[soft music] The story of the Red River carts starts with the beaver.

Unfortunately the pelt makes a fine hat and beaver hats were very popular in Europe for nearly 300 years.

Overhunting led to the near extinction of the Eurasian beaver.

The French colonized eastern Canada calling it New France where beaver were abundant.

However demand was so great that soon the number of beavers in New France were depleted.

Two Frenchmen, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Medard des Groseilliers, learned from the Cree Indians that the beaver were plentiful to the northwest.

They asked the governor of New France for permission to set up a trading post on Hudson's Bay.

The governor refused because it would shift the center of fur trade away from Montreal.

In 1659, Radisson and Groseilliers ventured to the northwest.

They returned a year later with many fine furs but they were quickly arrested by French authorities.

They were fined and their furs confiscated.

In 1665 they traveled to England where they met with Prince Rupert, cousin to King Charles II.

Charles supported their enterprise and chartered what we now know as the Hudson's Bay Company.

On May 2, 1670 the Hudson's Bay Company was granted monopoly control over all the region drained by all the rivers and streams which flowed into Hudson's Bay.

This area was named Rupert's Land.

The watershed of Hudson's Bay is nearly a million and a half square miles, nearly a third of what is now Canada and parts of what is now the United States.

The company established trading posts on the shore of Hudson's Bay between 1668 and 1717.

The company would import consumer goods, sell the products at the trading post and ship the pelts back to Europe.

At the time moving goods and furs on ships was the fastest and most economical.

The alternative was via canoe to Lake Superior or Lake Michigan.

Carolyn Gilman is one of the authors of Red River Trails, oxcart routes between St Paul and the Selkirk settlement 1820 to 1870.

The Red River Trails were a set of overland trails that were used by oxcarts in between the Red River settlement, which was around present day Winnipeg, and the frontier town of St Paul, which was then the head of navigation on the Mississippi River and they were used as early as the 1820s but really their heyday as a commercial route was the 1840s through the 1860s.

And there wasn't just one Red River Trail, that's a common misconception, there were three major routes and then there was a whole series of connecting routes and it was like a web work, it was a spider web of roots that they used traveling south through Minnesota and North Dakota and then across Minnesota to the Mississippi River.

And what makes them interesting to me as a historian of the frontier and of movement on the frontier is that when you think about trails in the American frontier you think of things like the Wilderness Trail or the Oregon Trail and those were trails that were pioneered by American migrants moving West, they were to transport people into the land for settlement.

The Red River Trails were a complete opposite.

They were trails that were pioneered by the Indigenous people living up near Winnipeg reaching out to find markets for their products and to buy the manufactured goods of the industrial world.

So they ran north to south and west to east instead of the other way around so they kind of turn around our whole concept of frontier trails.

Superimposed in the early part of the 19th century a kind of colonial scheme called the Selkirk settlement.

It was the brainchild of the Earl of Selkirk who wanted to alleviate suffering in the Scottish Highlands by importing impoverished Scots into the United States and giving them new land to live on and one of the places that he chose was the Red River Valley.

Now unfortunately it didn't work out the way he envisioned because he ended up not actually getting many takers among the Scots and so he ended up importing a lot of Swiss and German farmers who took one look at Manitoba and decided this was not for them and promptly moved south to the Mississippi Valley.

A few of them stayed and so that this Swiss culture and German culture was superimposed on the Metis culture and the British, Scotch and French culture that had already been there.

So it was a totally polyglot settlement, quite varied.

The Metis are a recognized Indigenous community in Canada and the United States whose distinct culture and language emerged after early intermarriage between First Nation peoples and early European settlers, primarily French trappers.

The Metis part of the settlement were very unique because they were independent to the backbone.

They called themselves gens libre which means free man and that was in contrast to the engageais or the hired hands of the Hudson's Bay Company.

They considered themselves sprung from the land.

They disdained boundaries, they disdained nations and limits, they didn't see themselves as the subjects of any particular nation, whether a Native nation or a European nation and they didn't see themselves as employees of any particular company.

In 1869 they coalesced around their shared identity as Metis people in order to form a political resistance to Canadian incursions into western Canada.

They resisted Canadian takeover and insisted on their rights and it was a successful political resistance.

They ended up getting representation in the Canadian Parliament.

So that gives you a sense of how very independent and how well organized they were.

We met with Armand Jerome of Jerome Cartworks in Steinbeck, Manitoba where he was attending a celebration of Mennonite culture.

He has been building Red River carts for many years.

What is a Metis?

A Metis is a culture that blends European culture with Native culture.

You join those two cultures now you have a part of each so you have the knowledge of the Europeans and the knowledge of the First Nations, very important at a time when it was still wild, the area was still wild.

And so they were able through their European knowledge and some of the tools that they got from or brought along with them to create the Red River carts, a vehicle that wouldn't have been possible before that, so it was the Metis basically that opened up the west and then opened up a whole new industry.

There was basically no one else that could do it.

No one knew the land better than them, no one knew the natives like they did, the First Nation, because they were part of it.

They were uniquely positioned to just take up the trade.

They had already adopted the oxcart, which was superior to water traffic.

You could carry far more and you could travel in a straight line, something Alexander Henry the Younger says.

They employed the carts right away because well, you know, you can go a mile in a straight line which is three or four miles by river so it's just more efficient.

The Metis had been using them from the beginning.

They were the ones who were building them so they had the means when the demand for freight between the Red River colony Winnipeg and St Paul picked up.

So, yeah, right place, right time, right conditions for them to enter that trade.

The other thing I find interesting about them is that they didn't just connect two points in space, they connected two cultures.

There was the Metis culture of the Red River settlement and then there was the culture of American expansionism down around St Paul in the Mississippi Valley.

So I look at them often from that perspective that this is a cultural story.

And I guess the next question you would ask was okay what were the cultures like?

And we're pretty familiar with the culture of the American frontier around St Paul but what was the Red River settlement like?

The crucial people in the Red River settlement were the Metis people and Metis means mixed in French and that was a beautiful word to use because they were mixed people.

They were mixed in terms of race, they were mixed in terms of language and in terms of culture.

On their mother's side they were primarily Ojibwe, Cree and Assiniboine.

On their father's side they were primarily French, Scottish and British.

But they didn't identify with either the European or the Indian culture entirely, they formed a new identity that they considered unique to themselves.

Now in Mexico there was a unique category of people, unique ethnicity, the Mestizo and in Canada there was the Metis but in the United States there wasn't any room for an independent group of people that were mixed race.

That's because the United States had a very odd and kind of racialized attitude toward intermarriage.

So they didn't recognize the Metis as a separate group of people or as a separate culture.

But in Canada the Metis were free to be what they were and they chose to be neither Native nor European, they were their own unique culture.

They actually had a rather elite, you know, role within the fur trade community because they were the cultural brokers, they were the translators and the people and the Europeans who came to trade with them.

They were often the interpreters in treaty situations, so they could translate not only the languages but they could translate the cultures and why people were saying what they were saying.

Prince Rupert formed the Hudson's Bay Company in order to exploit this land and 200 years later it was still in charge of Manitoba and of all the land draining into Hudson's Bay.

In the 1700s and very early 1800s it had had some competition in the form of a Montreal company called the Northwest Company but in 1821 those two companies merged and that left all of western Canada in the hands of one giant monopoly.

The monopoly of course wanted to protect its markets, they wanted to assert their authority and make sure that nobody else muscled in on their commercial territory and so they wanted the Metis to trade only with them but from the Metis point of view the situation was not nearly so clear-cut.

Their options were they could go 600 miles north to Hudson Bay and take their furs and their buffalo robes with them and buy whatever the Hudson's Bay Company was willing to send in on one ship a year that they would send to Hudson's Bay or they could go 400 miles south to St Paul where there was a frontier town where they could also sell their furs and their robes and products.

If they went north they faced monopoly pricing and they didn't get much choice as to what they had to buy.

If they went south they had a free market, there was competition, the prices were better, they could bargain and the Americans were eager to sell them just about anything their hearts desired.

If they went north it was legal, if they went south it was smuggling and the Hudson's Bay Company tried quite a few different ways of preventing them from smuggling.

At one point they got Britain to send 350 Red Coats to police the Red River settlement and prevent people from taking the furs and the robes across the border to the Americans, but that didn't work out very well because the soldiers wanted some of the products of the civilized world and so they were a market also for the American traders who competed with the Hudson's Bay Company.

They also tried to bring some of the smugglers to trial, which they did, and they convicted these smugglers but the problem was that their jury was all Metis people and the jury refused to exact any penalty.

They reached a guilty verdict, that was obvious, but they said oh well they shouldn't be punished for this act of smuggling and so the Hudson's Bay Company couldn't enforce the law and as you know as a result the Metis considered the trade to be free at that point and eventually the Hudson's Bay Company itself gave up and gave in and decided to start using the trails themselves.

By the 1860s the major importer along the trails was the Hudson's Bay Company itself.

The Metis were the long-haul truckers of the trade in this area.

But when you're talking about the bison hunting, because the carts participated in both, so twice a year the Metis would meet here in Pembina or over at St Joseph and then range out west to hunt bison and they would bring their carts with them, load up their meat and their fur, come back here where they would then sell that product to the Hudson's Bay Company and then often times they might join an ox cart train carrying the stuff that they just sold to market to then buy their own stuff and bring it back.

So the trails weren't maintained as such.

The trails were just the trail, it's the route you followed.

So often times you wouldn't be on the exact same road each year, you would find the most passable spot.

The trail was more of just a general like go that way through the woods and you can avoid the Dakota, go that way along the ridge and you're up out of the mosquitoes, just follow straight down the river and you have a nice flat road sort of deal, but you you wouldn't be on the like there are ruts and there were sections of the trail that became very common but overall you would just find the most passable route year over year so it wasn't always the exact same road.

And then as for the question of ownership I mean that was an open question at the time because you had American imperialism pushing west, it was ostensibly American territory but it was occupied.

The Woods Trail, that was Ojibwe territory, that was their home.

The Ridge Trail was at least once you start getting further south that's Dakota territory, that's their home.

In fact The Woods Trail was picked up because the Ridge Trail was becoming dangerous due to Dakota attack.

The Metis being predominantly descended from the Ojibwe had family connections going through the woods so they did make claims to ownership in a number of treaty negotiations that the United States did just ultimately ignore but so The Woods Trail you could partially think was owned by the Metis or at least relatives of the culture, that was their territory at the time.

But then once you get down into once you get down closer to St Paul where settlement is much heavier, I'm sure the trail crossed the land of some settler who thought it was theirs but that's where the trail goes so that's a road now.

Where do you bring your goods, you bring them to a post like an outpost or a fort.

So these forts were in different areas, that's where the product was brought to.

So the product was brought there and then there was individuals like Alexander that had connections to send this product where it was needed.

And in the earlier days there it wasn't about money, money didn't really mean anything, what it was was trade.

We're talking when we talked about the fur trade it was trading furs for things that they could use: knives, axes, guns, ammunition.

The same thing goes with the buffalo hunt, it was trading for goods that they needed: food supplies, axes.

Then as the years went by then now we're talking more of a commerce type thing but in the earlier days it was a trade, it was trading goods for something that benefited you.

A dollar bill didn't mean anything to you but flour and salt did.

The trading posts were like the Walmarts of their day.

They had all sorts of consumer goods.

I mean the usual consumables tobacco and alcohol would have been available and that was a high demand item, but even your fabric, beads, dinnerware, tools, whatever sort of things you would need, they would buy.

They would be buying from the traders if not in St Paul and then hauling it up themselves.

Many people call these ox carts and I'm not saying that they're wrong.

I call it a Red River cart and it's well known as a Red River cart because it had its beginnings in Red River.

But if you look at even on if you went on Google and you looked at pictures from the 1800s, we'll say 1880 even earlier than that, you'll see that not only did they have ox, sometimes they had the longhorn ox pulling loads.

But you'll also see in other things they have horses and they have mules.

So I've been doing these kind of wagon trains at the Red River cart for 20 some years and in that time I also had the opportunity to experiment with different animals and we did use ox from time to time.

We couldn't use them all the time because when we plan these heritage journeys we have to make it from point A to point B within a certain length of time and we call the ox, belonging to the ox union, meaning you're not necessarily making it to point B at that allotted time because if he wants to go one mile an hour he's going 1 mile an hour, if he's going to go a half a mile an hour he's going to go a half a mile an hour, or if he wants to lay down that's what he's going to do.

Where a horse can go up to 6 mph.

So doing these journeys then I learned the fact that okay now I can understand why they used horses at times if you wanted speed and you didn't have the real heavy loads.

And also a layout of the land would be important.

There are areas in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Montana that are very hilly so if you're carrying 1,000 lbs loads and you're going up hills well you would be better off to take a longer time and use ox because of their power, but if you were say freighting to St Paul and you want to go at a quicker pace or wherever you were freighting to then you're going to use a horse and that's because the horse can travel like five times faster, you'll get there a lot quicker and then your journey is a lot quicker and your funds coming in are quicker.

And mules were also used because mules can have the speed of a horse and they also have power, they got tremendous pulling power, so they also use mules.

So, I call it a Red River cart because they've used different animals on it for different reasons.

The first mention of a cart in the record is here in Pembina in Alexander Henry the Younger's journal in 1801.

They build Henry describes a smaller cart than this built with a wheel that's just a cut section of a log.

But by the next year Henry's talking about his carpenter who he leaves unnamed regrettably building much nicer carts modeled after resembling carts that are being used by the French in Quebec.

So, but I mean, whatever you choose, the story really starts around the end of the 18th century beginning of the 19th century and it is centered here in the Red River Valley with the fur trade.

So the history of the Red River cart actually begins before the first Red River cart.

It actually begins at the time we'll call it, we'll say the fur trade.

Now the fur trade basically they just needed canoes and they needed to travel along the waterways of the watershed of the Hudson Bay, all the tributaries, the rivers in the area because the fur trade it was a big business for beaver pelts in Europe, for hats and clothing, whatever, and so that was the big thing and the Red River cart at the time was not really that important at that particular time, we're talking when they were able to just transport goods mostly along rivers and there was no problem there.

But then as time went on now it got to the point where the fur trade was starting to die out.

Now the product, the beaver pelts, were no longer as important now, and the Metis, the people that lived in the Red River area basically they had settled in and they did a little bit of farming, a little bit, but they needed also to expand their incomes and basically they needed a vehicle so that they could not just transport their families but they needed to transport goods and at the time there was buffalo hunts on maybe horseback and that but they needed a way to transport some of this product and at that time, remember the very first Red River cart was in 1801 recorded by Alexander Henry the Younger, and that first Red River cart was basically just a little vehicle with these two logs cut to make wheels with an axle.

Now it served the purpose okay for just local but it did not serve the purpose of going any distances so the buffalo hunts were out of the question.

Really it could transport some goods locally, but that was as far as it got.

So it came into this evolving of the Red River cart trying to find this vehicle that they could actually build in the area, use all the common normal woods in that area that they could build it and repair it.

From there the Metis progressed and must have done the same thing that I did when I started building carts, you try a certain technique and then if that don't work you try something different and then you just keep evolving.

And then the cart evolved into the vehicle very much like what you see here now where they were able to build it no screws, no metal parts, everything could be maintained.

If you broke an axle you could actually make one very quickly overnight and then put it on and use it the next day and then so these vehicles were basically that started the new business of the buffalo hunts and then that opened up a whole new world for the Metis.

It was a big industry going on the buffalo hunts in times over a 1,000 carts eventually and then you had every part of the buffalo was used.

You used the hides, you used all kinds of the organs and then unfortunately, even in the end when the buffalo hunt days were over, the carts were still used to gather the bones of the buffalo.

And you have to also remember it wasn't the Metis that exterminated all the buffalo.

Governments like even in the States had offered, they wanted to cut the Plains Indians food supply, they offered bounties on buffalo.

Even Wild Bill Hickok had been advertising come along and shoot as many as you want, and then they were just left laying on the prairies.

So then eventually there was bones all over the place, piles of bones and they were gathered up by the Metis in the later years for fertilizer and then the carts eventually came to an end once the railroad started coming through.

So the very first carts that I started making they were actually very crude.

We got plans, diagrams.

Tried to follow these diagrams but even the diagrams were wrong.

So when we put these carts together we also had some older gentlemen that made sort of carts but they didn't know if they would work, they were for display.

Making a cart for display, making a cart that's going to be used on a journey are two different things and so the very first carts were breaking down.

One, in particular one day we were experimenting with them well two carts broke down within a space of 3 hours.

So now we were starting to regret saying we were going to do this south journey but we just kept working at it and experimenting with it and made a kind of a crude type of Red River cart that looked good but didn't function great but it functioned good enough that we'd piece these carts together in the evenings so that it could make one more day and one more day and one more day and that's how it all started.

And then since then through trial and error and much research I've learned to make Red River carts that are basically the same as the original ones they used and ones like this one.

This one I have no doubt would last for hundreds of miles without any problem.

You're talking about the height of the wheels, we also have to think about the dish shape, if you notice the wheels are dished, very important.

Now I had heard originally when I first started building carts oh that so the mud could fall off the wheel rims when you go through mud and whatever it would never collect.

That is actually the least of the problem.

The big problem you're going across the prairies, you got 1,000 lbs in the cart and it's very hilly and you can't always be in a level spot and you could maybe go one way or the other way.

Now if your wheels were straight, remember these wheels are made wood on wood no metal parts, now that's a strain on your spokes and your wheel if you've got 1,000 lbs and you're going alongside a hill, you can lose stability on your wheel, you could crack your spokes.

Folks with the dish, I've experimented going alongside hills at certain angles, and I found that the stability of the cart was unbelievable.

So what it does in a superficial way widens your body because of the dish itself.

I also found out that if you want to make your wheels dished also the axles are cone shaped but the first cone-shaped axles that we made, so the axle is cone shaped, the inside of the hub is cone shaped but if you do that which in these plans I found that the wheels were wearing out on the inside, so the wheels were more like a little wagon wheel, you know, that doesn't fit together properly and so it was through more research I discovered there's memoirs where say that the axle has to be flat on the bottom of them now why that is I wasn't sure but okay let me try it.

So I made axles that were cone shaped, just tapered from the top and the two sides and leave the bottom flat.

Now that was very important because now you put the wheels on and the wheels are running true.

The flat parts of the wheel are running flat on the ground so what it does it alters the way your wheel will sit on the axle to make them run true.

One of the main things are these corner supports.

I've seen people make carts that just have spindles in the baskets which they would use either birch or willow but it's far too weak.

If you have 1,000 lbs of buffalo hides and buffalo meat in your cart and you're going alongside a hill.

If you only had the spindles your basket would break and you would lose your load at the bottom of the hill.

These were very important, they were anchored to these heavy duty bolsters we call them front and back that serve dual purpose.

They hold the floorboards down, they give you your spread on your shafts, and they are heavy duty.

They become anchors for your corner support, something heavy duty that it's like a tree with deep roots, otherwise the tree would fall over.

So this serves the purpose of keeping these corner supports solid and strong.

You have one in each corner, they probably used babiche, we've used rope cuz we're always doing displays and it's wrapped together.

This basket is extremely strong, I can't imagine the weight it would require to break that basket off that body.

So that's one of the things that I discovered and that and actually you can see in pictures from circa 1880 these Red River carts have these heavy duty corner supports tied in with your basket and that was very important.

Seasoned oak axle is very hard and it'd be almost like metal anyways, and so what we would do is we burn them, the wood, to give a bit of a charcoal lubricant and also toughen it up a bit and we had no problems with axles wearing on that whole journey.

I actually experimented using grease one time and I thought what is going to cause it to wear out so bad just going down certain trails in the sand or down a road then I found out that it's just the wind even blowing the dust in the fields collecting and then it's making a fine, fine grinding like sandpaper that does grind away the axle.

So experiment and learn, trial and error.

This cart is made out of oak and I've experimented with different woods.

I've experimented with ash which is a hardwood and I do make my shafts out of ash because ash can be very straight and it's flexible type strong wood.

You could make them out of oak too but I prefer actually ash shafts through experience.

But I have used oak but most of the cart is oak and the reason for that is I experimented with poplar which is considered a hardwood but it's just not strong enough to endure the stresses of loads on the prairie and ash it's very hard but brittle.

I find that oak is the same strength as ash but it also is more forgivable under certain harsh conditions.

So you're talking about the Red River cart being made in the Red River area, indigenous to Red River, all these woods are available in quantity.

There's oak all over the place and there's ash all over the place.

One thing that isn't available so much anymore are the hubs, the hubs are made out of elm.

Now I get elm when I can but over the years the Dutch elm disease has wiped out most of the population of elm and I can only get it the odd time if somebody cuts down an elm tree so I'll make it out of ash you know but I prefer the elm.

Now anybody that's ever split wood will know the difference between an elm block of wood of elm and a block of wood of birch or block of wood of oak that's seasoned.

You can split the oak, you can split the birch, can split the ash when it's seasoned actually quite easily with a splitter axe.

I ask you to split an elm hub with a splitter axe on the first stroke or the second stroke or the fourth one, it is a stringy type wood that is much like fiberglass so it prevents cracking at every turn and eventually only when it gets old and you know that it will eventually split but otherwise elm was the perfect wood for a hub that didn't have metal bands on it.

Later on when the metal became available and when you were able to band your wheels okay now you can use ash as freely as you want, oak as freely as you want but at the first you had to use elm or else suffer your hubs cracking in half on dry, dry, dry days.

The sound of the squealing axles was legendary, they say you could hear it for miles, just imagine the sound of a convoy of dozens of carts made as it trundled across the prairie.

Julius Collier is quoted as saying the squeaking of the wheels could be heard in Shakopee before the carts crossed Murphy's Ferry over a mile away.

They could be smelled almost as far away, too.

From time to time there were various small companies that got organized and existed for a few years and then went out of business.

There were small entrepreneurs, sometimes the Americans the American traders would try to organize expeditions but the Metis were very accustomed to organizing expeditions because they ran yearly buffalo hunts out onto the Plains and these were very sophisticated military and civic enterprises.

They were organized into brigades and they had captains and they had leaders, everything was almost a military organization.

That was the model for the way they organized these ox cart trains to St Paul and to the south.

It wasn't just individuals going on their own.

They would gather together into large groups and organize themselves and have people who would be scouting and people who would be cooking and people who would be driving the carts.

It was a fairly dangerous thing to go south and therefore you needed a certain amount of organization.

Toward the end of the Red River Trail's life they kind of got turned around and a lot of people started moving from the south to the north along them and they saw the land completely differently than the Metis had seen it.

You know, as I said, the Metis saw it as a desert, as isolated and not at all hospitable, but the Americans saw it as land that could be exploited and so they described it very differently, as a garden, as enticing to agriculturalists.

They envisioned it all drained and plowed up and farmed and they said this is the most idyllic landscape in the world and everyone should come out here and settle it and buy more land.

So the descriptions of what the Red River Trails looked like became very different depending on who was looking at them.

These were people whose ancestors who had been Voyageurs on the inland waterways of North America and they kind of transplanted all the vocabulary of travel on the inland waterways to the prairies.

You hear the cliche about the prairie being a sea of grass, but to the Metis it was a very real sea of grass and they thought of themselves almost as mariners over this sea.

Some of the words that they used that were similar to water travel were for instance coteau, coteau is the French word for coastline and if you were in a canoe out on one of the Great Lakes you stayed close to the coastline because if the wind came and the waves rose your canoe could easily get swamped and overturned.

Well it was kind of the same on the prairie, you hugged close to the coastline, and the hills on either side of the Red River Valley were called the coteau.

Once upon a time they had been literal coastlines because they were the beaches of Glacial Lake Agassiz but in the 19th century they didn't know anything about glaciers or about glacial lakes but they could see that those rises on either side of the valley were like coasts and so they kept close to them because for one thing you could orient yourself if you kept close to the coast and you could often find wood and water near there.

Another word that they used was isles du bois, islands of wood.

Occasionally on the prairie there would be isolated stands of wood that would offer shelter and that might offer water and nice lush grass, so they would often head for the isles du bois and one thing famous one was the Bois de Sioux and the upper Red River is now called the Bois de Sioux River and that shows you where the Bois de Sioux was, that was an island of wood in a sea of grass.

Another term they used in prairie travel was portage.

In water travel by canoe the portage was the place where you would stop and have to carry your goods and your canoe from one waterway to the next.

On the prairie the portage was when you had to cross a river and then you had to unload your cart, float your cart across, float the goods across or carry them across and then reload everything on the other side.

So they call that the portage.

A section of The Woods Trail is preserved at Crow Wing State Park just south of Brainerd, Minnesota.

The carters chose to cross here because the Mississippi is sometimes shallow and the bank is fairly low.

Imagine being responsible for safely floating a half ton of valuable hides or trade goods, your ox and horse or mule, and yourself across the river.

So the wheels are dished so you take it off dish side up, underneath you'd strap them underneath the box section, wrap hides around it and what you've made is sort of a really top heavy bull boat and then you could float it across.

From what I've read it sounds like they often did this when they were unloaded just otherwise the chance of all of your merchandise getting soaked and sinking is just pretty good.

So they'd have a ferry system to move their merchandise across but the carts themselves they would just float across the river.

Now I had discovered through experimenting that the Red River cart itself, though it will float, it's not buoyant enough to keep the goods high and dry.

I experimented with crossing a river with the cart and I began to find that just my weight with the wheels tied underneath the shafts with the body on top the axle in the basket, my own weight would sink the cart below the level.

It wouldn't sink it all the way down but it would sink it so that anything that was in there would be wet.

I did more research and then I found out that they didn't actually just do that.

What they did they would cut couple of logs, you don't need that big a log, and then you would strap the wheels to the logs, one in front of the other, and then you would strap the body onto the wheels.

Now you have actually a raft and if you were really if it was really important that you needed to keep your product dry, if you had flour, salt, well then they also used hides and had it was called a waterproof stitch that they put inside the basket to keep everything in there dry.

So it was through that experience and that research that I learned the knowledge of how they cross rivers and to this day the odd time people would ask me oh well you can cross a river or you make a raft it's not as simple as that though you're on the right track but it's a little bit more complicated that you also need to make it into a raft.

They probably did some hunting if they were by a river, they probably did some fishing, and then they would eat pemmican and they, you know, and they would have brought some supplies.

They would have probably brought pork, salted pork.

They had wagons, you know, so they didn't just were just limited to pemmican, but you needed to have a source of food that wasn't going to spoil on you.

So the Metis started using making pemmican, it was like meat that was dried and with berries.

And this sort of a product was high protein, high energy type food that you could travel with.

Armies even used it where you could go and not worry about spoilage on your food you know and carrying big barrels of salt for salted pork or anything like that you're able to carry this stuff in smaller packages.

So pemmican became a very big industry with that and it's because of its uses and its sustainability.

It's a simple, simple recipe.

You start with animal fat and you know back in the old days the main source of animal fat was the buffalo and then meat.

You start with raw meat and again buffalo and then to add variety and also to add carbohydrates because up to this point it's all protein they also used dried berries and those could be blueberries, cranberries, currants, those type of things that grew naturally.

And the secret to the meat and the berries is that they're either sun dried or they're heat dried.

And I mean you really have to dry them out, get all the moisture out.

Could be any form of venison which would be deer, elk, caribou, moose.

The problem with beef is that if you think about a beef steak it's very, at least a good beef steak, is well marbled with fat and you want a very lean meat, you don't want a lot of fat in it.

And the number one reason for that is that it dries out much better without the fat.

In some indigenous areas they would add corn because some of the indigenous people grew corn and it would be in the form of cornmeal.

Other things that they would add would be some sort of a dried herb or something that would add flavor to it, but mostly it's just these three ingredients: the dried berries, the dried meat and then the fat.

So pemmican came about because the early people, both the Indigenous people and the Europeans who came after Columbus, they needed something that could last, that they could carry with them that wasn't heavy.

And if you think about the fact that if you take 5 lbs of fresh meat and you dry it out and make jerky you now have one pound of dried meat so you would really reduce the weight a lot and a lot of these people, again both Indigenous and then the later Europeans, they go on long treks into the prairie or into the southwest up into Canada doing whatever they did and they needed a steady food source.

Yes they would kill game and so on along the way but if they ran into a situation where there was no game they would have something like pemmican that they could eat and it would give them lots of nourishment.

Most people didn't care for it just raw.

In a pinch they would just bite off a chunk and eat it, but a lot of times it was used to make a stew.

So you'd break off a chunk of pemmican, throw it in a pot, add some water and then if there were wild onions or they had some potatoes or some other vegetables that were available they'd throw that in there and it would be like a beef stew.

Now that I haven't eaten that but I would think it would be fairly good because I've eaten pemmican raw and it kind of tastes to me it tastes like a piece of burnt meat, really greasy burnt meat.

The other way that they would cook it would be in a frying pan and they'd throw it in the frying pan and it would melt down and then they would maybe throw some if they had flour some flour in there or they would throw some cornmeal in there and they'd make it into kind of a mash and eat it that way, which doesn't do much for my taste buds, but I think the best way that there is to eat it is in the form of a stew.

You could kind of think of it as an early Hamburger Helper.

With the establishment of Fort Snelling at the head of navigation on the Mississippi and the end of the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly, the movement of goods between Winnipeg and St Paul thrived, but it wouldn't last long.

As the Red River colonies grew to become Winnipeg, they at last raised enough crops to export.

However the Red River carts could not carry the quantity of grain or consumer goods the market demanded.

A steamboat was now working on the Red River and the railroads were building west across Minnesota into North Dakota.

The days of the Red River carts ended rather abruptly in the early 1870s and one source said it was specifically 1871.

Their life was short but their impact on the history of Manitoba, North Dakota, and Minnesota was significant.

The growth of the cities of Winnipeg and St Paul and those in between was due in large part to the commerce driven by the Metis and carried in their wooden carts, a simple tool with enormous impact.

What started essentially as sticks tied together rolling on solid wheels cut from a log evolved into a highly crafted vehicle of commerce.

Many people have told me of the places where you can still see the ruts worn deep into the Earth by the carts and when people ask me what happened to the trails I tell them they're still there but they now go by the names of US Highway 10, US 75 and many others.

The Red River carts now go by Peterbilt and Freightliner.

The Metis are as strong and unique as ever and Armand Jerome is still building Red River carts.

Fortunately we're not eating pemmican.

Everything I've read about the Red River carts emphasizes the squeal of the wood on wood axles that you could hear for miles.

Listen, if you're still and listen closely to the wind on the prairie, you may still hear it.