Red River Trails

The Red River Trails were a network of ox cart routes connecting the Red River Colony and Fort Garry in British North America with the head of navigation on the Mississippi River in the United States. The routes were used by both the Canadian and U.K. railways to travel between Canada and the United states. The paths are still used today, but in a much more limited way than they were in the 1800s and early 1900s.

About Red River Trails in brief

The Red River Trails were a network of ox cart routes connecting the Red River Colony 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. 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began to use the trails by the 1820s, with the heaviest use from the 1840s to the early 1870s, when they were superseded by railways. They gave the Selkirk colonists and their neighbours, the Métis people, an outlet for their furs and a source of supplies other than the Hudson’s Bay Company. 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 U.S. The trails have 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. They are now used to travel along the banks of the Red and Minnesota Rivers, and along other rivers in the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region of North America. They were also used by independent fur traders operating from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, exploited by First Nations peoples of the Minnesota River valley, otherwise occupied by the First Nations of the Big Stone River valley. The trailways are now being used by the Canadian National Railway to travel across the Canadian Shield to the west of the rugged barrier known as theCanadian Shield.

The Red River Trailways are currently being used to transport cargo along the Canadian-U.S.-Dakotas border. They will be used for the first time since the 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 in the 1960s and 1970s. They have been used since the 1970s and 1980s by Canadian and American railroads to cross the border into the United Kingdom and Mexico. The routes were used by both the Canadian and U.K. railways to travel between Canada and the United states. The paths are still used today, but in a much more limited way than they were in the 1800s and early 1900s. It is not clear whether the trails will ever be used again by railroads or if they will be replaced by buses or other forms of transport. The last time they were used was in the 1950s and 1960s, and they were the most efficient means of transportation between the isolated Red River colony and the outside world. They provided a natural thoroughfare along this gently graded route along the watercourses of the Little Red River and the Little Traverse River. They also provided a way for the colonists to get to the new United States as well as the rich fur areas along the upper Mississippi River, otherwiseoccupied by First Nation peoples of Minnesota, Des Moines, Missouri, and Missouri. The route was also used to get from Winnipeg to Fort Garry.

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