A Community Forms

A Community Forms. Main Street, Crow Wing — Self-Guiding Trail. , Crow Wing grew slowly in the decades following its beginnings as a fur trade location. The fledgling community received a boost in the fall of 1844, when a segment of the Red River Oxcart Trail system was established through Minnesota's forest region. The new trail was blazed in an effort to transport goods between Winnipeg and St. Paul through Ojibwe territory rather than the original prairie-edge route through lands inhabited by the Dakota, who were at odds with the Metis cart drivers. Less than a year later, a train of 80 carts stopped for supplies and lodging. Crow Wing became the principal supply station on the route., In 1848 Henry Rice negotiated with Ojibwe leader Hole-in-the-Day II for rights to cut pine on tribal land. They settled on a payment of trade goods and 50 cents a tree, and logging became a new mainstay of the town's economy. By 1850 Fort Ripley was established across the river, a crossing ferry was in operation, stagecoaches ran regularly between Crow Wing and St. Paul, and the town had become the principal supply depot for area Ojibwe trading posts., The census of 1849 lists 174 permanent residents at Crow Wing. In 1860 the census count was 2969. Less formal accounts suggest the permanent and temporary population at its zenith, in the 1860s, exceeded 600. With many stores, hotels, saloons, warehouses and three churches, it had become the largest town of the region and began to gain fame as a frontier outpost of American Civilization., Trader Clement Beaulieu, who was of French and Ojibwe descent, received 80 acres of land as payment from the treaty of 1866. He claimed his acreage right in Crow Wing and in 1856 filed this plat for the town. He immediately began selling lots to villagers and land speculators.