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 on the Mississippi River in the United States. These trade routes ran from the location of present-day Winnipeg in the Canadian province of Manitoba across the Canada–United States border, and thence by a variety of routes through what is now the eastern part of the Dakotas and across western and central Minnesota to Mendota and Saint Paul, Minnesota 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began to use the trails by the 1820s, with the heaviest use from the 1840s to the early 1870s, when they were superseded by railways. Until then, these cartways provided the most efficient means of transportation between the isolated Red River Colony and the outside world. They gave the Selkirk colonists and their neighbours, the 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 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 ox carts that once travelled the 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. Hold cursor over waypoints to display settlements; click to go to article. 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.This settlement had a number of names over the years, including the "Selkirk Colony" or "Selkirk Settlement" and later "Fort Garry". The latter name was current during most of the period covered by this article. Although fur posts were scattered throughout the Canadian northwest, and settlements of fur traders and bison hunters were located in the vicinity of Selkirk's establishment,Bryce (1909), pp. 27–29. 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 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 (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, from salt water to the Assiniboine.Bryce, in The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists (1909), states this figure at page 78. Eric Morse however gives the distance from York Factory to Winnipeg via Norway House as a total of . Morse (1969), p. 20. 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.Morse (1961), pp. 71–75In 1803 Fort William had replaced Grand Portage as the Lake Superior anchor of this route for freight, but the Grand Portage route continued to be used for express canoes. 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.Bryce, The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists (1909), p. 96.
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.Morse (1969), pp. 1–14Waters (1977), p. 124Nute (1941), pp. 20–24Gilman (1979), p. 1
But geology also provided an alternate route, albeit across foreign territory.Morse (1961), pp. 27–32 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).Ojakangas (2009), pp. 223–25, 230–31; Sansome (1983), pp. 174–81 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.Gilman (1979), pp. 7–8. Although founded as an agricultural colony, the Selkirk settlement's neighbours were fur traders, and many of the colonists also turned to that more lucrative endeavour. The sole legal outlet for their fur, and for that matter the sole legal source of supply, was the Hudson's Bay Company, the charter of which gave it a monopoly on trade. Kelsey (1951), pp. 136–139.
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.Gilman (1979), pp. 2–3. The paths between these posts became parts of the first of the Red River Trails.Huck (2002), pp. 200–03.
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.Gilman (1979), pp. 2, 4. 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.Christianson (1935), p. 114. 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.Bryce (1909), pp. 156–58; Kelsey (1951), pp. 102–03. 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.Gilman (1979), p. 6. 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.Gilman (1979), pp. 5, 43. 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.Gilman (1979), pp. 5, 7.
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.Gilman (1979), pp. 27–33; Huck (2002), p. 201. 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.Gilman (1979), pp. 34–38. 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.Hess, (1989), p. E–3; Gilman, Red River Trails (1979), p. 38.
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.Gilman (1979), p. 41. 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,There was a fur post on the west side of Big Stone Lake, in what now is Roberts County, South Dakota. Gilman (1979), pp. 45 (map); 46–47. 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.Gilman (1979), pp. 44–47.
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.Gilman (1979), pp. 43–50. 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.Norman Kittson preferred to transship to keelboats at Traverse des Sioux, and keep his carters away from the diversions and temptations of the tiny settlement which was to grow into Saint Paul. Gilman (1979), p. 12. 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.Gilman, (1979), pp. 43–47. From there furs were shipped down the Mississippi River to Saint Louis and other markets.