The forgotten trail : from Prince Arthur's Landing to Red River

Summary: In 1870 the two-year-old nation of Canada inherited an empire. That year the Hudson's Bay Company ceded its claim to the vast territory over which it had carried on its fur trade for 200 years. The land stretched across the continent and north to the Arctic Ocean but the centre of its economic and settlement activity was a tiny community at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, a thousand miles west of Toronto. The question arose as to how these far-distant places could be joined. A railroad through British territory was a financial impossibility and using the rapidly-expanding American railroad system was politically unsavoury. The only solution was to implement a plan that had been suggested ten years earlier by civil engineer Simon Dawson--conquer the wilderness between Lake Superior and Red River with a land and water route using wagons and steamboats.