Steamboats on the Red River formed an important local transportation link about 150 years ago, even though the river itself had changed little from that period, with its low water and tight bends. Before steamboats, canoes were the primary transportation on the Red River, but demand for faster travel led to paddlewheel steamboats. In the 1850s, St. Paul and Fort Garry were the two largest settlements in the area, and Minnesota merchants shipped goods north by horse- or ox-drawn Red River carts, a cheap but slow 500-mile one-way trip that took a month; a steamboat could cut that time in half. In 1859, Anson Northup hauled a steamboat engine and boiler from the Mississippi River through a Minnesota winter to the Red near Kragnes, Minnesota, built a new steamboat, and named it Anson Northup. The Hudson's Bay Fur Trading Company at Fort Garry built a steamboat terminal at Georgetown, Minnesota, to transfer furs and trade goods between ox carts and the boat, and soon trains of hundreds of carts traveled from St. Paul to meet the Anson Northup and the International, a second steamboat built at Georgetown in 1862. The International, 136 feet long, was the largest steamboat to run on the U.S. portion of the Red and tied up at Moorhead in the early 1870s, where the river was only 140 feet wide. In 1871, the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the Red River at Moorhead, steamboating expanded, trade with Winnipeg increased dramatically, and thousands of settlers bound for Canada passed through Fargo-Moorhead. Steamboats also stopped downriver at the Randolph M. Probstfield Family Farm for food, fuel, and rides to town when the river was low. The steamboat era began to decline in the southern valley after the railroad reached Fisher's Landing on the Red Lake River, east of Grand Forks, in 1876, and flatboats became the preferred river transport, carrying goods slowly to Winnipeg before being dismantled and sold for lumber. By 1878, Winnipeg had its own rail connection, and steamboating was soon abandoned in favor of the faster, cheaper railroad. Steamboaters then turned to short-hauling grain, lumber, and other wares for new farmers along the Red; in 1878, the Grandin bonanza wheat farm near Halstad, Minnesota, built the J.L. Grandin to haul wheat to its elevator in Fargo. Within a few years, railroad branch lines along the Red again outcompeted river traffic. Steamboats operated near Grand Forks until about 1910, but the big boats in the southern valley stopped running about 1886.