Plan of Route Followed by the Red River Expeditionary Force from Lake Superior to Fort Garry showing the exploratory line for the Dawson Road and “Mr. Snow’s Road” as it was being constructed from his road-building headquarters at La Coulée des Ressources. Source: Engineers Geoscientists Manitoba (2018, Mar 4). Dawson Trail, Planning and Construction. Retrieved June 30, 2020 from http://heritage.apegm.mb.ca/index.php/Dawson_Trail

“In the fall of 1867, a swarm of locusts had settled on the Red River and when their eggs hatched in the following spring they stripped the country bare, threatening the entire region, colony, Indians and all, with starvation. Money for relief was raised in Canada, London and the United States and the Canadian government took advantage of the situation to use a make work relief scheme, as an excuse to build a military access road from Fort Garry to the Lake of the Woods in order to facilitate the annexation of the Hudson Bay Company territories.

"The road was one of McDougall’s public works patronage schemes but when Snow, the appointed boss of the project, (arrived) to Red River he, John Schultz and a third Canadian, Charles Mair went into partnership in a fraud scam.”

Source: Everlastingexile. (n.d.). Canada’s Hero of the West: How the children of the Fort Garry Band met the great Canadian hero in the west. The Tales and Adventures of an Exile and Heretic. Retrieved June 28, 2020 from http://everlastingexile.weebly.com/canadas-hero-of-the-west.html

“From the start, the project had troubles. The area where the road was to be built was still HBC land. Then Governor McDougall should have notified the company and asked permission to start the road. He did neither.

"Snow, the designated road supervisor, quickly made enemies by displacing the original boundaries established previously by Roger Goulet, the official surveyor for the Assiniboine Council. He paid local labourers, mostly Métis, $15 a month, but not in cash. The wages were purchase orders on the survey store at Oak Point (Ste. Anne) where prices were higher than in Fort Garry and in which it was generally believed, Dr. John Schultz owned a share.”

Don Aiken

Source: Aiken, D. (1988, May 6). Heritage Highlights. Winnipeg Real Estate News. Also in Feilberg, E., & Annell, L. (1989). Pioneer History of Glenn, East Braintree & McMunn (P.18-25). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10719/2239350

Grasshoppers during epidemic 1868 locusts that ravaged at the Red River, Manitoba. Glenbow: NA-2111-1. July 23, 1874. Retrieved June 30, 2020 from http://ww2.glenbow.org/search/archivesPhotosResults.aspx?AC=GET_RECORD...

Teillet, J. (2019). The NorthWest is our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s people by Jean Teillet, 2019. Harper Collins e-book (P.184). Retrieved from https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443450140/the-north-west-is-our-mother/

Back to La Coulèe des Ressources Heritage Tour page | Top

Previous page: Of Mud and Straw
Next page: John Snow: Foreman of Road Building