The Red River Trail was the nineteenth-century answer to communication over the frontier between the early settlements on the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers and Lord Selkirk's settlements at Winnipeg in Canada. It was not a marked trail and was not even a true trail, but rather a direction running across what is now Minnesota from the present site of Minneapolis and St. Paul to Pembina. The Red River Trail followed three main lines, one of which ran through what is now Kandiyohi County in a northwesterly direction. Because the route was not defined, it became a broad track, sometimes miles wide, over which teamsters guided their oxcarts. Only when it passed near a lake did the cart tracks converge into a comparatively narrow band, and the portion of the highway along the southwest shore of Diamond Lake was built over one of these bands.