Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 29).djvu/70

 the water side. The noble river before it is sixteen hundred and seventy yards wide, and from five to seven fathoms in depth; the whole surrounding country is covered with {264} forests of pine, cedar, and fir, &c., interspersed here and there with small open spots; all overlooked by the vast snowy pyramids of the President's Range, thirty-five miles in the east.

The fort itself is an oblong square two hundred and fifty yards in length, by one hundred and fifty in breadth, enclosed by pickets twenty feet in height. The area within is divided into two courts, around which are arranged thirty-five wooden buildings, used as officers' dwellings, lodging apartment for clerks, storehouses for furs, goods, and grains; and as workshops for carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, tinners, wheelwrights, &c. One building near the rear gate is occupied as a school-house; and a brick structure as a powder-magazine. The wooden buildings are constructed in the following manner. Posts are raised at convenient intervals, with grooves in the facing sides; in these grooves planks are inserted horizontally; and the walls are complete. Rafters raised upon plates in the usual way, and covered with boards, form the roofs.

Six hundred yards below the fort, and on the bank of the river, is a village of fifty-three wooden houses, generally constructed {265} like those within the pickets. In these live the Company's servants. Among them is a hospital, in which those who become diseased are humanely treated. At the back, and a little east of the fort, is a barn containing a mammoth threshing machine; and near this are a number of long sheds, used for storing grain in the sheaf. And behold the Vancouver farm, stretching up and down the river (3,000 acres, fenced into beautiful fields) sprinkled with dairy houses, and herdsmen and shepherds' cottages! A busy place.