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Red River Cart pauses for a rest, 1820
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The Red River Cart, cresting a hill on it's way across the prairie. Reference was supplied by the Glenbow Foundation and the Vancouver Central Library. The Red River Cart was most instrumental in opening up the western Canadian prairies to settlement. Made at Pembina, close to the American border, the building of the Red River Cart became the first mechanical industry in Canada in 1802. Each cart was pulled by a single ox or horse and one skilled driver could handle four carts. Upwards of two hundred carts composed a train. Long before the carts were seen, the squealing of the high wheels reverberated across the prairie. For many years, beginning about 1802, the Hudson Bay Company exported tons of furs, and imported supplies by oxcart on the Pembina Trail. The Red River Cart was an early development of the Metis. A flat box was mounted over an axle and two large wheels. The entire vehicle was made of wood. Strips of wet buffalo hide wound around the wheels served as tires. By 1850 over one hundred Red River Carts were making the annual spring journey to St. Paul with their loads of buffalo hides and about one thousand five hundred carts were in general use between Fort Gary and St. Paul. Hundreds of carts were moving in and out of Minnesota which was settled very rapidly. The last brigade of Red River Carts seems to have traveled to St. Cloud about 1871 and this was due, probably, to the fact that the last organized buffalo hunt ended about 1886. The buffalo was, by this time, on the brink of extinction. | 
