My mother is descended from an extraordinary North American lineage of English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish Puritans and Quakers, New Netherlands Dutch, and French-Canadian fur traders.
Most of my life I have been fascinated by the history of North American fur trade, and have researched and blogged about my French-Canadian voyageur ancestors for almost a decade.
All that said, you can imagine my absolute thrill when I found one of the most famous fur traders of all time lurking in our family tree…
PETER POND (1739–1807), NORTH WEST COMPANY FOUNDER, CARTOGRAPHER, AND FUR TRADER — MY 4TH COUSIN 7X REMOVED
Pond was an army officer (French Indian War), explorer and fur trader. He was also a Connecticut Yankee (thus of suspect loyalty in British North America in the years following the American Revolution).
He was not as well-educated as his competitors — including his one-time protege turned glory-seeking rival, Alexander Mackenzie — and his maps were less mathematically precise.
And then there were those two murders, if that is what they were, deaths in which Pond was neither formally charged nor cleared of suspicion in the minds of contemporaries.
HIS ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
He played a key role in opening up the Athabasca region to the fur trade and was also one of the original partners in the North West Company.
Pond explored farther north and west than any European before him, and was the first to cross the Methye Portage, a 20-km trek that separates the Hudson Bay and Arctic watersheds.
He was the first to record the features of the Mackenzie river system, information Alexander Mackenzie used in his great voyages of exploration.
He was the first non-Native to note, and make use of, the oil-sands “tar” bubbling from the blackened banks of Lake Athabasca.
Peter Pond was always too much of a presence in his extraordinary voyages of exploration to be completely ignored by contemporaries or later historians, but also too discomfiting, in his time and later, to be given his full due.
BIOGRAPHY:
Peter Pond was born in Milford, Connecticut, around 1739. After a brief military career, in 1765 he joined his father in Detroit to work in the fur trade. He quickly made enough money to enter into partnership with free traders who would be involved in the future North West Company (Simon McTavish, Alexander Henry, the Frobisher brothers, and others) and to organize an expedition west of the Great Lakes.
It was while looking to extend their territory that he discovered Athabasca, that rich reservoir of pelts between Lac Île-à-la-Crosse and the Peace River. The maps he subsequently drew, based on his explorations and on the information provided to him by Native peoples, would grant him international renown at the end of the 18th century.
1773 to 1775, Pond collected furs in present-day Minnesota and Wisconsin. His journal reveals that he had not completed his studies but that he had an acute sense of observation when describing the Sioux, the Saulteux (Ojibwa) and the Mandan.
1775, two events drew his interest to the northwest: the First Nations wars in the Mississippi area and the many furs from Saskatchewan that he had heard of traders bringing to Montreal and to Hudson's Bay.
Pond then joined Alexander Henry to winter at Dauphin Lake -- which had been known since La Vérendrye -- while Thomas Frobisher went up the Saskatchewan with Charles Paterson, another free trader.
1777, the profitable trade conducted by Thomas Frobisher at Lac Île-à-la-Crosse, on the edge of the Athabasca drainage system interested other traders in the area. However, at such a distance, labour and the transport of supplies were very expensive. Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, as well as McTavish and Company, joined forces and asked Pond to lead an expedition into the Athabasca region, an area not well known by traders beyond accounts by Native peoples.
1778-1779, Pond travelled to Île-à-la-Crosse, crossed a few small lakes and reached the La Loche (Methye) portage, which was shown to him by Native people. Nearly 20 kilometres long, this portage was so steep that it took him eight days to cross with the canoes, food and trade-goods, but allowed him to cross from La Loche Lake, in the hydrographic basin of Hudson's Bay, to Pelican River (Clearwater) in the Athabasca basin.
His discovery would open up the Athabasca country to the fur trade. Pond wintered on the Athabasca River some 25 kilometres from Lake Athabasca. He intercepted a large group of Cree and Chipewyan who were making an annual trip to Fort Prince of Wales. Pleased not to have to go as far as Hudson's Bay, they agreed to pay a little more for trade goods. As a result, Pond found himself with more pelts than his canoes could carry. He had to hide some and return for them later.
1781-1782, Pond joined the trading company of McBeath, Côté and Graves and, wintered at Lac La Ronge with Jean-Étienne Waddens, a representative of another company. An argument arose between the two men and Pond shot Waddens. He escaped the law, his action having taken place in an area outside the jurisdiction of the courts.
Another account states that in 1782, fur-trading rival Jean-Etienne Waden was shot through the thigh and bled to death in Lac La Ronge (present day Saskatchewan).
1783, Pond went to Athabasca where he explored the waterways around Lake Athabasca. Native people told him the approximate locations of Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake and possibly also those of the Peace and Mackenzie rivers.
1784-1785, During the winter in Montreal, Pond transcribed this information on a map, showing rivers and lakes from west of the Great Lakes and Hudson's Bay to the Rocky Mountains and, north, to the Arctic.
The map included a large river (the Mackenzie) which, originating in Lake Athabasca, crossed Great Slave Lake and flowed towards the Arctic Ocean.
1785, a copy of this map, accompanied by a report -- probably written by one of the Frobishers, but signed by Pond -- was submitted to the United States Congress and another to the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec, Henry Hamilton. Pond asked Hamilton to support his project to explore the limits of North America's northwest. Sent on to London, the request was denied.
“The original Map being incumbered with a great deal of writing, I have thought it best to transcribe it separately with the references marked, by the numbers. - Copied by St. John de Crevecoeur for his Grace of La Rochefoucault."
Having become a partner in the North West Company, founded in 1784, Pond got as far as the Peace River area in 1786-1787. During the winter, he again quarreled with a competitor, John Ross, who was killed by a bullet during a brawl. A witness would later state that a Canadian called Pesche shot Ross, on Pond's orders.
Another source suggests that in 1787, another rival, John Ross, was shot dead near Athabasca, probably by a man in Pond’s employ.
This second murder forced the trader-explorer to abandon the fur trade, and he left the northwest in the spring of 1788, never to return.
Pond continued to draw maps of the northwest. A version prepared for the Empress of Russia showed that he was aware of Captain Cook's discoveries. The latter had taken an Alaskan inlet (which bears his name today) for a river flowing from the east. Pond transposed this information onto a map in 1787, leading one to believe strongly that it flowed from Great Slave Lake. The alacrity with which Pond made changes, trusting to James Cook's unconfirmed discoveries, severely tainted his credibility. However, he was not the only one to make this kind of mistake.
1790, Pond sold his shares in the North West Company to William McGillivray and returned to Milford, Connecticut, where he died in 1807.
A violent and ambitious man, Peter Pond contributed to the mapping of Canada by drawing the general outline of the river basin that Mackenzie, heavily influenced by his predecessor, recorded in 1789.
BEAVER CLUB FOUNDING MEMBER
SOURCES:
Buxton, William J. (Ed.)(2019) — Harold Innis on Peter Pond
Gates, Charles (Ed.)(1965) — Five Fur Traders of the Northwest. Being the narrative of Peter Pond and the diaries of John Macdonell, Archibald N. McLeod, Hugh Faries, and Thomas Connor
Innis, Harold A. (1930) — Peter Pond: Fur Trader and Adventurer
