VIDEOS: ‘A gut punch’: Wildfire destroys Robertson Trading in La Ronge

When a wildfire tore through Robertson Trading in La Ronge on the night of June 3, 2025, it wasn’t just a business that went up in smoke — it was a lifetime of memories, history, and dreams.

It’s a place that began as a fur trading post on July 2, 1967, and over the decades, it became a cultural cornerstone in La Ronge — a place where tradition was preserved and Indigenous art was treasured.

“It’s a gut punch, you feel it all. You feel regret, you feel sadness, frustration,” said co-owner Scott Robertson.

Scott Robertson said his father (T. Alex Robertson) was a Hudson’s Bay Company-trained fur buyer who spent years travelling Canada, trading with Indigenous peoples.

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“That was back in the day when it was like becoming a carpenter or a plumber, or an electrician. You would go to school — fur trading school in Montreal for a year or more,” he said.

“Then you would cycle through as an apprentice all the various posts across Canada — the Arctic, the western provinces, sometimes you would wind up in the east — You would learn to buy all those idiosyncratic skins like polar bears, walrus hides, and beluga whale hides, and all that weird stuff,” he said.

In the course of moving around Western Canada, his father spent almost a quarter of a century in remote communities and came to deeply respect and appreciate the culture, history, and people of the Indigenous communities he lived in

That’s an appreciation and respect that Robertson said he also grew up having.

“The moccasins, the moose hide jackets, beadwork — all that sort of stuff — and as a young man, I inherited that from him.”

A photo of some local men in La Ronge on the front steps of Robertson Trading (Robertson Trading Memories/Facebook)

Robertson and his siblings eventually took over the store from their dad, and as a family, they filled it with what he described as “the best of the best” from mostly Woodland Cree, but items from Dene as well.

“Over the course of a half a century, we have filled our store with some of the finest beadwork, moosehide moccasins, we would even hang on to a particularly good moosehide if it was well done,” he said.

“We would only buy beadwork that was done on smoke tan moosehide — the smell of smoke tan moosehide almost gives it a mark of authenticity… The smell becomes how you know it’s real.”

While the store had officially closed at the end of 2023, the family’s collection remained inside and had been opening periodically since then. So, when Robertson found out La Ronge was evacuating on June 2, he was up on the Churchill River and immediately made plans to paddle back.

Although the Robertsons lost the trading post, they did manage to save their cabin. Below are videos submitted by Robertson of their cabin.

“I was in the west end of Dead Lake. I paddled all day Tuesday, got to Missinipe, borrowed a vehicle from a friend, drove like hell through all that smoke and burn between the Stanley Mission junction and La Ronge, and got to La Ronge, ironically, just in time to watch our store burn.”

Robertson said it is an overwhelming mix of emotions that he is left with and something he struggles to talk about.

“It’s not like having an A&W burn down. This was different. This was a different business,” said Robertson.

“The best of the best became part of the Robertson’s Collection, and ironically, that’s the stuff that went up in smoke.”

They didn’t want to sell everything inside the store— rather, they wanted to preserve it.

“We always had this dream of putting a display together — a museum, an art gallery — somewhere down the road in the future, there would be a display of all this stuff and we would have a fantastic display.”

However, now, Robertson is left with a loss that goes far beyond brick and mortar.

“I’m 68 years old at my next birthday. I am too old to rebuild this, and honestly, that ship has sailed.”

“Some of this stuff is simply irreplaceable,” he said. “Twenty years ago, if you would have walked into Robertsons and said you wanted to buy a moosehide, we could have shown you one of 80 or 100 moose hides. We had tons of that stuff. I haven’t seen a good moosehide come in in years.”

Looking ahead to the future, Robertson said he is left with a lot of uncertainty as they try to navigate insurance on items worth more than money.

“The whole process is cumbersome, they are going to want a whole list of every damn thing that was in that store… I’m not even sure I’m capable of doing that — even though it’s probably the most photographed store in all of western Canada.”

Though Robertson said after he watched Robertson Trading burn down, he had to go save his family cabin that was also at risk of burning down.