repeated install errors - 2011 13" Macbook pro, clean install (formatted SSD)

Hi all,

this is frustrating. I've (well into the past) done this many times. God daughter's mac was very slow; she works 99% from the cloud, so after some quick maintenance i offered to format and re-install.

I booted to an external USB drive (10.12), ran disk utility, formatted it HFS+/Journaled. Re booted and it would not boot from external drive - only from recovery partition. Odd. So i proceeded to install, with only 10.11 (El Cap) offered (again, odd, why?). I had several errors ("try again") after which it appeared to proceed, downloading "additional modules". Then failed with the error "no packages were eligible for install, contact the software manufacturer......"

Please help. I simply want a clean install of High Sierra (10.13) the OS that was running previously and to the best of my knowledge, the end of the road for this machine.

TIA, G