Read Online The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 by Pierre Berton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Pierre Berton
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not a single white settler had yet ventured there.
To cross the North West, in the days before the railway, was a considerable feat attempted by only a hardy few. The chief form of transportation was by Red River cart, “scrub oak shaganappi and squeals,” as John McDougall, the pioneer Fort Edmonton trader called them. The carts, pulled by oxen, were adapted from Scottish vehicles – light boxes, each perched on a single axle with wheels six feet high. There was one difference: they contained not a single nail nor, indeed, a scrap of iron. Instead, tough strands of buffalo hide – the all-purpose “shaganappi” – were used. The axles could not be greased because the thick prairie dust would quickly immobilize the carts; as a result the wheels emitted an infernal screeching, “the North West fiddle,” as some pioneers dubbed it.
With the clouds of yellow prairie dust that were raised in their wake, the brigades of carts were made visible and audible for miles. Jean d’Artigue, a Frenchman who spent six years in the North West during the seventies, wrote that the sound had to be heard to be really understood: “A den of wild beasts cannot be compared with its hideousness. Combine all the discordant sounds ever heard in Ontario and they cannot reproduce anything so horrid as a train of Red River carts. At each turn of the wheel they run up and down all the notes of the scale without sounding distinctly any note or giving one harmonious sound.”
The carts generally travelled in brigades, some of which were as long as railway trains. The most memorable, and surely the loudest, was the one organized in 1855 by Norman Kittson, the St. Paul trader. It contained five hundred carts and took one month to reach the Minnesota capital from Fort Garry.
The carts left deep ruts in the soft prairie turf, so deep that the wagons tended to spread out, the right wheel of one cart travelling in the wake of the left wheel of the cart ahead; thus, the prairie trails could be as much as twenty carts wide, a phenomenon that helpsexplain the broad streets of some of the pioneer towns. Portage Avenue in Winnipeg, the widest thoroughfare in Canada, is actually part of the old trail that led west to Portage la Prairie.
These trails furrowed the plains like the creases on a human palm. The well-rutted trail from the Red River settlement to Minnesota was paralleled in the Far West by a similar trail from Fort Edmonton to Fort Benton, Montana. Another trail ran southwest from the Red River settlement to Fort Benton. The most famous trail of all was the Carlton Trail, the aorta of the plains, winding for 1,160 miles from Fort Garry to the Yellow Head Pass in the Rockies by way of Fort Carlton and Fort Edmonton. It was slow going to travel that famous thoroughfare. It took a good forty days for an ox cart to negotiate the initial 479 miles to Fort Carlton – the halfway point – where the trail branched off for various destinations. But for half a century this was the broad highway used by every explorer, settler, trader or adventurer who set his sights for the West. When the railway was planned, almost everybody expected it to follow the general course of the Carlton Trail. This was not to be, but a later railway did just that: it forms part of the Canadian National system today.
The trails crossed the domain of the buffalo whose numbers, in the early seventies, were still legion. The open prairie was covered with their dried dung, which provided the only fuel for hundreds of miles; often, too, it was white with their bones – so many that, from a distance, it seemed as if a blizzard had covered the grass. As late as 1874, when the newly formed North West Mounted Police made their initial trek across the plains, their colonel estimated, within the range of his own vision, one million head stretching off to the horizon. And the sound of them! To the Earl of Southesk, “the deep, rolling voice of the mighty multitude came grandly on the
To cross the North West, in the days before the railway, was a considerable feat attempted by only a hardy few. The chief form of transportation was by Red River cart, “scrub oak shaganappi and squeals,” as John McDougall, the pioneer Fort Edmonton trader called them. The carts, pulled by oxen, were adapted from Scottish vehicles – light boxes, each perched on a single axle with wheels six feet high. There was one difference: they contained not a single nail nor, indeed, a scrap of iron. Instead, tough strands of buffalo hide – the all-purpose “shaganappi” – were used. The axles could not be greased because the thick prairie dust would quickly immobilize the carts; as a result the wheels emitted an infernal screeching, “the North West fiddle,” as some pioneers dubbed it.
With the clouds of yellow prairie dust that were raised in their wake, the brigades of carts were made visible and audible for miles. Jean d’Artigue, a Frenchman who spent six years in the North West during the seventies, wrote that the sound had to be heard to be really understood: “A den of wild beasts cannot be compared with its hideousness. Combine all the discordant sounds ever heard in Ontario and they cannot reproduce anything so horrid as a train of Red River carts. At each turn of the wheel they run up and down all the notes of the scale without sounding distinctly any note or giving one harmonious sound.”
The carts generally travelled in brigades, some of which were as long as railway trains. The most memorable, and surely the loudest, was the one organized in 1855 by Norman Kittson, the St. Paul trader. It contained five hundred carts and took one month to reach the Minnesota capital from Fort Garry.
The carts left deep ruts in the soft prairie turf, so deep that the wagons tended to spread out, the right wheel of one cart travelling in the wake of the left wheel of the cart ahead; thus, the prairie trails could be as much as twenty carts wide, a phenomenon that helpsexplain the broad streets of some of the pioneer towns. Portage Avenue in Winnipeg, the widest thoroughfare in Canada, is actually part of the old trail that led west to Portage la Prairie.
These trails furrowed the plains like the creases on a human palm. The well-rutted trail from the Red River settlement to Minnesota was paralleled in the Far West by a similar trail from Fort Edmonton to Fort Benton, Montana. Another trail ran southwest from the Red River settlement to Fort Benton. The most famous trail of all was the Carlton Trail, the aorta of the plains, winding for 1,160 miles from Fort Garry to the Yellow Head Pass in the Rockies by way of Fort Carlton and Fort Edmonton. It was slow going to travel that famous thoroughfare. It took a good forty days for an ox cart to negotiate the initial 479 miles to Fort Carlton – the halfway point – where the trail branched off for various destinations. But for half a century this was the broad highway used by every explorer, settler, trader or adventurer who set his sights for the West. When the railway was planned, almost everybody expected it to follow the general course of the Carlton Trail. This was not to be, but a later railway did just that: it forms part of the Canadian National system today.
The trails crossed the domain of the buffalo whose numbers, in the early seventies, were still legion. The open prairie was covered with their dried dung, which provided the only fuel for hundreds of miles; often, too, it was white with their bones – so many that, from a distance, it seemed as if a blizzard had covered the grass. As late as 1874, when the newly formed North West Mounted Police made their initial trek across the plains, their colonel estimated, within the range of his own vision, one million head stretching off to the horizon. And the sound of them! To the Earl of Southesk, “the deep, rolling voice of the mighty multitude came grandly on the
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