Red River Road

At the mouth of the Kaministiquia, whose name has been translated from the Anishinabek language as "meandering river," an upriver route served as the first highway to the North American west. First Nations of the region paddled it in canoes for thousands of years, and fur traders began using it in the 1700s. In 1868, work began on a new highway that linked rivers and lakes with a patchwork of portages into the Red River Road, a route central to Canadian history. Simon Dawson had surveyed a road in the 1850s from this port to Fort Garry on the Red River in what is now Manitoba, and in 1868 Canada's new Confederation government directed him to build it as part of opening up the north west. Two years later, the British Colonel Garnet Wolseley and his Red River Expeditionary Force traveled the new road to assert federal authority at Fort Garry, where the Métis leader Louis Riel, who had fought to have his settlement entered into Confederation, was in conflict with opposing forces. After 54 days of mud and 47 portages, Wolseley and his men reached the settlement as Riel was leaving, and the conflict ended. Riel was later elected to the House of Commons three times, remained in exile until 1885, then led an uprising in Saskatchewan, was convicted of high treason that same year, and was executed; in 1992 he was given status as a founding father of Manitoba. On May 25, 1870, when the port was known as the Depot or the Landing, Wolseley named it Prince Arthur's Landing in honor of Queen Victoria's third son, Prince Arthur, who at age 20 had already been appointed by the Ontario Iroquois as a chief of the Six Nations, later spent much of his military career in Canada, and in 1911 became the country's 10th Governor-General. The Canadian government intended Dawson's road to open up the west by carrying immigrants from ships and trains at this waterfront to homesteads in Manitoba, but the plan faltered and the road quickly fell out of use after rail service began in 1882. Its advertised journey time was 10 to 12 days, but the trip often took three weeks or more; government-built sheds along the route were judged "deplorable" by immigrants. The road's most popular year was 1875, when 2,700 travelers used it. An 1871 map of Dawson's Road from Lake Superior to the Red River Settlement included place names such as Frenchman's Shanty, 6 Mile Creek, 13 Mile Shanty, Matawan Bridge Depot, Young's Landing, Oskondagee River Depot, and Ward's Landing. To corduroy the road, builders used logs 15 to 23 centimetres in diameter cut three metres long, then filled the cracks between them with small branches, sand, and earth.

Ontario · Canada