as to accommodate the proprietors and clerks during their 

 short residence there. The North men (men working in the 

 trade further northwest) live under tents, but the more frugal 

 pork eaters (canoe men from Montreal) lodge beneath their 

 canoes." 



This fort and trading post was the meeting place for tlje 

 party from the East with articles of trade, and the party from 

 the West with fur bought and transported from all points to 

 the North and West. Sometimes men to the number of twelve 

 hundred assembled here, their leisure hours spent in fighting, 

 carousing and drinking, as this was their gala time of the 

 year. The men who made up the force to transport the arti- 

 cles of trade between Montreal and Grand Portage were hired 

 in Montreal to begin work about the first of May, or as aoon 

 as the ice was out of the lakes and rivers, and generally were 

 classed; five clerks who were apprentices with a prospept of 

 partnership, or from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars 

 per annum if we speak in American collateral; eighteen guides, 

 receiving about two hundred dollars a season, including a suit- 

 able outfit of clothes; the foremen and steersmen, a team to 

 each canoe, about one hundred and fifty dollars apiece; the 

 middlemen, six to each canoe, fifty dollars apiece; also to each 

 canoe man, three hundred and fifty in number, a pair of 

 trousers, a shirt and one blanket, the whole crew from clerks 

 to middlemen being maintained at the expense of their em- 

 ployers while in service. 



The articles necessary for trade were coarse woolen blank- 

 ets, arms and ammunition, twist and carrot tobacco, cutlery, 

 linens, coarse sheetings, thread, lines, twine, common hard- 

 ware, sheet-iron, brass and copper kettles, silk and cotton 

 handkerchiefs, hats, shoes and hose, calicos, printed stuffs and 

 numerous trinkets, all being imported into Canada from over 

 the seas. 



In exchange for these goods, for example, one year's fur 

 buying was one hundred and six thousand beaver skins, twen- 

 ty-one hundred bear, fifteen hundred fox, forty-six hundred 

 otter, seventeen hundred musquash, thirty-two thousand mar- 

 ten, eighteen hundred mink, six thousand lynx, sixteen hun- 



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