Small it was and crowded, this little trading post of the great
Hudson's Bay Company in that year of 1796, and a goodly stream of
beaver found its way through it to the mighty outside world.

Squatted alone on the shores of the Assiniboine, shouldering back the
wilderness with the spirit of the conqueror, it faced the rising sun
with its square stockade, strong and well built, log by log, its great,
brass-studded gate in the eastern centre, its four bastions rising at
its corners.

Here was a little world of itself, a small community of voyageurs,
trappers, coureurs du bois, and a11 those that cast their lot in the
wild places.

Adventurers from the Old World often passed through it on their way to
the farther west, lured by the tales of dreamers who spoke of the
Northwest Passage and the world that opened beyond the setting sun;
renegades of the lakes and forest came for and found its ready
hospitality, and into it came at all seasons those Indians whose skill
and cunning accounted for so much of that great fur trade which made
for wealth in the distant cities beyond the eastern sea.

Too small for a council, it gave allegiance wholly to its factor, young
Anders McElroy, at whose right hand for sage advice and honest
friendship stood that most admirable of men, Edmonton Ridgar, chief
trader and anything else from accountant to armourer. Beneath them and
in good command were some thirty able men whose families lived in the
neat log cabins within the stockade.