Besides the powerful house of McTavish, Frobisher, Todd, McGill and McGillivray, were hosts of lesser traders who literally peddled their goods to the Indians. In 1778, these pedlars pooled their stock and outfitted Peter Pond to go on beyond the Frobisher posts to Athabasca. Here, some miles south of the lake, Pond built his fort. Pond was a Boston man of boundless ambition and energy but utterly unscrupulous. While at Athabasca, he heard from the Indians rumors of the Russian fur traders on the Pacific Coast and he drew that famous map of the interior, which was to be presented to the Empress of Russia. He seems to have been cherishing secret designs of a great fur monopoly. Fur posts sprang up on the waterways of the West like mushrooms. Rum flowed like water—50,000 gallons a year “the pedlars” brought to the Saskatchewan from Montreal. Disorders were bound to ensue. At Eagle Hills near Battleford, in 1780, the drunken Crees became so obstreperous in their demands for more liquor that the three terrified traders cooped up in their house tried to save themselves by putting laudanum in the liquor. An Indian was drugged to death. The sobered Crees sulky from their debauch, arose to a man, rammed the doors, stabbed the three whites and seven half-breed traders to death, burnt the fort and sent coureurs running from tribe to tribe across the prairie to conspire for a massacre of all white traders in the country. Down on the Assiniboine at what is now known as Portage la Prairie, where the canoemen portaged across to Lake Manitoba and so to Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, were three strong trading houses under two men called Brice and Boyer. With them were twenty-three Frenchmen. Three different companies had their rendezvous here. The men were scattered in the three houses and off guard when one night the darkness was made hideous by the piercing war cry of the Assiniboines. Before lights could be put out, the painted warriors had swooped down on two of the houses. The whites were butchered as they dashed out—eleven men in as many seconds. The third house had warning from the shots at the others. Brice and Boyer were together. Promptly, lights were put out, muskets rammed through the parchment windows and chinks of the log walls, and a second relay of loaded weapons made ready. When the Assiniboines attempted to rush the third house, they were met with a solid crash of musketry that mowed down some thirty warriors and gave the assailants pause. With checked ardor, the Indians retreated to the other houses. They could at least starve the white men out, but the white men wisely did not wait. While the Assiniboines rioted, drunk on the booty of rum in the captured cabins, Brice ordered all liquor spilt in his house. Taking what peltries he could, abandoning the rest, Brice led a dash for the river. Darkness favored the fugitive whites. Three only of the retreating men fell under the shower of random arrows—Belleau, Facteau, Lachance.