Freshwater Passages: The Trade and Travels of Peter Pond

5. Mississippi Trader

85 CHAPTER FIVE Mississippi Trader Mississippi Bound When Pond returned from his latest voyage to the West Indies around March of 1773, he received a letter from Felix Graham with a business proposal. He visited his old partner in New York, and the two veteran traders came to an agreement for the coming year. Pond recalled,“We Lade in a cargo to the amount of four thousend Six Hundred Pounds [currency] & I went into the Entearor Part of the Cuntrey.”Their initial destination was Michilimackinac. Their plan was for Pond to venture west from there to the Mississippi River via Green Bay, along the same route that Carver and Tute had gone six years earlier. They embarked from New York likely sometime in May, when the trade routes opened up for the season.Graham escorted the majority of their goods in bateaux via the old route up the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, while Pond took a detour to Montreal via Lake Champlain. As he explained in his memoir ,“I wanted Sum Small artickels in the Indian way to Cumpleat my asortment which was not to be had in New York. I tharefour took my Boat threw Lake George & threw Lake Champlain to Montreal whare I found all I wanted.”¹ Pond followed the route north that he had first encountered seventeen years earlier as a young provincial soldier. One wonders what he thought about while walking the portage north out of Lake George, where he 86 ∙ mississippi trader had seen so much death. Did he hear the echoes of men dying in the abatis when he passed Fort Ticonderoga or reminisce about General Howe as he went by the site of his tragic and sudden death? Or perhaps Pond thought about the growing possibility of war to come. His journey to Montreal may have stemmed from nonimportation agreements that were part of the growing conflict leading up to the American Revolution . Some British goods now flowed more easily into Montreal than the tumultuous ports of New England or New York. Since the end of the last war, Montreal and Albany had offered competing routes to the interior; but in only two years New York and the Hudson Valley would again become a war zone. As a result, Montreal would fully supplant Albany in supplying the Great Lakes and beyond. Pond was expanding his horizons by detouring to Montreal, but doors were closing behind him as well. Unknown to him at the time, he was leaving the British colonial world of his youth for good. When he eventually returned more than a decade later he would be like Rip van Winkle-returning to a world transformed.² Pond had been to Montreal as a soldier, but now, more than a dozen years later, he certainly found the city more vibrant than it had been before. Montreal was well over a century old. There was a large francophone population in the city and surrounding countryside, and there was a growing anglophone community whose members had arrived from around the Empire. Pond likely found Montreal a more colorful city than New York, Albany, or Boston. A contemporary, the geographer and army officer Thomas Hutchins,would describe Montreal“as attached to dress and finery.” Hutchins observed that “from the number of silk sashes, laced coats, and powdered heads that are constantly seen in the streets, a stranger would imagine, that Montreal was wholly inhabited by people of independent fortunes.”³ It was certainly full of people, like Pond, out to make such fortunes. After finding what he needed, Pond arranged transportation west to Michilimackinac by canoe.The extensive rivers and lakes of the Canadian Shield (the region largely north of the Great Lakes where exposed granite frequently interrupts the free flow of rivers), favored light birch-bark mississippi trader ∙ 87 canoes over the heavy wooden bateaux used by Albany traders.Birch-bark canoes were an invention of Algonquians, who used them to travel over the interconnected waterways of their homelands, and Canadien craftsmen had built upon indigenous technology, creating larger birch-bark craft suited to the needs of traders. New Jersey–born Alexander Henry (the elder) was one of the first British traders to learn the Canadien style of travel by canoe, and to travel the route that Pond now followed. He described large craft made of birch bark wrapped around a frame of cedar ribs. Unlike aboriginal canoes, which were usually no more than eighteen...