The Road North That Never Was

You're standing in what was, back in the 1850s and 60s, the ragged northern edge of everything. This country around Houpt was thick pine forest and muskeg, cut through with the Tamarac River, and it marked the boundary between two completely different kinds of frontier movement. To your south and east, you had the traditional overland emigrant trails, the wagons rolling west. But up here? This was timber country, fur country, and the people moving through came by canoe and bateau more often than wagon.

The Red River Trails ran about sixty miles west of here, a network of ox-cart routes connecting Saint Paul to the British settlements around Winnipeg. From the 1840s through the 1870s, you could hear those Red River carts coming from miles away, their ungreased wooden wheels shrieking like demons. The closest thing to civilization was Fort Ripley, established in 1849 down on the Mississippi, about fifty miles southeast.

This land didn't see a land rush like Oklahoma or the Dakotas. Minnesota's Homestead boom came in the 1870s and 80s, after the railroads pushed through. Before that, you had mostly logging crews, a few hardy Norwegian and Swedish families, and the Ojibwe who'd been here all along. The government surveys didn't even reach this area until the late 1860s.

Now here's the thing about wagon trains and this country: they mostly avoided it. The great emigrant routes, the Oregon and California trails, they ran far south of here. But in 1858, a promoter named James Wickes Taylor tried to convince emigrants to take a northern route through Minnesota, claiming it was safer from Indian troubles and had better grass and water. He published maps, gave speeches, pushed hard for a wagon road from Saint Paul straight through this pine forest country and on to the Montana goldfields.

A few dozen families tried it in the summer of 1862. They got their wagons maybe a hundred miles northwest of Saint Paul before the trail just... ended. No road, just forest and swamp. They had to backtrack, lost weeks of travel time, and barely made it to Dakota Territory before snow. One family's journal, kept by a woman named Sarah Wakefield, described trying to float their wagon across rivers on hastily built rafts, losing an ox to quicksand-like muck, and finally abandoning half their goods just to keep moving.

The northern route died before it ever really lived. Sometimes the frontier's biggest stories are the roads that never got built.