The great feature of the settlement, however, was the central building. This wooden edifice stood in the middle of a spacious square and had a long balcony, five feet from the ground. In the centre, flanked by rows of apartments, was a great dining hall, sixty feet long by thirty wide, where two hundred agents, partners, clerks, interpreters, guides, and visitors could dine. Across the upper end of the hall was stretched a very large map of the Indian country, with all the Northwest Company’s posts and routes from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay and the Pacific,--probably the only accurate map of that region on the continent, save for its smaller copies in the factories themselves. Along the sides of the room were portraits of various proprietors of the company, a bust of Simon McTavish, a pioneer member of the company and long its head, a full-length portrait of Nelson, and a painting of the battle of the Nile. To this post came every spring from Montreal two of the directors of the company, with a retinue of cooks, bakers, clerks, and attendants, and in the great hall from the last of May to the end of August there was always high carnival of feasting and merriment. In this room, too, were held the parliaments of the fur trade, when with all solemnity the Scottish chiefs regulated the affairs of the company and shrewdly made their bargains and estimated their earnings. About them gathered a host of traders, coming every day out of the bleak wilderness to enjoy the good cheer of this metropolis of the Northwest and spend their hard-earned gains in the short summer holiday; and with these came a legion of half-breeds, Indians, and hangers-on. It was a picturesque and motley throng. Ross Cox, visiting there in 1817, found natives of every part of the British Isles, of France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Switzerland, and, in the capacity of servants, of Africa, the Sandwich Islands, and Bengal. “In their features,” he says, “all shades of the human species,--in their dress, all the varied hues of the rainbow.”