Its a living history site of the Minnesota Historical Society. As you step through the pickets that form the perimeter of the post, you step back 200 years. Staff members portray characters from 1804. On the day I visited this spring, a French-Canadian woman named Josette led a group of schoolchildren, explaining the function of the rooms in the post. There are six rooms in the fur post.
Pelts hang from the wall in the Indian Shop, where tribe members came to trade furs for goods.
In the clerks' quarters, playing cards and checkers look as if they might have been recently handled by snowbound clerks. The voyageurs' quarters housed eight men in a cramped room. The family quarters housed the field director for the post, plus his Ojibwa wife and family. There also are a warehouse room and an orientation room with modern-day museum displays to explain the site. Outside the perimeter a garden is planted in the fashion of the original fur traders, and a wigwam is typical of the Ojibwa tribe.