Métis and the Red River Trade World

The people who shaped this valley most profoundly before statehood were neither purely Indigenous nor purely European. They were the Métis, the children of French Canadian and Scottish fur traders and their Ojibwe and Cree wives, and by the early eighteen hundreds they had built a distinct culture that spanned the entire Red River corridor from Winnipeg south through what is now North Dakota.

The Métis were extraordinary bison hunters. Twice a year, enormous organized hunts departed from the Red River settlements, sometimes numbering many hundreds of carts, the distinctive two-wheeled Red River carts made entirely of wood and buffalo hide, no metal anywhere, so they could be repaired on the open prairie. The carts' wooden axles against wooden hubs produced a shrieking sound that travelers described as a loud, violin-like squeal. Grand Forks sat squarely on the south end of this world, a waypoint on the cart trails that connected the Canadian settlements to American markets at Saint Paul.

The Métis economy ran on pemmican, the high-calorie mixture of dried bison meat, fat, and berries that provisioned the fur trade across thousands of miles. Pemmican from these hunts was traded northward through the fur trade. After the American government surveyed and sold Red River Valley land to settlers in the eighteen seventies and eighties, most Métis families were pushed north into Canada, where Louis Riel's resistance movements in eighteen seventy and eighteen eighty-five sought to secure their land rights. The cart trails they wore across the prairie are still faintly visible from the air in some sections of the valley, ghost roads of a world that disappeared in a single generation.