Crees did not venture
east for fear of Sautaux and Iroquois. He mentions a river of
Sturgeons, where was a great store of fish.

The Crees wished to conduct the two white men to the wooded lake
region, northwest towards the land of the Assiniboines, where Indian
families took refuge on islands from those tigers of the plains--the
Sioux--who were invincible on horseback but less skilful in canoes.
The rivers were beginning to freeze. Boats were abandoned; but there
was no snow for snow-shoe travelling, and the explorers were unable to
transport the goods brought for trade. Bidding the Crees go to their
families and bring back slaves to carry the baggage, Radisson and
Groseillers built themselves the first fort and the first fur post
between the Missouri and the North Pole. It was evidently somewhere
west of Duluth in either what is now Minnesota or northwestern Ontario.

This fur post was the first habitation of civilization in all the Great
Northwest. Not the railway, not the cattle trail, not the path of
forward-marching empire purposely hewing a way through the wilderness,
opened the West. It was the fur trade that found the West. It was the
fur trade that explored the West. It was the fur trade that wrested
the West from savagery. The beginning was in the little fort built by
Radisson and Groseillers. No great factor in human progress ever had a
more insignificant beginning.

The fort was rushed up by two men almost starving for food. It was on
the side of a river, built in the shape of a triangle, with the base at
the water side. The walls were of unbarked logs, the roof of thatched
branches interlaced, with the door at the river side. In the middle of
the earth floor, so that the smoke would curl up where the branches
formed a funnel or chimney, was the fire. On the right of the fire,
two hewn logs overlaid with pine boughs made a bed. On the left,
another hewn log acted as a table. Jumbled everywhere, hanging from
branches and knobs of branches, were the firearms, clothing, and
merchandise of the two fur traders. Naturally, a fort two thousand
miles from help needed sentries. Radisson had not forgotten his
boyhood days of Onondaga. He strung carefully concealed cords through
the grass and branches around the fort. To these bells were fastened,
and the bells were the sentries. The two white men could now sleep
soundly without fear of approach. This fort, from which sprang the
buoyant, ag