The Hudson's Bay Company then built a large new post, Fort Garry, at the mouth of the Assiniboin River, as a center for the fur trade for the whole region and as a supply depot to furnish food for all the boat crews. The post manager offered to buy a large quantity of dried meat each year, plus all the buffalo grease and tallow the hunters could furnish. This boon led to the organization of the Red River hunt, composed mostly of métis, but with a sprinkling of Scots and others. For sixty years this unique, colorful pageant roamed the western plains each summer, an important economic enterprise hidden under gaudy trappings.
The distinctive badge of the Red River hunt was the Red River cart, something of a curiosity in its own right, a small, light rig designed to be drawn by a single horse or ox. It was made entirely of local products, wood and rawhide, and was light enough to float across a stream. The basic pattern for the cart came from rural France to Montreal, and was brought west by the French Canadians. The first contemporary record of the carts was made by Alexander Henry at Pembina, September 1, 1801: "I also sent off Langlois with four men and five small carts, each drawn by one horse, loaded with three packs of goods and baggage." He described the wheels as one solid piece, sawed off the ends of trees, with a diameter of three feet. Two years later Henry estimated that one cart could haul as much as five pack horses could carry, about 800 to 1,000 pounds.
A few years later, when the métis had become more skillful at building carts, they made spoked wheels, much larger in diameter but about the same weight. The larger wheels could roll over small bumps more easily, an important advantage on the trackless plains. The wheels, solid or spoked, were fitted to an axle made from the trunk of a poplar tree, and were run without grease, for grease would pick up the fine dust so plentiful on the plains in dry weather. This mixture of dust and grease would bind the wheels to the axle, causing rapid wear and considerable friction. The ungreased wheels rubbing on the dry axles produced a terrific screech, like a thousand fingernails being scratched across a thousand windowpanes. When several hundred carts started along the trail in a body, no one needed to go ahead to announce their coming.
So closely did the Crees associate the métis with the carts that their name for the métis in sign language signified half-man, half-cart.
Alexander Ross described the métis: "… they possess many good qualities; while enjoying a sort of licentious freedom, they are generous, warm-hearted, and brave, and left to themselves, quiet and orderly. They are, unhappily, as unsteady as the wind in all their habits, fickle in their dispositions, credulous in their faith, and clannish in their affections."
For the big summer hunt each man liked to take two carts to bring back his meat and grease. He also needed a horse or an ox to pull each cart, a buffalo horse, a gun, many rounds of ammunition, camp gear, and a small supply of food for the trip out to the buffalo. The rest of the summer he expected to live well on meat. A provident man might own all or most of these needed items, many had about half of them, and at the bottom of the scale were the shiftless, lazy ones who owned nothing at all, yet had to go on the hunt or starve. These people went through the settlement begging, borrowing, going heavily into debt, and promising double prices in order to get the needed credit. The higher prices bothered these lazy borrowers not at all, for they seldom paid back more than a part of the debt before asking for more credit from the same person.
About the middle of May the hunters began their preparations for the start on June 15. At that time most of the carts started out promptly, with a few stragglers racing madly to çatch up. The caravan made an imposing sight, with several hundred carts in the line and a large herd of stock, the buffalo horses, and the spare draft animals being driven alongside the trail. On a large hunt the men and women totaled the number of carts, with about half that many dogs, a third that many buffalo horses, and a fourth that many children. Most of the children were left in the settlement with relatives. About a third of the hunters had no buffalo horses. They were too poor to own one and too shiftless to be trusted with a borrowed one. They expected to secure their meat by begging from the good hunters, or gleaning from the carcasses abandoned after a big kill.
Once the buffalo were sighted, the hunters rode out in a body and killed as many as possible the first day, even though they could not save the meat from more than half of them. After a successful hunt the camp spent most of the next day drying the meat, then went hunting again. If only small herds were sighted, only a few of the hunters went out each time, but such smaller hunts might be made each day while the buffalo were near. In three weeks of good hunting, a rare occurrence, enough meat could be secured to fill all the carts, but most of the time the carts went back partly empty.
In 1840 the hunt went well, and the 1,210 carts returned, each loaded to capacity, with a total of about 1,008,000 pounds of dried meat and grease, pemmican, and tallow. This was the equivalent of about 4 million pounds of fresh meat, or 7,000 buffalo. Alexander Ross, who was with this hunt, estimated that as much meat was wasted as was used.
Of this imposing stock of meat and grease, Fort Garry took 150,000 pounds, most of it in payment for goods charged out to the hunters for the trip. Another large portion went to pay the people in the settlements who had extended credit in the form of horses, oxen, and carts. The remainder was soon devoured in a series of feasts for all the friends and relatives of the hunters, who sat idle as long as there was a bite left. Then they had to rustle around and prepare for the fall hunt if they expected to have any meat for the winter.
Improvident families returning from the fall hunt often were entirely out of meat in a few days, and had to start out at once for the hunting grounds, 250 miles away by 1840, in hopes of killing enough buffalo to carry them through the winter. If the herds shifted their range, as they often did, or if a severe blizzard blew in, the little bands might lose several of their number. One winter thirty-three died before rescuers could find their snowbound camp.
In spite of all the hardships and privations of this life, the métis would try no other. To them the freedom and excitement more than compensated for the dangers and sufferings. Perhaps the dangers were an important part of the charm. Each succeeding generation of métis raised its children in the same pattern and in the same environment, so the number of dedicated hunters grew year by year until they presented a serious problem to the community and to the government, a problem that became very serious as the buffalo herds dwindled and moved farther and farther away. The more restless of the métis moved on west following the retreating herds and for a few years lived near the Montana border in the Cypress Hills, with one camp in central Montana in the Judith Basin, but they all had to leave when the last of the buffalo were killed in 1883.
After Canada gained dominion status in 1867, the métis made strong demands for equality with the whites. They were led by the fiery Louis Riel, a métis who had failed in his studies to become a priest. They demanded equality of citizenship, with education for their children and training for them in the crafts and professions. They resented being barred from equal rights because they had some Indian blood, and being refused any of the treaty payments and land settlements given to the Indians on account of their white blood.
With no more buffalo herds to follow, the métis squatted on lands along the South Saskatchewan River, laying out their claims in long, narrow strips, each with a small river frontage, as the farms were laid out along the St. Lawrence River. When the government surveyors arrived to lay out the permanent boundaries, they insisted on the standard gridiron type of land plots, to the dismay of the métis, already disturbed by the end of the buffalo hunting.