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The Cast
Everyone named in the narrative, one page each.
How they looked, where they were from, what they spoke, what they likely wore. Attested detail is cited inline; the rest is period-typical reconstruction, and labeled as such rather than left to read as fact. A few entries are not one person but a type — a composite figure built only from what the store's own sources describe, used where the record names a role but not an individual (a voyageur on the portage, say) — and those are marked apart from the people.
The cast runs from the portage to 1919, and several people are here because the record almost failed to keep them: a man auctioned on a Chicago sidewalk in 1842 to pay for the cost of his own imprisonment, a seamstress whose wages are known only because a federal commission put her under oath, a seventeen-year-old whose drowning this store can describe the consequences of at length and the person at almost none. One entry has no name at all — the keeper who saved the city’s water intake on the night of the fire, whose testimony survives and whose name does not.