The Nor’West brigades pause to divide again. A dozen canoes go up the Assiniboine for Portage la Prairie and Dauphin, and Swan Lake, and Lake Manitoba and Qu’Appelle, and Souris. Three or four groups of men are detailed to camp at the Forks (Winnipeg) and trade and keep an eye on the doings of the Hudson’s Bay--above all keep them from obtaining the hunt. When not trading, the men at the Forks are expected to lay up store of pemmican meat for the other departments, by buffalo hunting. Not till the winter of 1807-8 does MacDonald of Garth, a wiry Highlander of military family and military air, with a red head and a broken arm--build a fort here for the Nor’Westers, which he ironically calls Gibraltar because it will command the passage of both rivers, though there was not a rock the size of his hand in sight. Gibraltar is very near the site of the Cree graveyard and boasts strong palisades with storage cellars for liquors and huge warehouses for trade. Not to be outdone, the Hudson’s Bay look about for a site that shall also command the river, and they choose two miles farther down Red River, where their cannon can sweep all incoming and outgoing canoes. When this fort is built a few years later, it is called Fort Douglas. Two brigades ascend the Red as far south as Pembina south of the Boundary, one to range all regions radiating from Grand Forks and Pembina, the other to cross country to the Mandanes on the Missouri. Charles Chaboillez sends Antoine Larocque with two clerks and two voyageurs from the Assiniboine and the Red to the Missouri in 1804, where they meet the American explorers, Lewis and Clarke, with forty men on their way to the Pacific; and, to the Nor’Westers’ amazement, are also Hudson’s Bay traders. The American officers draw the Canadians’ attention to the fact--this is American territory. British flags must not be given to the Indians and no “_derouines_” are to take place--a trade term meaning that the drummers who come to beat up trade are not to draw the Indians away to British territory. Charbonneau, the Northwest voyageur, ignores his debt to the Company and deserts to become guide for Lewis and Clarke. “I can hardly get a skin when the Hudson’s Bay trader is here,” complains Larocque, “for the Englishmen speak the Mandan language.” Nevertheless Larocque dispatches to the bourgeois Mr. Chaboillez on the Assiniboine, six packs worth £40 each. Charles MacKenzie, the clerk, remains three years trading among the Mandans for the Nor’Westers, and with true trader’s instinct chuckles within himself to hear Old Serpent, the Indian Chief, boast that if he had these forty Americans “out on the plains, his young warriors would do for them as for so many wolves.”