Old Crossing Treaty Park

Before railroads and highways, travel across the north country followed the rivers and a network of overland trails. The most famous of these were the Red River oxcart trails, which linked the fur-trade settlements of the Red River in the north with St. Paul and the Mississippi to the south. Two-wheeled wooden carts pulled by oxen creaked along these trails in long trains, their ungreased axles famously shrieking for miles.

This bend of the Red Lake River was a ford where those trails crossed the water, one of the natural pinch points where travelers had to gather and wait their turn to cross. That made it a landmark and a meeting place in a landscape with few of them, and it is why the crossing became the setting for the treaty council. The park preserves this historic ground where the trails and the river met.

This is the homeland of the Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe, and in particular the Red Lake and Pembina bands whose people lived and traveled across the Red River Valley. In 1863, at this crossing, representatives of the United States and these bands negotiated the Old Crossing Treaty. By its terms the Ojibwe ceded a huge tract of the valley, some of the most fertile land on the continent, in exchange for payments and promises that, as with so many treaties of the era, often fell short.

The treaty opened the Red River Valley to settlement and the farms that now cover it, and it marked a turning point for the Ojibwe of the region. The Red Lake Band remains a distinct and sovereign nation in Minnesota today, one that never allotted its reservation and holds its land in common. The park interprets this history factually and with respect for the Ojibwe people, whose homeland this is and whose descendants continue here, so that the story of the crossing is told fully, not just as a settlers' milestone.

The park sits in the Red River Valley, one of the flattest and most fertile landscapes in North America. This broad plain is the bed of a vast glacial lake, Lake Agassiz, that filled here at the end of the last ice age when meltwater pooled behind the retreating glaciers. When the lake finally drained, it left behind a deep, level bed of rich soil that now grows wheat, sugar beets, and other crops across an enormous open expanse.

The rivers of the valley, including the Red Lake River that runs through the park, flow slowly across this flat land and, unusually, drain north toward Canada and Hudson Bay rather than south. Against the wide, treeless farm country, the wooded river corridor at Old Crossing stands out as a green ribbon, a shaded refuge where the water bends through cottonwoods and the past feels close at hand.

The wooded river corridor draws wildlife into the open valley. White-tailed deer move through the trees, beavers and muskrats work the riverbanks, and the woods and water host songbirds, waterfowl, and raptors. The park's shaded bottomland is a magnet for birds against the surrounding farmland, and the Red River Valley as a whole lies on a major migration route.

Spring brings high, muddy water and returning birds, along with the first green in the river woods. Summer is warm and the trees full, offering shade in a valley that can bake and blow under the open sky. Fall turns the cottonwoods and oaks gold along the water, a quiet and lovely time to walk the grounds. Winter is cold and stark on the northern plains, the river frozen and the valley white, when the park's history feels all the more solitary.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.