Grand Portage was eighteen hundred miles from Montreal and lay at the foot of a hill, the buildings engirt by eighteen-foot palisades. It was here rival traders were usually stopped. When the Montreal merchants first went to the Northwest, their headquarters had been Michilimacinac, but this was too close to rival traders. The Frobishers and McGillivrays and McTavishes decided to seek some good location on the north shore of the lake leading directly to the Up Country. Grand Portage on Pigeon River leading up to the height of land drained by Rainy River, was chosen for the fort, but when the American boundary was specified by treaty, it was found that Grand Portage was in foreign territory. The partners looked for an eastern site that would still be on waterways leading toward Rainy River. The very year, 1785, that the Nor’Westers had petitioned the government for monopoly, they sent voyageurs seeking such a site. The man who led the voyageurs was that Edward Umfreville, who had been captured by the French on Hudson Bay, in 1782, and had now come to join the Nor’Westers. Umfreville found a chain of waterways leading up from Lake Superior to Lake Nipigon and from Nipigon west to Winnipeg River, but later, in 1797, Roderick MacKenzie found the trail of the fur traders in the old French régime--by way of Kaministiquia; and to the mouth of the Kaministiquia headquarters were moved by 1800, and the post named Fort William in honor of that William McGillivray who had bought out Peter Pond. The usual slab-cut palisades surrounded the fort. In the center of the square stood the main building surmounted by a high balcony. Inside was the great saloon or hall--sixty feet by thirty--decorated with paintings of the leading partners in the full flush of ruffles and court costume. Here the partners and clerks and leading guides took their meals. Round this hall were the partners’ bedrooms; in the basement, the kitchen. Flanking the walls of the courtyard were other buildings equally large--the servants’ quarters, storehouses, warerooms, clerks’ lodgings. The powder magazine was of stone roofed with tin with a look-out near the roof commanding a view of the lake. There was also a jail which the voyageurs jocularly called their _pot au beurre_, or butter tub. The physician, Doctor McLoughlin, a young student of Laval, Quebec, who had been forced to flee west for pitching a drunken British officer of Quebec Citadel on his head in the muddy streets, had a house to himself near the gate. Over the gate was a guardhouse, where sentry sat night and day. Inside the palisades was a population of from twelve hundred to two thousand people. Outside the fort a village of little log houses had scattered along the river front. Here dwelt the Indian families of the French voyageurs.