^[20] In fact, that company introduced the use of the Red River ox cart to haul its furs and goods. It also developed the trails, and by the early 1830s, an expedition from the Selkirk settlement driving a flock of sheep from Kentucky to the Assiniboine found the this trail to be well-marked.^[21]

Sporadic at first, more regular trade between Fort Garry and the Mississippi started in 1835, when a caravan of traders from the Red River came to Mendota. The efforts of the Hudson’s Bay Company to enforce its monopoly only induced the fur traders to avoid the company's jurisdiction by moving across the border to the United States. These included Norman Kittson whose enormous fur-trading and shipping enterprise along the West Plains Trail started with one six-cart train in 1844.^[22] 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.^[23] While some of this fur traffic was shifted to other routes in 1854, the forts, missions, Indian agencies, and remaining through cart traffic kept the trails busy, and they were improved in the 1850s and supplemented by military roads.^[24]

[edit] Woods Trail

The West Plains Trail, although relatively level, went by a lengthy route through the lands of the Dakota people, and the shorter East Plains Trail also skirted Dakota land. The Dakota were the enemy of the Ojibwa, to whom the Metis carters were related by blood and marriage.^[25] These tensions led to conflicts. 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 St. Paul. It meant that they could not safely return by the normal route.^[26] The traders therefore, struck northwest up the Mississippi to Crow Wing at the mouth of the Crow Wing River, west up that river and across the divide to the fur post at Otter Tail Lake, then northwest across the prairie to a crossing of the Red River near its confluence with the Forest River.^[27] The next year, a southbound party followed its tracks, and by the year after (1846), the final route had been well-established inland from the Red River bottomlands. This trail was known as the Woods or Crow Wing Trail; it was also known locally as the Saint Paul Trail and Pembina Trail.^[28]

As the first of these names indicates, the path was wooded over part of its way, as its southern reaches crossed the transition zone between the western prairies and eastern woodland. From Fort Garry, southbound cart trains followed the east bank of the Red River, crossing the Roseau River and the international border. 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. It ascended to and followed a firm gravelly ridge which was once among the higher beaches or strandlines of that ancient lake, forded the Red Lake River at the Old Crossing near modern Huot, and angled south by southeast to the fur post at White Earth. At Otter Tail Lake, the route left the plains and turned east into a forest in the Leaf Mountains on the continental divide. Taking a difficult but scenic path east through the woods, the trail crossed the Mississippi River at Old Crow Wing. It then went south down the east bank of that river on a smooth and open glacial outwash sandplain to Sauk Rapids and East Saint Cloud.^[29]

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. This route ran within a few miles of the river to Saint Anthony Falls and the community of that name which was growing on the east bank of the Mississippi. The trail then left the river and crossed open country to St. Paul. The carters camped on the uplands west of the steamboat landing during the interval between their arrival with the furs and their return to the north with supplies and trade goods.^[30]

Inferior in terrain to other routes, the Woods Trail was superior in safety, as it was well within the lands of the Ojibwa. It was less well used during times of relative calm.^[31] In the late 1850s, its utility was increased by improvements made by the U.S. Army,^[32] which straightened and improved the winding oxpath through the woods along the Leaf and Crow Wing Rivers, and also replaced the old trail between Fort Ripley (near Crow Wing) and Sauk Rapids with a military road.^[33]

[edit] East Plains Trail

The Middle or East Plains Trail also came into common use in the 1840s. 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. His successor and former partner Norman Kittson moved their company's cart trains from the West Plains Trail in the Minnesota River valley to the East Plains route.^[34]

The East Plains Trail followed the older routes of the West Plains Trail from Pembina to Breckenridge, Minnesota, then struck east by a variety of routes out of the Red River Valley across the upper valleys of the Pomme de Terre and Chippewa Rivers (tributaries of the Minnesota River), to St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids on the Upper Mississippi.^[35] Soon however a branch was added to connect the East Plains Trail with the Woods Trail. This link skirted the west slope of the Leaf Mountains and joined the East Plains route at Elbow Lake and later, after a stagecoach road had been constructed further north, near the Otter Tail River. At times this eastern connection may have been the better-traveled of the two variants.^[36]

At Saint Cloud the furs of some of the cart brigades were transshipped to river craft on the Mississippi, which operated to Saint Anthony Falls at Minneapolis. Other cart trains crossed the Mississippi and travelled on to Saint Paul on a route shared with the Woods Trail.^[37]

Over most of its route the East Plains Trail went through a post-glacial landscape of lakes, moraines, and drumlins, with beautiful scenery and difficult swamps. 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 settlement began.^[38]

[edit] Commerce

The trails were first used to obtain staples and supplies for the Selkirk colony. They soon became trade routes for local fur traders. In the 1830s they began to be heavily used by American fur traders operating just south of the international border, who acquired furs from Metis fur traders in British North America who were evading the Hudson's Bay Company monopoly on trade within its chartered domain. ^[39]

Once the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly was broken the trails the Canadians freely used the trails as a legal outlet for the agricultural surplus they produced and a source of supply for their needs. The settlement at Fort Garry was isolated and at the end of a seven-hundred mile water and land route from York Factory, which was served by only one or two ships each year. Orders from Britain had to be placed a year in advance. But from St. Paul the settlers could obtain spices, seed, staples, lamps and coal oil to burn in them, fine cloth, tools and implements, and other manufactured goods in the space of a summer.^[40]

[edit] Life on the trail

The typical carter was a Métis descended from French voyageurs and Ojibway. His conveyance was the Red River ox cart, a simple conveyance derived either from the two-wheeled charettes used in French Canada, or from Scottish carts,^[41] but adapted from 1801 on to use only local materials.^[42] This cart contained no iron at all, being entirely constructed of wood and animal hide. Two twelve-foot long parallel oak shafts or "trams" bracketed the draft animal in front and formed the frame of the cart to the rear. Cross-pieces held the floorboards, and front, side and rear boards or rails enclosed the box. These wooden pieces were joined by mortices and tenons. Also of seasoned oak was the axle, lashed to the cart by strips of bison hide or "shaganappi" attached when wet which shrunk and tightened as they dried. 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 hub.^[43] Motive power for the carts was originally supplied by small horses obtained from the First Nations. After cattle were brought to the colony in the 1820s oxen were used, preferred because of their strength, endurance, and cloven hooves which spread their weight in swampy areas.^[44]

The cart, constructed of native materials, could easily be repaired. A supply of shaganapi and wood was carried; a cart could break a half-dozen axles in a one-way trip.^[45] The axles were ungreased, as grease would capture dust which would act as sandpaper and immobilize the cart.^[46] The resultant squeal sounded like an untuned violin, giving it the sobriquet of "the North West fiddle"; one visitor wrote that "a den of wild beasts cannot be compared with its hideousness."^[47] The noise was audible for miles. The carts were completely unsprung, and only their flexible construction damped the shocks transmitted from the humps and hollows of the trail.

The carts were lashed together in strings as many as ten carts long. Trains consisted of a few carts to many hundreds: carts numbering in the low hundreds annually used the trails in the 1840s,^[48] many hundreds in the 1850s, and thousands in the late 1860s.^[49]

On reaching Saint Paul, the carters would camp on the bluff above the town developing on the riverfront. Not all was harmonious. To the locals, the swarthy-complected carters up on the hill had a "devil-may-care" aspect, with their "curious commingling of civilized garments and barbaric adornments". 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 balance was "employed in cheating each other or imposing upon strangers". The economic benefits of trade, and the separation of the carters' camp from the village below, may have helped keep relations civil.^[50] After three weeks or so of trading, the "wild" carters from the north, now laden with trade goods, took their leave of the "den of blackgards" that was Saint Paul, and returned to what they felt was a more civilized world, but which some of their erstwhile hosts thought were uncivilized frozen wilds.^[51]

[edit] End of the trails

Some ox cart trains at times did not go all the way through, but were supplemented by river craft. 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 traveling the West Plains Trail. In 1851 weekly steamboat service on the Mississippi began between Saint Anthony Falls and Sauk Rapids on the Middle and Woods trails. In 1859 steamboat machinery was carried overland to the Red River and where a boat was built, but service was intermittent and the Dakota War of 1862 and the U.S. Civil War inhibited further improvements until after the wars.^[52]

After the Civil War the age of steam came to the region. Steamboat service was revived on the Red River, and railways were built west from Saint Paul and Duluth on Lake Superior. A branch of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad reached St. Cloud in 1866, and the mainline of that concern reached Willmar in 1869 and Benson the following year. Each end-of-track town in turn became the terminus for many of the cart trains. In 1871 the railway reached the Red River at Breckenridge, where revived steamboat service carried the traffic the rest of way to Fort Garry.^[53] The ox cart trains were replaced by trains drawn by steam, and the trails reverted to nature.^[54]

A few traces of the vanished trails still exist. Some local roads folllow their routes; depressions in the landscape show where thousands of carts once passed, and even after over a century of winters and springs freezing and thawing the land there are still places where soils remain compacted and resistant to the plow.^[55] Some of these subtle artifacts are marked or are visible to those with a discerning eye, but in most places the trails have been obliterated completely.^[56]

[edit] Significance

The Red River Trails sustained the Selkirk settlement in its early years and gave its colonists and their Métis neighbors a route for immigration and emigration as well as a highway for trade which was not dependent on the Hudson's Bay Company. As usage grew, old fur trading posts became settlements and new communities were established along the routes. The routes pioneered by the fur brigades led to the development of Minnesota and North Dakota, and facilitated settlement of the Canadian northwest.

The trails had profound political effects as well. The trails and the colony which they served were established in a time of Anglo-American tension and concern over the cross-border influence of each nation over the territory and citizens of the other. The trails and their uses both were created by, and contributed, to these influences. Born of the impetus of commerce and located by the dictates of geography, the trails had political effects unthought of by many of their users. Continued British presence in the northwestern fur posts on soil which the United States claimed, prior British claims to the Red River Valley and attempts to obtain access to the Mississippi, and the establishment of Lord Selkirk's colony all contributed to U.S. interest in the area and military expeditions to assert that interest.^[57]

Later on, the economic dependence of the Selkirk settlements and the Canadian Northwest on the Red River trade routes to U.S. markets came to pose a threat to British and Canadian control.^[58] The geographical dictates which led to the trails' establishment continued even beyond the end of the trails. 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.^[59] And there was an active Manifest Destiny faction in Minnesota which sought to use those commercial ties as a means to acquire northwestern Canada for the United States.^[60] These pressures led Canada to obtain cession by the Hudson's Bay Company of its territory and rights, contributed to Canadian Confederation and the establishment of Manitoba, and led to the decision to require on an all-Canada route for the Canadian Pacific Railway.^[61] Not until completion of that line in 1885 did Manitoba and the Northwest finally have reliable and efficient access to eastern Canada by a route located entirely on Canadian soil.^[62]

Now, with the border firmly established and peaceful, a greater sense of Canadian nationality and diminution of fears of U.S. Manifest Destiny, and expanded north-south commerce in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the trade corridor once occupied by these long-gone trails continues to be employed for its historic uses.^[63]

[edit] See also

• Carlton Trail
• Red River ox cart

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

[edit] Sources

[edit] Books and pamphlets

• Berton, Pierre (1972)). The Impossible Railway. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-3944-6569-5. 

• Bryce, George (1909), The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists, Toronto: The Musson Book Company, <http://ia301128.us.archive.org/3/items/romantic00brycuoftBi/romantic00brycuoftBi.pdf> 

• Christianson, Theodore (1935), Minnesota: The Land of Sky-Tinted Waters, vol. I: From Wilderness to Commonwealth, Chicago and New York: The American Library Society .

• Gilman, Rhoda R.; Carolyn Gilman & Deborah M. Stultz (1979). The Red River Trails: Oxcart Routes Between St. Paul and the Selkirk Settlement, 1820-1870. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. ISBN 0-8735-1133-6. 

• Kelsey, Vera (1951). Red River Runs North!. New York: Harper & Brothers. 

• Kernaghan, W. (c. 1857). Hudson's Bay and Red River Settlement with a short account of the country, and the routes in 1857. London: Algar and Street. 

• Lass, William E. (1978), Minnesota, A History (2d ed.), New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., ISBN 0-3930-4628-1 

• Lass, William E. (1980). Minnesota’s Boundary with Canada. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. ISBN 0-8735-1153-0. 

• Morse, Eric W. (1969). Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada / Then and Now. Minocqua, WI: NorthWord Press. ISBN 1-5597-1045-4. 

• Nute, Grace Lee (1950). Rainy River Country. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. 

[edit] Websites

• Bell, Charles N. (29 April 1887). "Some Red River Settlement History". MHS Transactions Series 1 (29). Manitoba Historical Society. 

• Brehaut, Harry Baker (1971). "The Red River Cart and Trails: The Fur Trade". MHS Transactions Series 3 (28). Manitoba Historical Society. 

• Bowsfield, Hartwell (1967-68). "Canadian-American Relations: The Background". MHS Transactions Series 3 (24). Manitoba Historical Society. 

• Bowsfield, Hartwell (1966-67). "The United States and Red River Settlement". MHS Transactions Series 3 (23). Manitoba Historical Society. 

• Foseca, William G. (25 January 1900). "On the St. Paul Trail in the Sixties". MHS Transactions Series 1 (56). Manitoba Historical Society. 

• HBC Heritage (2007). The North West Company. Our History: Acquisitions, Fur Trade. Hudson's Bay Company. Retrieved on 2008-02-14.

• Henderson, Anne Matheson (Spring 1968). "The Lord Selkirk Settlement at Red River, Part 3". Manitoba Pageant 13 (3). Manitoba Historical Society. 

• Hess, Jeffrey A.; Minnesota Historical Society (July 1989). Minnesota Red River Trails (PDF). N.H.R.P. Multiple Property Documentation Form and Continuation Sheets. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Retrieved on 2008-02-14.

• Killion, Rick (12 2004). Historic Trade Corridors: Vital Links Follow Nature's Bounty. Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, University of North Dakota. Retrieved on 2008-02-14.

• McFadden, Molly (1950-51). "Steamboating on the Red". MHS Transactions Series 3. Manitoba Historical Society. 

• Morrison, William R. (2007). Dawson Road. Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Foundation of Canada. Retrieved on 2008-02-14.

• Peihl, Mark (2001). A Few Thoughts About Red River Carts. Clay County Historical Society. Retrieved on 2008-02-14.

• Walsh, K. (May 2006). Crow Wing Trail. Winnipeg & Region Green Map. Department of City Planning, Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba. Retrieved on 2008-03-23.

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