Thomas Correy, Forrest Oakes, and Charles Boyer were pedlars -- independent traders operating out of Montreal without the backing of a major company. Around 1768, they established the first Pine Fort on the Assiniboine, pushing into territory the Assiniboine people considered their own trade corridor. The Indigenous middlemen had profitable reasons to resist: they controlled the flow of furs from western and southern nations to the Hudson's Bay Company posts on the bay. The fort's presence threatened that monopoly. Despite the tension, trade continued for over a decade. Then, in 1781, a devastating smallpox epidemic swept through the region, killing many of the local Assiniboine people and some of the traders themselves. The first Fort des Epinettes was abandoned.

The North West Company recognized what the pedlars had stumbled onto. In 1785, they built a second post about three-quarters of a mile upstream from the original site. The location was strategic: near the head of easy navigation on the Assiniboine and squarely in buffalo country, which meant a steady supply of pemmican -- the concentrated meat-and-fat food that fueled canoe brigades across the continent. Fort des Epinettes became a major depot. In 1790, the explorer Peter Pond noted that trade extended to the Mandan villages, twelve days away on horseback to the south. The fort thrived until 1794, when the North West Company consolidated operations at the new Fort Assiniboine, eighteen miles to the west.

The story might have ended there, but the Assiniboine had one more chapter to offer. In 1807, the North West Company dismantled Fort Assiniboine and rafted its timbers downriver to the old Fort des Epinettes site, reassembling a post from the bones of its successor. This third incarnation lasted until 1811, when operations shifted upriver again to Fort la Souris. The site itself sat on a horseshoe bend with good supplies of birchbark and watap for canoe-building, though few large trees for construction. That bend eventually became an oxbow lake, cut off from the main river channel in 1979.

When geologist Joseph Tyrrell visited the site in 1890, he found that much of it had already been washed away by the Assiniboine's persistent current. Archaeological excavations conducted between 1971 and 1974 recovered what they could. Today the site lies within Spruce Woods Provincial Park, roughly a mile northwest of where Manitoba Highway 5 crosses the river. No walls stand. No stockade remains. The Assiniboine, which gave the fort its reason for existing, eventually reclaimed the ground. What survives is the story: of pedlars risking everything on an unknown river, of pemmican stores feeding a continental enterprise, and of a McKay staring down six hundred warriors with nothing but trade goods and nerve.