The Hudson's Bay Company nominally had a monopoly of trade in the West but from the 1820s on this was challenged by the settlers, who could get higher prices for their furs from the Americans to the south. One major transportation vehicle was the Red River cart, a couple of which can be seen in this photograph. Locally developed in the early-1800s, it used no metal parts and could thus be made by the settlers themselves. While the cart still had some years of use left to it when this photograph was made in 1873, within a decade the railway began to displace it.