Red River Ox Carts Photograph Collection
Collection
Identifier: Photo 432
Scope and Content
The Red River Ox Carts Photograph Collection is an artificial collection created by archives staff to hold general photographs of the Red River Ox Carts. Currently the collection holds only two photogaph, which appeart to be copy prints from originals held at the Minnesota Historical Society. One photograph shows the Ox Carts on the streets of St. Paul, and the second is of a train of ox carts out on a trail.
Dates
- 1860s
Access
The collection is open under the rules and regulations of the NDSU Archives.
Copyrights
Photographs in this collection are in public domain.
History
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 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began to use the trails by the 1820s, with the heaviest use from the 1840s to the early 1870s, when they were superseded by railways.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.
History copied from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Trails
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.
History copied from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Trails
Extent
2 Photographic Prints (2 photographic prints)
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
The Red River Ox Cart Trails were a network of trade routes connecting the Selkirk Settlement and Fort Garry with the Mississippi River in St. Paul. They were used between the 1820s and 1870s.
Provenance
Donor unknown.
Property rights
The NDSU Archives owns the property rights to this collection.
- Title
- Finding Aid to the Red River Ox Carts Photograph Collection
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the Institute for Regional Studies Repository
Contact:
West Building N
3551 7th Avenue North
Fargo North Dakota 58102 United States
ndsu.archives@ndsu.edu
West Building N
3551 7th Avenue North
Fargo North Dakota 58102 United States
ndsu.archives@ndsu.edu