Breckenridge, founded in 1857 at the juncture of three rivers, is the county seat of Wilkin County and the gateway to the Red River Valley. First a river town, then a railroad village, and now an agricultural city, it has endured fire, abandonment, and floods and repeatedly recovered. One of the Red River Valley's most colorful eras centered on steamboats and oxcart trails along the Red River. In the 1850s, merchants in St. Paul used horse- or ox-drawn Red River carts to ship goods to Fort Garry, a slow 500-mile one-way trip that took a month, while a steamboat on the Red 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, built a new boat, and named it after himself. The Hudson's Bay Fur Trading Company then built a terminal at Georgetown, Minnesota, where furs and trade goods were transferred between ox carts and steamboats, and a second steamboat, the International, was built there in 1862. After the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the Red River at Moorhead in 1871, steamboating expanded as trade with Winnipeg increased and settlers bound for Canada passed through Fargo-Moorhead. Its decline in the southern valley began when the railroad reached Fisher's Landing on the Red Lake River in 1876, after which flatboats became a preferred river transport and, by 1878, Winnipeg's rail connection hastened the shift to rail. Steamboaters then turned to short-hauling grain, lumber, and other wares for new farmers along the Red, including the huge J.L. Grandin built in 1878 to carry wheat from the Grandin bonanza farm near Halstad to Fargo, but branch rail lines soon undercut that trade as well. The big boats in the southern valley stopped running about 1886, though steamboats near Grand Forks continued until about 1910.