The folk songs of traditional music have evolved from the blending of different cultural traditions. Familiar songs sometimes spring from surprising origins. One of the most notable is the popular folk song “Red River Valley.” What appears to be a simple song of lament sung by cowboy singers around campfires is, in reality, the end of a musical mix that has its foundation in the melodies of traditional folk songs sung in the mists of a Gaelic past and whose lyrics were written in a personal expression of the cultural conflict occurring during the nineteenth-century settlement of the American continent by Europeans and the related displacement of the indigenous natives. “Red River Valley” was first recorded as “Cowboy Love Song” in 1925 by Carl T. Sprague, one of the first cowboy singers from Texas. The biggest hit of the cowboy version was the 1927 version by Hugh Cross and Riley Puckett. In both recordings of the song, the lyrical associations are about the Red River Valley that marks the border between Oklahoma and Texas. A song named “Bright Mohawk Valley” with the same tune was published as sheet music on Tin Pan Alley in 1896 with James J. Kerrigan as the writer, but the song was thought to have been adapted for a New York audience. The earliest known written manuscript of the lyrics to “Red River Valley” were found in Iowa bearing the notation of the year 1879. Although it is not widely known, there are two significant Red River valleys on the American Continent: The Red River Valley of the South and the Red River Valley of the North. And it is to this Red River Valley of the North that the origins of “Red River Valley” lead. The famed Canadian folklorist, Edith Fowke, gave mostly anecdotal evidence that the song was known in at least five Canadian provinces prior to 1896 and speculated that the song was composed at the time of the Wolseley Expedition of 1870 in Manitoba. She claimed that the song was well known on the Canadian prairies and held the form of a story about a Métis girl lamenting the departure of her Anglo lover, a soldier who came west to suppress the Red River Rebellion. The text for Fowke’s version of the song was published in “Western Folklore” in 1964 and was discovered in the papers of a former Canadian Mounted Police officer, Col. Gilbert Sanders. Fowke has written, “This is probably the best known folk song on the Canadian prairies. Later research indicates that it was known in at least five Canadian Provinces before 1896 and was probably composed during the Red River Rebellion of 1870