The Red Lake Trail

The Red Lake Trail, though used by loggers and homesteaders, was not intended originally for their use. Its particular purpose was to provide for movement, mostly of government supplies and mail, from the White Earth Reservation and Detroit (now Detroit Lakes), which was on the railroad, to the Red Lake Agency, about eighty miles away. One settler calls it a mail route, but it was chiefly a means of furnishing supplies to the Red Lake Indian Reservation. It was a road authorized and funded by Congress.

building roads to the agencies...

The first government road in the area was from the Leech Lake Agency to the Red Lake Agency, authorized by treaty in 1863. Larsen explains why the road-building activity after the Leech Lake Trail was authorized. In 1867, he points out, the White Earth reservation was created. The government at first hoped to shift the Ojibwe bands, other than those at Red Lake, to White Earth. To facilitate movement between the Leech Lake Agency and White Earth, the government built a road, opened in 1870. It was a "good wagon road, practicable at all seasons, westward from Leech Lake to White Earth, a distance of 80 Miles." The Northern Pacific had reached Detroit, near White Earth, and it was the closest railroad to both the Leech Lake and Red Lake reservations.

The agent at Red Lake claimed in 1871 that the only existing road to the railroad was a hundred and fifty miles long, and "the worst in the state." The proposed road, he averred, would shorten the distance to the railroad by fifty miles, and save thirty dollars per ton in freight charges. In 1873 Congress included in the deficiency appropriation bill the sum of $5000 for such a road, and the following year, $10,000 more was made available. With this money "a very fair wagon-road, with the necessary bridges," was constructed by the end of 1875.

Arthur J. Larsen, The Development of the Minnesota Road System, Minnesota Historical Society, © 1966, p.116.

George Boorman describes its location:

The Red Lake Trail, coming out of Mahnomen County, ran mostly lengthwise through what is now Clearwater County, through the townships of Falk, Copley, Holst, Dudley, Sinclair, and Clover, and more or less north to Red Lake and then east to Red Lake Village.

....Those [settlers] coming from the south could come over the Crow Wing Trail to Detroit, then on the Pembina Woods Trail to White Earth, and northeast on the Red Lake Trail.

North Country History, III.4 (1986), p.106 © Hilda R.Rachuy 1986.

hauling on the trail...

Supplies, mostly government materials, had to be hauled first from the railhead at Detroit to the agency at White Earth then from White Earth to the agency at Red Lake. Morrison, who hauled freight on the trail between 1888 and 1892, recalls he got twenty-five cents a hundred on the shorter trip and a dollar a hundred from White Earth to Red Lake. (Mainly Logging, p.81.)

Morrison lists the stopping places along the trail in 1888. The first was a little settlement near White Earth Lake where the river runs out of the lake. Tyler Warren was at Twin Lakes, Simon Roy on Roy (or Simon) Lake, and Thompson on the Clearwater River, south of the present town of Bagley. The next was Warren's, later Howe's, where the Red Lake and Fosston Trail ran together. Finally there was Bob Nevings at the outlet of Clearwater Lake. The trip was about eighty miles, and it took five days for the round trip.

Morrison describes what they had to do when they could not find a stopping place in the winter. "One fellow would blanket up the horses and the other shovel snow away, Then we would chop down dry trees, haul twelve to eighteen foot logs up with a team and got the fire started." The long fire would burn all night, giving warmth to the horses on one side and the drivers on the other. He ends his discussion saying: "There was a lot of hardship attached to the job for blamed little money." (Mainly Logging, p.21).

After 1892, government supplies were shipped to Fosston rather than Detroit, which made a closer and shorter route to Red Lake. An 1896 map of Polk County shows a trail called Old Red Lake Trail running northeast out of Fosston through Queen Township. The Red Lake Trail and the Fosston Trail ran together for a short distance from west of Howe's or How's Stopping Place, just north of the present Bagley, to a fork just east of Howe's Stopping Place. Boorman explains that at the fork "the Fosston Trail went east, fording the Clearwater River near where the Bagley Dam was later constructed and a bridge built." On the Red Lake Trail just beyond the fork was Neving's Stopping Place. W.R.Spears, whose store was in Red Lake, was another of the traders who sold to the settlers. Morrison himself later ran a hotel in Red Lake.

Dam on the Clearwater, site of Nevings' Stopping Place

where the trail ran...

The earliest settlers in northern Beltrami County followed the Red Lake Trail, the road that was already there, establishing their homesteads in the area of Leonard, and Pine River. After crossing the Clearwater River, it ran close to the section line. The Red Lake Trail, which turned northwest where it forks from the Fosston Trail, does its best to follow the high ground as the Leech Lake Trail does .The Fosston Trail at that point crossed the Clearwater River. The Red Lake Trail crossed the river at the outlet to Clearwater Lake.

The Red Lake Trail received Federal and county support for maintenance, according to Boorman.

....Red Lake Agency records indicate Federal money was spent to maintain this road well over a hundred years ago. Also, I have seen in old Beltrami Commissioner's proceedings where they helped to maintain this road when this was in Beltrami County. The road kept to high ground as much as possible, avoiding swamps, fording when there was no other way to get across a low area, a miserable thing to ride across.

North Country History, III.4 (1986), p.107. © Hilda R.Rachuy 1986.

Boorman apparently refers to the meeting of the County Commissioners on August 8, 1896, in which they voted to expend $30 for corduroy on the Red Lake Road three miles north of Howes' Place.

The Red Lake Trail ended at the village of Red Lake. Red Lake, as its inhabitants will be happy to say, was an established village, a source of supplies, before any other settlements in Beltrami County were begun. While the trail ended at Red Lake, the village was the beginning point for settlers who wished to reach the lands east of the agency. They could go by foot or, usually, by boat to one of the streams flowing into the lake and follow it into the interior. Until the Black Duck County Road was built, this was the common means of travel to places like Blackduck Lake or the Cormorant River.

The Red Lake Trail, after about 1893, had a competitor in the steamboats that ran from the railhead at Thief River Falls to the Red Lake Agency as well as other places on the lake. While the government did not ship supplies that way, storekeepers, and others with goods to ship, as well as passengers, found the trip by boat useful and convenient. While the Red Lake Line, a logging railroad, brought its locomotives in over the frozen trails from Steamboat Landing above Leech Lake to Nebish, many other parts, including the trucks for the cars, were brought in by water.

the railroad supplants the trail...

The Red Lake Trail, like the Leech Lake Trail, lost its primary reason for being when, in 1905, the Minneapolis, Red Lake and Manitoba Railroad closed the gap from Nebish to Bemidji, giving Red Lake direct access to the Great Northern, the Brainerd and Northern (Northern Pacific), and the Soo Line. Goods from remote markets could now be shipped directly to Red Lake. There are traces of the trail left, but like the Leech Lake Trail, its route was determined by following the high places and avoiding the low; so it has had little effect on the 20th Century road system, which follows section lines. But it served the government and the people of Minnesota well. For thirty years it was an important link between the Red Lake Agency and the world outside. In its later years it was a highway, however rutted and uncomfortable, for immigrants into a new land.

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