Nancy Marguerite Anderson is Metis, and an accepted member of Metis Nation British Columbia. She is descended from a North West Company voyageur known to have lived and worked in Red River District for many years; a man who crossed the Rocky Mountains with explorer David Thompson, and whose daughter married a Scottish gentleman in the west. Because of her Scottish ancestors' involvement with the York Factory Express and the HBC Brigades on the Pacific Slopes, she has (to her surprise) become a transportation historian of sorts, writing about the journeys that the Hudson's Bay Company men made both east and west of the Rocky Mountains.

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. This book contains Archival images, maps.