The fort itself is an oblong square two hundred and fifty yards in length, by one hundred and fifty in breadth, enclosed by pickets twenty feet in height. The area within is divided into two courts, around which are arranged thirty-five wooden buildings, used as officers’ dwellings, lodging apartment for clerks, storehouses for furs, goods, and grains; and as workshops for carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, tinners, wheelwrights, &c. One building near the rear gate is occupied as a school-house; and a brick structure as a powder-magazine. The wooden buildings are constructed in the following manner. Posts are raised at convenient intervals, with grooves in the facing sides; in these grooves planks are inserted horizontally; and the walls are complete. Rafters raised upon plates in the usual way, and covered with boards, form the roofs. Six hundred yards below the fort, and on the bank of the river, is a village of fifty-three wooden houses, generally constructed {265} like those within the pickets. In these live the Company’s servants. Among them is a hospital, in which those who become diseased are humanely treated. At the back, and a little east of the fort, is a barn containing a mammoth threshing machine; and near this are a number of long sheds, used for storing grain in the sheaf. And behold the Vancouver farm, stretching up and down the river (3,000 acres, fenced into beautiful fields) sprinkled with dairy houses, and herdsmen and shepherds’ cottages! A busy place. The farmer on horseback at break of day, summons one hundred half-breeds and Iroquois Indians from their cabins to the fields. Twenty or thirty ploughs tear open the generous soil; the sowers follow with their seed, and pressing on them come a dozen harrows to cover it; and thus thirty or forty acres are planted in a day, till the immense farm is under crop. The season passes on, teeming with daily industry, until the harvest waves on all these fields. Then sickle and hoe glisten in tireless activity to gather in the rich reward of this toil; the food of seven hundred at this post, and of thousands more at the posts on the deserts in the east and {266} north. The saw mill, too, is a scene of constant toil. Thirty or forty Sandwich Islanders are felling the pines and dragging them to the mill; sets of hands are plying two gangs of saws by night and day. Three thousand feet of lumber per day; nine hundred thousand feet per annum; are constantly being shipped to foreign ports. The grist mill is not idle. It must furnish bread stuff for the posts, and the Russian market in the north-west. And its deep music is heard daily and nightly half the year.