This book is about the first hundred years in the life of Pembina, a fur trading post, then a small town near the center of North America, first inhabited in 1797.
During its first 50 years, the town served as a rendezvous point for buffalo hunt brigades, a highly organized effort to provide dried and processed buffalo meat for fur traders in the far north.
At mid-century the town's attention turned to official management of traffic across the international boundary between the United States and British North America.
Along the way, Pembina witnessed and played its own role in:
the arrival of the Selkirk settlers in the area that would become Winnipeg, giving them shelter and sustenance during the first decade of their struggle for survival; the final 60 years of the conflict that was the North American fur trade, a battle between the Hudson's Bay Company, the North West Company, the X Y Company, the American Fur Company, and the independent hunter/traders; the beginning of the settlement that would become St. Paul, the southern terminus of the Pembina ox cart trail; the fixing of and the surveying of the 49th parallel of north latitude, the boundary between the United States and British North America; the formation of the Dominion of Canada and the Province of Manitoba, including the "Riel Rebellion" and the surrender of Hudson's Bay Company's sovereign rights granted under its Royal Charter of 1670; the development of the Territories, then States, of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Frontier characters populating this story include:
Enos Stutsman, a frontier lawyer who had been born without legs; Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk, founder of the settlement that would become Winnipeg; Father Joseph Goiffon, the frozen priest of Pembina; Sir Alexander McKenzie and David Thompson, North West Company explorers of Canada; Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Pembina's suffragette; Mr. Belymire, a prisoner, his hands in shackles, who leaped from a Red River steamboat to save a three-year-old girl who had fallen overboard; "Jolly Joe" Rolette, larger-than-life fur trader and legislator; a broad assortment of bishops, rogues, fur traders, politicians, soldiers and financiers.
