Red River Trails
Minnesota Red River Trails | |
| Nearest city | Winnipeg, Manitoba |
|---|---|
| Area | Transportation |
| MPS | Minnesota Red River Trails |
| NRHP reference No. | 90002201, 90002202, 91001061 |
| Added to NRHP | February 6, 1991 |
The Red River Trails were a network of ox trails connecting the Red River Settlement in the Canadian province of Manitoba, with the head of navigation of the Mississippi River at St. Paul in the U.S. state of Minnesota. The trails went from modern Winnipeg, Manitoba to the international border and then crossed the eastern part of Dakota Territory and much of western and central Minnesota to St. Paul. For half a century between the 1820s and the early 1870s they provided the principal means of transportation between the Red River Colony and the outside world.
Background
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. While fur posts were scattered throughout the Canadian northwest and settlements of Métis fur traders and bison hunters were located in the vicinity,[1] this 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, the settlement's only accesses to outside sources of supply were two laborious water routes. The first, maintained by the Hudson's Bay Company (of which Lord Selkirk was a principal), 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.[2] The alternative was the historic route of rival North West Company's voyageurs from Montreal through the Lakes Huron and Superior, along the international border through Lake of the Woods, and then down the Winnipeg River to the Red. The distance from the Selkirk settlement to Lake Superior at Grand Portage was about 400 miles (640 km)and even further to the new post at Fort William, but Lake Superior was only the start of a lengthy journey to Montreal where furs and supplies would be transhipped to and from Europe.[3] Neither of these routes were suitable for heavy freight; the only cargo transported was that which could be carried in York boats or canoes through often shallow and rapid-strewn waterways and on men's backs over dozens of portages.
But geology provided an alternative, albeit across foreign territory. The valleys of the Red and Minnesota Rivers lay in the beds of Glacial Lake Agassiz and its prehistoric outlet the glacial River Warren; the lands exposed when these bodies of water receded were flat plains between low uplands covered by prairie grasslands. A narrow height of land only a mile (1.6 km) wide separated the Bois des Sioux River, a source stream of the Red (which flowed north to Hudson's 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). This gently graded route provided a natural thoroughfare to the south, and 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.[4]
Development
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. They 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 routes between these posts became parts of the Red River Trails.
In 1815, 1822, and 1823 cattle was 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. In the early 1820s other supplies were delivered from Prairie du Chien.[5] 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. They returned by flatboat up the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers and over the height of land to the Red River Valley, arriving back at the settlement in the summer of 1820.[6] In 1821 five dissatisfied settler families left the colony for Fort Snelling, and two years later Major Stephen B. Long was the first official U.S. representative to reach Pembina; his expedition came by way of the Minnesota and Red Rivers.[7] These early uses of the valleys of these two streams became the first of the Red River Trails.
Life on the trail
The typical carter was a Métis descended from the French voyageurs and the First Nations. His conveyance was the Red River ox cart, a simple conveyance derived either from the two-wheeled charettes used in French Canada or Scottish carts, [8] but adapted from 1801 on to use only local materials.[9] It contained no iron at all, being entirely contructed 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 is 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.[10] Motive power for the carts was originally supplied by horses obtained from the First Nations. After cattle were brought to the colony in the 1820s oxen were used, preferred because their cloven hooves would spread their weight in swampy areas.[11]
The cart, constructed of native materials, could easily be repaired. A supply of shaganapi and wood was brought; a cart could break a half-dozen axles in a one-way trip.[12]
The axles were ungreased, as dust would act as sandpaper and immobilize the cart.[13] 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."[14] The noise was audible for miles. The carts were completely unsprung, and transmitted the shock of each hump or hollow of the unimproved trail to any occupant who chose to ride.
End of the trails
Some ox cart trains at times did not go all the way through, but were supplemented by river craft. Shallow-draft steamboats ascended the Minnesota River, and weekly service on the Mississippi above the Falls of St. Anthony to Sauk Rapids began in 1851. In 1859 steamboat machinery was carried over the trail and a boat was built to accommodate it, but service was intermittent and the Dakota War of 1862 and the U.S. Civil War inhibited further improvements.
After the Civil War railways came to the region. A branch of the St. Paul and Pacific Railway reached St. Cloud in 1866, and its mainline 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 the flatboats and revived steamboat service carried the traffic the rest of way to and from Canada.[15] The ox cart trains were replaced by trains drawn by steam, and the trails reverted to nature.[16]
Significance
The Red River Trails and the colony which it served were established in a time of Anglo-American tension and uncertainty over the location of the border. 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. The continued British presence in the northwestern fur posts on soil which the Unites States claimed, 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.[17]
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. 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.[18] 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.[19] Not until completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 did Manitoba and the Northwest finally have reliable and efficient access to eastern Canada by a route located entirely on Canadian soil.[20]
Now, with the border firmly established and peaceful, a well-established 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 corridor once occupied by these long-gone trails continues to be employed for their historic commercial uses.
References
Notes
- ^ Bryce, The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists, pp. 27-29.
- ^ Bryce, The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists, p. 78.
- ^ Bryce, The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists, p. 96.
- ^ Gilman, Red River Trails, pp. 7-8. The Hudson's Bay Company's charter gave it a monopoly on trade in the area.
- ^ Gilman, Red River Trails, pp. 2, 4.
- ^ Bryce, The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists, pp. 156-58.
- ^ Gilman, Red River Trails, p. 6.
- ^ Gilman, Red River Trails, p. 5; Berton, The Impossible Railway, p.25.
- ^ Piehl, A Few Thoughts About Red River Carts.
- ^ Fonseca, On the St. Paul Trail in the Sixties.
- ^ Piehl, A Few Thoughts About Red River Carts.
- ^ Piehl, A Few Thoughts About Red River Carts.
- ^ Piehl, A Few Thoughts About Red River Carts; Berton, The Impossible Railway, p. 25.
- ^ Berton, The Impossible Railway, p. 25.
- ^ Hess, Minnesota Red River Trails, p. E-6.
- ^ Gilman, Red River Trails, pp. 21-26.
- ^ Lass, Minnesota's Boundary with Canada, pp. 32-33, 72-73. The 49th parallel was established as the border in 1818, extinguishing old British claims to the Red River valley, part of the watershed of Hudson's Bay and therefore part of Rupert's Land within the Hudson's Bay Company's 1670 charter. Major Stephen Long's expedition to Pembina located the 49th parallel border and was an assertion of U.S. control. Nute, Rainy River Country, pp. 27-28.
- ^ Berton, The Impossible Railway, pp. 14-18, 20, 25, 497-98.
- ^ Lass, Minnesota's Boundary with Canada, p. 72; see also Gilman, The Red River Trails, p. 25.
- ^ Upon assimilation of the North West Company in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company abandoned use of the former concern's border route in favor of the route to York Factory, which was cheaper to operate and allowed single-season shipments to and from Europe. In 1858 the company gave up use of the York Factory route and used the Red River Trails instead. In 1870 the Dawson Route was established along the line of the old voyageur's route from Fort William, Ontario, but was much inferior to the Red River routing. See Berton, The Impossible Railway, pp. 35-38; Morrison, Dawson Road.
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