Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1984, pp. 121-34.
Abstract
Water transport has played a major part in the economic development of Canada. It has been claimed that a series of east-west water routes were essential to Canada's evolution as a transcontinental nation. The many connecting rivers and lakes formed the lines of least resistance through the environment, so that in most regions of Canada, water transport was almost invariably the earliest and most important form of transport. Land transport and land routes developed more slowly and thus played a secondary role in Canada's development prior to the beginning of large-scale agricultural settlement. However, there was one region, the prairie parkland section of the western interior, where land transport was at least as important as water travel. By the middle of the nineteenth century, movement along the major rivers of the prairie-parkland, such as the North Saskatchewan, the Red, and the Assiniboine, was complemented by travel along a network of carting trails that stretched from St. Paul, Minnesota, in the southeast to Fort Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan River in the northwest. The use of two-wheeled carts pulled by an ox or horse eventually spread west as far as Montana and south as far as Colorado.
The carts that were employed briefly by French fur traders in the prairie-parkland region during the mid-eighteenth century and for a longer time by North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company traders after 1801 were not the first to appear in the Great Plains region. The two-wheeled cart, or carreta, had long been a familiar sight in the southern Great Plains and the Spanish Southwest. Widely used over large parts of Spanish America, including Mexico and Argentina, these carts were clearly part of the Spanish or Iberian tradition of cart making. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, their use spread north from Mexico into the Great Plains and the Southwest.
The Red River cart of the northern Great Plains was the equivalent of the Spanis,h carreta, but its cultural origins are not as well established. Some writers believe it was an extension to western Canada of the French or French Canadian tradition of cart use. Others claim that the Red River cart was largely Scottish in origin. Still others have said that it combined elements of both the French and Scottish traditions.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln