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 international border and by a variety of routes
across what is now the eastern part of North Dakota and 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superseded by railways.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 Métis 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.