The Red River Colony and the Pemmican War

The land on both sides of the border here was the center of one of the strangest conflicts in North American history: the Pemmican War. In eighteen eleven, Scottish nobleman Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, convinced the Hudson's Bay Company to grant him three hundred thousand square kilometers of the Red River Valley to settle displaced Scottish and Irish tenant farmers. The trouble was that the North West Company, the HBC's rival, ran the fur trade through the same territory, and Metis bison hunters supplied both companies with pemmican, the dried meat that powered the voyageur brigades.

When the colony's governor issued a proclamation in eighteen fourteen banning provision exports to keep food in the colony during a shortage, which the North West Company ignored, it set off years of raids, burned crops, and armed standoffs. The conflict ended only when the two rival fur companies merged in eighteen twenty-one. The eighteen eighteen treaty then set the border at the forty-ninth parallel, at exactly this latitude, and later surveys showed that part of the settlement lay on the American side.