_As a military fort Michilimackinac was scarcely adequate even to withstand the attacks of Indians. The post was maintained, however, because it was a convenient center of the fur trade. The small garrison, with its six-pound and nine-pound cannon mounted on the bastions, was enough to impress the Indians who lived in the vicinity and those who gathered here each summer with the reality of British armed might. This symbol of military power protected the English fur traders who made up the second, and most important, segment of the fort’s population._ _By 1767 Michilimackinac had become for the British as it had been for the French the headquarters for the fur trade of a fourth of the continent. Canoes were sent out from here loaded with trade goods to be exchanged for furs at distant Indian villages located in the uncharted wilderness north and west of Lake Superior, westward across the Mississippi, and southward to the Illinois country. For two or three months in the summer hundreds of _voyageurs_ and traders came back from the west, bringing in the furs they had gathered during the previous year or two. Like the lumberjacks of a later era, these men were bent on enjoying to the fullest degree their brief contact with the comforts of civilization before they returned to the west to barter for more furs._ _A few traders who had acquired sufficient means to enable them to hire others to do the actual trading remained here the year round and occupied cabins in the fort. These Michilimackinac traders, men like Benjamin Frobisher, Isaac Todd, George McBeath, and others not mentioned by Morison, together with their agents or partners in Montreal who obtained the trade goods and sold the furs, dominated the fur trade for decades._ _From Morison’s narrative we see that the officers and the traders permanently in residence at the fort formed an elite group. It is obvious that the French _habitants_ and half-breeds who comprised a third part of the fort’s population, not to mention the Indians of the area, were not admitted to this exclusive social club. That the strain of being cooped up in the small fort, cut off from all contact with the outside world for over half the year, proved too much for some of the members of this clique, especially the bachelors, is also obvious._