Fort Union is up that way, right near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers. Soooo... we rolled our way through the heavy road construction and made our first stop there.
The fort sits on a low rise above the Missouri and was at one time THE place on the upper Missouri.
The place has the look of the "Hollywood" forts with the stockades, though, the Bastions built with rock are a lil' fancier.
With two bastions, set in diagonally opposite corners, the walls of the stockade would be pretty much impregnable to a fella on a horse with nothing but arrows...
If you were foolish enough to come at 'em with a bad attitude... 'tween the cannons protecting the walls... and all the firing ports for riflemen... You were bound to have a bad day...
Even at the main gate they had some pretty good protection. Traders might be allowed inside the first gate...
Just inside the first gate is a second... with the trading area the building on the left... in especially rough times... they kept the gate shut and you did your "trading" through that lil' window in the stockade wall...
Inside that Trading Area is a pretty fine great room... if you were allowed in! :)
From the parapets they had a 360 degree view from the river to the rolling country to the north... though... "rolling" might be a little bit of an exaggeration.
I believe they called the fella running the place the Bourgeois... and even back in the Missouri River Wilderness, in 1820 something... they guy lived pretty fine...
A lil' display of the difference in housing twixt the "Traders" and the Souix, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Flathead et al.
On the left of that frame and another set over behind the Tipi... is the foundation beams of where they had warehouses, stores and quarters for the people living/working there. One of the tasks was to take buffalo robes and other furs too I suppose and compress them into 100 lb bales for shipment back to the settlements...
They got pretty high tech there... Big Log... a couple of fat guys hoppin' on the end and Wa La! Compressed fur!
Well, with the tourista stuff done for the day we moved on up to the Oil Boomtown of Williston, North Dakota... where you'd never know there was any sort of economic hard times... There or Sydney for that matter. There's not hardly a store front without a "Help Wanted" sign... and the stores and shops are all bustling...
The Walmart in Williston, where we stocked up for the next few weeks of work is supposed to be the #1 profitable store in the country... the goods don't hardly stop moving... they just flow off the trucks and right on up to the registers. :)
The road construction slowed us down so much I was a mite afeared we could be late getting back for our shift, but... clever guy I am... I read the map and found another way around that had us sailing back into the fairgrounds in plenty of time to get ready and roll on over to the Sugar Factory to add some more sweetness to your morning coffee!
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| *Sydney Sugars Factory* |
... only trouble is... I got one slow brain trying to keep track of 'em all!
It's work work work
Brian
1 comment:
I was thinking as I read the final part of the blog.... why you are a virtual work machine these days... and so it is!!
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