The Red River Trade

The Red River Trade. . , Although the Red River Trails served all types of travelers, they primarily carried trade between St. Paul and two major Red River communities, the Selkirk Settlement near modern-day Winnipeg, and Pembina, now part of North Dakota near the Canadian border. Furs and buffalo robes, dried meat and pemmican, livestock, and other frontier products moved southward along the trails to St. Paul, where they were exchanged for tools, cloth, molasses, whiskey, and other manufactured goods., From modest beginnings in the mid-1830s, the Red River trade grew into a highly profitable enterprise. Its success was undiminished by the fact that it was thoroughly illegal. According to English law, Canadian furs could only be sold to the British-based Hudson's Bay Company. In 1836 the English also attempted to close the Red River market to American traders by imposing a stiff tariff on imported goods. Despite these provisions, smuggling was rarely punished, and the Red River trade flourished., Painting by Paul Kane, used courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada, Red River Carts on Main Street, St. Anthony, 1855., Commerce over the trails reached full maturity in the 1850s, when Norman W. Kittson established a trading post at Pembina. Each year Kittson sent out long caravans of oxcarts, piled high with furs and other items collected over the winter. In the 1850s, after the Hudson's Bay Company abandoned its northern supply route and shipped goods inland through the U.S., trains with up to 500 carts were arriving regularly in St. Paul. The Red River trade had become an important part of the region's livelihood.