Marla Kay Houghteling - Pelican Road

RED RIVER TRAILS

May 1871
Later I remember we had some adventures; one of the brother’s little girls came very near drowning when we camped by the Pomme de Terre River, and we had hard
work to resuscitate her. This was the most serious.

Sarah Moore Leonard Cole

This incident, from which the girl recovered, did not involve Indians. In spite of Evander Leonard’s warnings to Sarah about dangers of attacking tribes, they moved across Minnesota with nary an encounter. They were traveling in relative comfort in a prairie schooner, not the more primitive oxcarts that moved over the rutted paths that formed the unraveled web of Red River Trails, a series of little roads wandering off from larger, more traveled ones. The Coles would have taken the Metropolitan Trail out of the teeming capital and headed for St. Cloud. This route followed the Mississippi, past towns established earlier: Anoka in 1853 and Elk River, which had been the site of a trading post since 1848. The Metropolitan Trail was not a straight-forward route,

though not nearly as convoluted as the Middle Trail, a military road which overlapped it.
Near St. Cloud the three Cole wagons had to cross the Mississippi yet again to hook up with the Middle Trail. St. Cloud had three ferries, and at least one of them operated every year after 1855.
The trade on the trails between 1820 and 1870 laid the basis for the coming of the railroads. By the end of 1872, Minnesotan earth was covered with 1,906 miles of railroad tracks. In 1871 as the Coles pushed west in their prairie schooners, the Great Northern (formerly the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad) reached Breckenridge. The Milwaukee and St. Paul came down to Winona on the Mississippi. And in Hastings, the first iron railroad bridge in Minnesota was completed. The Northern Pacific, the Southern Minnesota, the Winona and St.