A lively recounting of the tough men and heroic but overworked packhorses who broke open B.C. to the big business of the 19th-century fur trade.

Facing a gruelling thousand-mile trail, the brigades of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) pushed onward over mountains and through ferocious river crossings to reach the isolated fur-trading posts. But it wasn't just the landscape the brigades faced, as First Nations people struggled with the desire to resist, or assist, the fur company's attempts to build their brigade trails over the Aboriginal trails that led between Indigenous communities, which surrounded the trading posts. Nancy Marguerite Anderson reveals how the devastating Cayuse War of 1847 forced the HBC men over a newly-explored overland trail to Fort Langley. The journey was a disaster-in-waiting.

Nancy Marguerite Anderson studied art, sailed the west coast, worked for the government, managed and owned a delicatessen and sold products for a natural-health company before discovering her love for writing and researching. As a descendent of fur traders who worked for the North West Company and the later Hudson's Bay Company, she is especially interested in discovering the stories of her heritage. Anderson has dedicated many years to writing this book about her great-grandfather, the fur trader and explorer Alexander Caulfield Anderson. She is descended from A.C. Anderson through his youngest son, Arthur Beattie Anderson, born in 1864. Anderson lives in Victoria, BC.

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