| Summary: | bank of the Goose. He cut trees, built a cabin and squatted on the land. Mr. Traill made Weston's acquaintance and placed him in temporary charge of the post at Georgetown. The reason Mr. Traill decided that Frog Point should be the head of navigation on the Red River was because the lower bank there was a natural levee, convenient for freight handling from steamboat to wagon and vice versa. He squatted on a claim consisting of 159.90 acres, legally described as Lot 1 in Section 23, Lots 1, 2 and 3 and west one-half of the Northeast Quarter of Section 22, all in what is now Belmont Township, Traill County. On a journey to Alexandria he took out naturalization papers and became an American citizen. He advanced money for a special land survey and became the first recorded land owner in Traill County. He quickly built warehouses and a hotel and was appointed the first postmaster in the county. He selected Howard Morgan, a fellow Hudson's Bay Company employee, as junior clerk at Frog Point and manager of the hotel. For a time Frog Point was the metropolis of the Red River. It had been settled by Scotch, Irish and English from Canada who left there during the troubles with the rebels. It had the usual business of a frontier town and a transportation industry of major importance. Hundreds of teamsters engaged in freighting congregated there, and together with the flatboat men, hunters, trappers and traders kept the saloon busy and there are tales of great revelry. Hudson's Bay Company in 1871 decided to establish a post above the rapids and named it Goose River (now Caledonia.) Traill quickly built docks, warehouses and a hotel and placed Asa Sargeant in charge of the settlement. Business boomed from the steamboat and stage coach trade and from service to a stream of pioneers settling along the Red and Goose Rivers. The company built a dam on the Goose, erected a fifty barrel water powered grist mill, the first in the state, and Goose River became an important grain center. The second post office in Traill County was established at Goose River April 22, 1872 with Asa Sargeant as postmaster. As early as 1853 official mail service had been established between St. Paul and Pambina. The lone carrier was usually a Metis who was acquainted with the cart trails and his trips were made once a month on horseback in summer and dog team in the winter. Many country postoffice mail drops were established in strategic settlements in the county during the middle 1870s. They were located in homesteaders' cabins where a box would be placed in which to deposit the settlement's mail. Letters were few in number and delivery to the cabins was quite irregular in summer and very irregular in winter. Mail was brought from the nearest boat or coach station on the Red River by a carrier on horseback when one was available. In order of establishment the first country post office was perhaps at the Arnold homestead near Mayville and then at Little Fork, Bloomfield, Fork and Hartland in 1879. With arrival of the railroad all country mail drops were discontinued and postoffices were established at the townsites along the railroad. The year 1875 was disastrous for Frog Point. Because of changes in the government of Canada, Hudson's Bay Company was deprived of its governing rights and its charter declared void. The company prepared to close its trading posts in the United States. Mr. Traill was placed in charge of liquidation and finished his work in 1876. He sold the Hudson's Bay Company store and hotel at Frog Point to Robert Ray. Caledonia, instead of Frog Point, had been Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
|
|---|