There was constant shifting of men in the different departments of the Northwest Company. When Henry passed down Red River, in 1808, to go up the Saskatchewan, half the brigades struck westward from the Forks (Winnipeg), up the Assiniboine River to Portage la Prairie and Souris, and Qu’ Appelle and Dauphin and Swan Lake. Each post of this department was worth some £700 a year to the Nor’Westers. Not very large returns when it is considered that a keg of liquor costing the Company less than $10 was sold to the Indians for one hundred and twenty beaver valued at from $2.00 to $3.00 a skin. “Mad” McKay, a Mr. Miller and James Sutherland were the traders for the Hudson’s Bay in this region, which included the modern provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Among the Nor’Westers, McLeod was the wintering partner and his chief clerks were the mystic dreamers--Harmon, that Louis Primo, who had deserted from Matthew Cocking on the Saskatchewan, and Cuthbert Grant, the son of a distinguished Montreal merchant and a Cree mother, who combined in himself the leadership qualities of both races and rapidly rose to be the chosen chief of the Freemen or Half-Breed Rangers known as the _Bois Brulés_--men of “the burnt or blazed woods.” The saintly Harmon had been shocked to find his bourgeois Norman McLeod with an Indian spouse, but to different eras are different customs and he presently records in his diary that he, too, has taken an Indian girl for a wife--the daughter of a powerful chief--because, Harmon explains to his own uneasy conscience, “if I take her I am sure I shall get _all_ the furs of the Crees,” and who shall say that in so doing, Harmon did either better or worse than the modern man or woman, who marries for worldly interests? Let it be added--that, having married her, Harmon was faithful to the daughter of the Cree chief all his days and gave her the honor due a white wife. In the case of the fur traders, there was a deep, potent reason for these marriages between white men and Indian women. The white trader was one among a thousand hostiles. By marrying the daughter of a chief, he obtained the protection of the entire tribe. Harmon was on the very stamping ground of the fights between Cree and Sioux. By allying himself with his neighbors, he obtained stronger defense than a hundred palisaded forts. The danger was not small, as a single instance will show. Until May each year, Harmon spent the time gathering the furs, which were floated down the Assiniboine to Red River. It was while the furs were being gathered that the Sioux raiders would swoop from ambush in the high grasses and stampede the horses, or lie in hiding at some narrow place of the river and serenade the brigades with showers of arrows. Women and girls, the papoose in the moss bag, white men and red--none were spared, for the Sioux who could brandish the most scalps from his tent pole, was the bravest warrior.