The garrison consisted of thirty-nine
common soldiers and a few officers. In addition, there hung about the
fort the usual habitues of a Northern fur post,--young clerks from
England, who had come out for a year's experience in the wilds;
underpaid artisans, striving to mend their fortunes by illicit trade;
hunters and _coureurs_ and _voyageurs_, living like Indians but with a
strain of white blood that forever distinguished them from their
comrades; stately Indian sachems, stalking about the fort with whiffs
of contempt from their long calumets for all this white-man luxury; and
a ragamuffin brigade,--squaws, youngsters, and beggars,--who subsisted
by picking up food from the waste heap of the fort.
The commission to despatch explorers to the inland country proved the
sensation of a century at the fort. Round the long mess-room table
gathered officers and traders, intent on the birch-bark maps drawn by
old Indian chiefs of an unknown interior, where a "Far-Off-Metal River"
flowed down to the Northwest Passage. Huge log fires blazed on the
stone hearths at each end of the mess room. Smoky lanterns and pine
fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light
from rafters that girded ceiling and walls. On the floor of flagstones
lay enormous skins of the chase--polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly.
Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders.
Draped across the walls were Company flags--an English ensign with the
letters "H.
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