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Once more he received subtle intimations of what he might learn out in the open; and it was with a less weighted heart that he faced the gateway between the huge yellow bluffs on his left and the slow rise of ground to the black mesa on his right. He looked back in time to see the trading-post, bleak and lonely on the bare slope, pass out of sight behind the bluffs.
After dinner we circled round the blazing fire and enjoyed ourselves listening to Macnab, who had a happy facility in giving a graphic account of his sledge journey from the Mountain Fort his recently built trading-post to Fort Wichikagan, and I observed particularly that the presence of a lady among us had a most wonderful and irresistible influence in softening the tones and the manners of all.
When divested of the strange Western expletives and imprecations with which the old man used to spice his reminiscences, some of them are enough. I remember one, telling how Peter Walker "raised the wind" on a particular occasion, when he got short of money on his way to some distant trading-post, in a district strange to him.
There were cabins of huge green logs with the moss still fresh and clinging, and smoke poured from mud chimneys. In the air was an enchanting odor of balsam and boiling coffee. It needed only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an axe to persuade us we had motored from a French village ten hundred years old into a perfectly new trading-post on the Saskatchewan.
From these rugged Laurentian ridges it foams down in an impetuous torrent through wild pine-clad steeps of rock and towering precipice, apparently to force an outlet into the valley of the Mississippi, but at the Dalles it seems to have suddenly preferred to seek the cold waters of the Atlantic, and, bending its course abruptly to the east, it pours its foaming torrent into the great Lake Superior below the old French trading-post of Fond-du-Lac.
Lapierre, however, had his own eminently more practical, if less Utopian, ideas concerning the erection of a trading-post; for in the quarter-breed's mind the planting of an independent trading-post upon the very threshold of MacNair's wilderness empire was of far greater importance than the establishment of a school, or mission, or any other institution especially when the post was one which he himself had set about to control.
It had been decided that Barrington and Henry should return to the Morris homestead before winter set in. They were to take six of the horses, and, if everything went well, were to return to the trading-post as early as possible in the spring, bringing with them a long list of articles wanted by James Morris.
Until 1848 San Francisco had been a drowsy little Mexican trading-post, a huddle of adobe huts and sheds where American ships collected hides vividly described in Two Years Before the Mast or a whaler called for wood and water. During the year preceding the frenzied migration of the modern Argonauts, only two merchant ships, one bark and one brig, sailed in through the Golden Gate.
When she grew to be an old lady, with her grandchildren about her knee, she delighted to tell them that when a girl she had run the gauntlet of the Indians. Col. Zane became the friend of all redmen. He maintained a trading-post for many years, and his dealings were ever kind and honorable.
This mighty inland sea of fresh water about two hundred miles in diameter, and big enough to engulf the greater part of Scotland was, at the time we write of, and still is, far beyond the outmost verge of civilisation, in the remotest solitudes of the Great Lone Land. Here the fur-traders had established a small trading-post close to the shores of the lake.
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