Red River Trails

Origins

Red River Trails between Fort Garry and Saint Paul

Not all trails shown; there were many connecting trails and alternate routes.

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In 1812, Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, started a colony of settlers in British North America where the Assiniboine River joins the Red River at the site of modern Winnipeg. Although fur posts were scattered throughout the Canadian northwest, and settlements of Métis people fur traders and bison hunters were located in the vicinity of Selkirk's establishment, 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, settlers and their Métis neighbours had access to outside markets and sources of supply only by two laborious water routes.
The first, maintained by the Hudson's Bay Company, was a sea route from Great Britain to York Factory on Hudson Bay, then up a chain of rivers and lakes to the colony, from salt water to the Assiniboine. 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 west along the international border through Lake of the Woods to Rat Portage, and then down the Winnipeg River to the Red. The distance from the Selkirk settlement to Lake Superior at Fort William was about, but Lake Superior was only the start of a lengthy journey to Montreal where furs and supplies would be transshipped to and from Europe.
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 and bogs, 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 of land separated the Bois des Sioux River, a source stream of the Red and the Little Minnesota River, a source stream of the Minnesota River. 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 outlet for their furs.

Development of the routes

The rich fur areas along the upper Mississippi, Minnesota, Des Moines, and Missouri Rivers, occupied by Indigenous peoples, were exploited by independent fur traders operating from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in the late eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 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 Red River Colony from Missouri by a route up the Des Moines River Valley to the Minnesota River, across the divide, then down the Red River to the Selkirk settlement. In 1819, following a devastating plague of locusts which left the colonists with insufficient seed to plant a crop, an expedition was sent by snowshoe to purchase seed at Prairie du Chien. It returned by flatboat up the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers and down the Red River, arriving back at the settlement in the summer of 1820. 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. 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. 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.

West Plains Trail

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. In fact, that company introduced 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 trail to be well-marked.
From the Red River Settlement, the trail 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 decade of the eighteenth century. 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 to the west. By staying on the uplands west of the Red River, this route avoided crossing the tributaries of that river near their confluences with the Red, and also kept out of the swampy, flood-prone, and mosquito-ridden bottomlands in the lakebed of Glacial Lake Agassiz which the river drained.
File:Norman Kittson c. 1856.jpg|thumb|right|upright|Fur trader and cart train operator Norman Kittson
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. 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, 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.
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, at first, usually transshipped to flatboats. 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. From there furs were shipped down the Mississippi River to Saint Louis and other markets.
Sporadic at first, trade between Fort Garry and the Mississippi became more regular 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. 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. While some of this fur traffic was shifted to other routes in 1854, the forts, missions, Indian agencies, and remaining through traffic to Fort Garry kept the trails busy, and they were improved in the 1850s and supplemented by military roads.

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 Métis carters were related by blood and marriage. These tensions led to conflicts. One such bloody confrontation in the summer of 1844 occurred when that year's expedition of free traders were in Saint Paul. This meant that they could not safely return by the normal route. 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 height of land 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. The next year, a southbound party followed its tracks, and by the year after, 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.
As the first of these names indicates, the path was partially wooded, as its southern reaches crossed the transition zone between the western prairies and eastern woodland. From Fort Garry, southbound cart trains followed the eastern edge of the Red River's Great Plains, 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.
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 Saint 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.
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. In the late 1850s, its utility was increased by improvements made by the U.S. Army, which straightened and improved the winding ox path through the woods along the Leaf and Crow Wing Rivers, and also replaced the old trail along the Mississippi River between Fort Ripley and Sauk Rapids with a military road.