Red River Trails

Vorlage:Infobox nrhp The Red River Trails were a network of ox trails connecting the Red River Settlement at what is now Winnipeg 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. In addition to Manitoba and Minnesota, they also crossed the eastern part of the Dakotas. For fifty years, between the 1820s and the early 1870s, the trails provided the only means of land 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, this colony was the only agricultural settlement between Upper Canada and the Pacific Ocean. Isolated 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. The alternative was the historic route of rival North West Company's voyageurs from Montreal through the Lakes Huron and Superior then along the international border through Lake of the Woods. 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 shallow and rapid-strewn waterways and on men's backs over dozens of portages. Consequently the eyes of the colonists turned to the new United States to the south, both as a source of supplies and an (illegal) outlet for their furs.

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. 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. 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. The valleys of these two streams held the first of the Red River trails.

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 railway building was accelerated. 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. The ox cart trains were replaced by trains drawn by steam, and the trails reverted to nature.

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 Red River Settlement and the trails had political effects which may have been 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 those interests.

Later on, the economic dependence of the Selkirk settlements and the Canadian northwest on the Red River trade routes 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 area relied on the Red River Trails and its successor steamboat and rail lines as an outlet for its products and a source of its supplies. 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. Not until completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 did Manitoba and the Northwest finally have a reliable and efficient access to eastern Canada located entirely on Canadian soil.

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

Sources

Books

• Pierre Berton: The Impossible Railway. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, ISBN 0-3944-6569-5. 
• Rhoda R. Gilman, Carolyn Gilman & Deborah M. Stultz: The Red River Trails. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul 1979, ISBN 0-8735-1133-6. 
• William E. Lass: Minnesota’s Boundary with Canada. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul 1980, ISBN 0-8735-1153-0. 
• Eric W. Morse: Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada / Then and Now. NorthWord Press, Inc., Minocqua, WI 1969, ISBN 1-5597-1045-4. 
• Grace Lee Nute: Rainy River Country. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul 1950, ISBN. 

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Web

• George Bryce: The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk’s Colonists. In: eBook #17358. Project Gutenberg, 1909, abgerufen am 28. April 2009. 
• A Few Thoughts About Red River Carts. Clay County Historical Society, 2001, abgerufen am 28. April 2009. 
• Rick Killion: Historic Trade Corridors: Vital Links Follow Nature's Bounty. Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, University of North Dakota, Dezember 2004, abgerufen am 28. April 2009. 
• William G. Fonseca: On the St. Paul Trail in the Sixties. In: MHS Transactions. Manitoba Historical Society, 25, abgerufen am 28. April 2009. 
• Jeffrey A. Hess, Minnesota Historical Society: Minnesota Red River Trails. In: N.H.R.P. Multiple Property Documentation Form and Continuation Sheets. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Juli 1989, abgerufen am 28. April 2009.