In 1857 the Hudson's Bay Company received United States government permission to ship furs and trade goods across the United States, and it contracted with the Burbank brothers' Minnesota Stage Company to haul freight from the Mississippi to steamboats on the Red for the last leg to Fort Garry. Georgetown was established by the Hudson's Bay Company on August 12, 1859, near the Buffalo River confluence as a transfer point, and in 1860 the Minnesota Stage Company began running stagecoaches three times a week from St. Paul through St. Cloud, Fort Abercrombie, and Georgetown. By 1862 the settlement had stables, a freight warehouse, a hotel, a Hudson's Bay Company store, a sawmill, a few log houses, two barracks housing 30 soldiers, and a boat yard where the International was built in 1862, a 134-foot steamboat with three decks, staterooms, and a promenade area, though it was too large to navigate the Red easily. Steamboats and oxcart trails became a colorful but temporary part of Red River Valley transportation, as boats such as the Anson Northup and the International linked St. Paul and Fort Garry more quickly than Red River carts, whose 600-mile one-way trip took a month. In 1859 Samson Northup dragged a steamboat engine and boiler from the Mississippi River through a Minnesota winter to the Red near Kragnes and built the Anson Northup, while trains of hundreds of carts traveled from St. Paul to meet steamboats at Georgetown. After the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the Red River at Moorhead in 1871, steamboating expanded and trade with Winnipeg increased, but low water over Goose Rapids north of Georgetown and the coming of faster, cheaper railroads ended Georgetown's importance as a transportation hub. The steamboat era then declined as rail lines advanced, with flatboats becoming preferred on some routes, Winnipeg gaining its own rail connection by 1878, and steamboaters briefly turning to short-hauling grain, timber, and other wares before branch rail lines up and down the Red's banks left steamboats unable to compete; big boats in the southern valley had quit running by about 1886, though steamboats operated near Grand Forks until about 1910.