agree “to joint occupancy,” the treaty in no way to affect the final question of ownership. * * * * * [Illustration: Sir James Douglas, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company in British Columbia.] If Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland were united under one flag, if that flag had the motto _Pro Pelle Cutem_--“Skin for Skin”--and the mystic letters H. B. C.--Hudson’s Bay Company--it would give some idea of the size of the fur traders’ kingdom ruled by McLoughlin. At a bend in the Columbia on the north side, far enough from the coast to be away from the rivalry of Pacific schooners, near enough to be in touch with tidewater, stood the capital of the kingdom, Fort Vancouver. Spruce slabs half a foot thick, twenty feet high, sharp at both ends and in double rows, composed the walls. Great gates with brass hinges extending half way across the top and bottom beams, opened leaf-wise toward the river. On the northwest corner stood a bastion whose lower stories served as powder magazine and upper windows as look-out. Cannon bristled through the double palisades of the fort, and to one side of the main gate was the customary wicket through which goods could be exchanged for furs from the Indians. The big, two-story, timbered house in the center of the court was the residence of the Chief Factor. On both sides were stores and warehouses and fur presses and the bachelors’ quarters and the little log cabins, where lived the married trappers. Trim lawns decorated with little rockeries of cannon balls divided the different buildings, and in front of the Chief Factor’s residence on the top of a large flagpole there blew to the breeze the flag with the letters H. B. C.--sign that a brigade was coming in, or a brigade setting out; or a ship had been sighted; or it was Sunday and the flying flag was signal to the Indians there would be no trade, a flag custom on Sundays that has lasted to this day. At the mouth of the Columbia, all that remained of Astor’s Fort Astoria and Lewis and Clarke’s Fort Clatsop was a moldering pile of rain-rotted logs with a little square-timbered hut where one lone Scotchman kept watch for incoming ships and possible wrecks. Eastward, where the Columbia takes its first bend was Walla Walla, under trader Pambrum; northward, where it takes a second bend, Okanogan under Ross; west, where it turns up into the Arrow Lakes of British Columbia, Fort Colville under Firman MacDonell; and half way between these two posts southward, Spokane House, founded by that John Clarke, who was with Robertson in Athabasca. These were the strongholds from which the Company ruled its transmontane kingdom, five little fur posts, all except Spokane, close to the main river trail, the capitals and sub-capitals of an empire big as half Europe.