In 19th century Canada, the Métis covered long distances using horse-drawn wooden carts known as Red River carts. In the photos, they don’t look different from small carts from other parts of the world. However, according to Wallace Stegner in Wolf Willow, they had one distinguishing feature:
To the Indian travois they added the Quebec cart, and without losing mobility, gained carrying capacity.
The also gained something else: noise. The axles were unpeeled poplar or cottonwood logs, and the wheels could not be greased because grease would have collected dust and frozen the hubs to the axles. The shriek of a single Red River cart was enough to set tenderfoot visitors writing home: it was an experience of an excruciating kind. But when they went out a hundred or two hundred at a time, as they did on the annual Red River buffalo hunts, the uproar was beyond imagination. They came like ten thousand devils filing saws, like the Gadarene swine in their frenzy, like the shrieking damned; and they came accompanied by barking dogs, yelling riders, youth shooting off guns […] as Howard said, “The Red River cart brigades never sneaked up on anybody.”
Nehaveigur 