Les Grandes Fourches: Where Two Rivers Made a City

Stand at the confluence of the Red River of the North and the Red Lake River and you are standing at one of the oldest crossroads on the northern Great Plains. The Ojibwe called the fork a meeting place long before Europeans arrived, using its rivers as highways between the Great Lakes and the vast grasslands to the west. French Canadian fur traders reached here in the seventeen hundreds, calling the spot Les Grandes Fourches, the Great Forks, because both rivers were wide and navigable and the junction was impossible to miss from a canoe.

The North West Company established a trading post here around eighteen hundred, and the Hudson's Bay Company followed. Métis bison hunters, those people of mixed Ojibwe and French-Canadian descent who defined the northern prairie economy, wintered near the confluence, selling pemmican and robes to the trade houses. For nearly a century this was not a town but a hub, a place where kinship networks and commerce converged on frozen rivers in January.

American settlement arrived in force only after the Red River Ox Cart Trail was surveyed and a railroad reached the area in the eighteen eighties. A townsite was platted on the North Dakota side in eighteen seventy-five, and East Grand Forks incorporated on the Minnesota bank. By eighteen ninety Grand Forks alone had nearly five thousand residents, with East Grand Forks adding more across the river, fed by Red River Valley wheat that was rapidly becoming some of the most productive farmland on earth. The Red River Valley is extraordinarily flat because you are standing on the floor of glacial Lake Agassiz, an inland sea that covered most of Manitoba and the eastern Dakotas until it drained roughly ten thousand years ago. That flat lakebed, with its deep, dark lacustrine clay, is why North Dakota wheat made fortunes here, and why a flood in nineteen ninety-seven would become a catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale.