| Summary: | Valley Indians photographed at Flaten Studio in 1885 to 1813 he brought his first contingents of Scottish colonists to the junction of the Assiniboine and the Red Rivers, 20 miles north of the forty- ninth parallel. The Selkirk Red River Colony had serious problems from the start: floods, famine, and attacks from rival North West trappers and traders who saw these farmers as a threat to their very existence. Other Selkirk settlers followed, however, including some Germans and Swiss, and soldiers were brought in to protect them. Some of the Selkirkers ventured so far south along the Red River that their Pembina settlement was found to be on the U.S. side of the border, and some others abandoned their Canadian colony to settle near Fort Snelling. Most important of all for the history of Moorhead, these early Canadian settlements in the Winnipeg area soon discovered that their easiest access to the outside world was up the Red River and thence across to the Mississippi. This led to the Red River ox cart trails, to steamboats on the Red River, and eventually to the land-and-water route with Moorhead as the rail-steamboat transfer point. American settlement had not developed far enough north and west to clash with Selkirk's claims of millions of acres, but British-American negotiations and treaties focused attention on American-Canadian border definition — and incidentally on the Red River Valley. When the Treaty of 1783 was drawn up, no one knew where the Mississippi River began. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the question became even more important. The Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06 was the most important answer, but for Minnesota two lesser ventures were more significant. In 1805 Lt. Zebulon Pike went up the Mississippi from St. Louis; he obtained from the Sioux the land on which Fort Snelling was built a few years later, raised the American flag and warned the British traders, and reached Cass and Leech Lakes, which he called the sources of the Mississippi River. The United States suffered setbacks in the North and West in a second war with the British in 1812, but after the Treaty of Ghent was ratified in 1815 the American government moved against British encroachment in the Red River and along the northern border of Minnesota. In 1797 Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez had established an important fur trading post at Pembina for the North West Company of Montreal traders. He may have had warning that his post was just south of the probable Canadian- American border, but any doubt was removed by the arrival of Major Stephen Long of the U.S. Army in 1823. Long, who had taught mathematics at Dartmouth, was an experienced topographical engineer. In 1817 he had selected the site for Fort Snelling, which was begun by Col. Leavenworth in 1819 and built by Col. Snelling from 1820 to 1827. In 1820 the Earl of Selkirk died, beset with problems and broken in health. In 1821 the North West Company merged with the Hudson's Bay Com pany, ending their bloody fur trade rivalry. Major Long's 1823 expedition "was virtually a circumnagigation of Minnesota." It was a learned, highly-skilled party, guided by the famous half-breed trader Joseph Renville; they moved up the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien, paused at Fort Snelling and went up the Minnesota — some travelling by canoe and others by land. In western Minnesota, when they turned northward up the Red River Valley, Long saw large herds of buffalo; at Lake Traverse his party joined a small train of two- wheeled ox carts and moved with them along the east side of the Bois de Sioux and Red Rivers to Pembina. This settlement of 350 people, white and Indian intermarried, had 60 cabins, all but one south of the forty-ninth parallel and thus American. Long's expedition, after marking the border and proclaiming American sovereignty, went on to the Winnipeg area and across to the Lake of the Woods and Lake Superior. This expedition was of major importance in the history of the region for several reasons. Theodore Blegen emphasizes the importance of the two-volume narrative of the Long expedition prepared by one of its members, William H. Keating: "This work, published in America, England, and Germany, gave the world its first accurate knowledge of some of the richest agricultural lands of the continent." Red River Trails After 1823 official maps of the northern mid-continent of North America 130 Production Credit Association of Moorhead The Radford Company Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
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