Freshwater Passages: The Trade and Travels of Peter Pond

Preface

ix PREFACE When Peter Pond was born in 1740 none of the people living in North America could accurately picture the entirety of their home continent. To the British colonists along the Atlantic, the interior beyond the Mississippi River was mostly unknown, while their countrymen on Hudson Bay seldom ventured inland from their bayside trading posts.The French along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, and on the Great Lakes, similarly had little knowledge of what lay very far west of the Mississippi or northwest of Lake Superior. The Spanish in Mexico and New Mexico seldom ventured very far north of Santa Fe,while Native societies throughout the continent knew their own regions and traded hundreds of miles into neighboring regions, but still had limited knowledge of what lay beyond. During Peter Pond’s lifetime that situation changed. As a fur trader and explorer, Pond participated in an expansion of knowledge about North America. As a teenager he left his hometown in Milford, Connecticut, to go to war against the French in Canada. When the war ended he became a trader around the Great Lakes. He moved west and north from there - first to the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers , and then into the Canadian Northwest as far as Great Slave Lake. Pond is best known as a partner in Montreal’s North West Company and as the trader who opened up the remote Athabasca region to the x ∙ preface fur trade out of Montreal. With his crew of French Canadian voyageurs, he was the first trader to cross the Methye Portage between the Hudson Bay and Arctic watersheds in what is now northern Saskatchewan. He is also known for his maps, which for much of the 1780s were the best available cartographic representations of much of what is now central and western Canada. Finally he is known as the mentor of Alexander Mackenzie, who made his famous journey down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Sea based on Pond’s theories about the best route to the Pacific Ocean. What follows is a biography.The focus is on Peter Pond’s personal story and his individual experiences. Pond was a curious, proud, talented, and ambitious man, living in a world that could often be quite violent. He lacked much formal education and was in many ways quite rough, but he was intellectually engaged with the world around him. He studied the geography, natural history, and cultures of the places he visited, and the knowledge he gathered spread to both sides of the Atlantic. Some previous accounts have caricatured Pond as a violent and unprincipled man, even a murderer, while the present account attempts to portray a fuller image of this unique individual. One cannot tell Pond’s story without also telling the story of the growth of the North American fur trade. Pond was part of a generation of traders who came of age while English-speaking people were extending their influence and their trade across North America. After fighting in the Seven Years’War, Pond ventured north and west through Albany to the Great Lakes, where he found an environment that was open to ambitious young traders. The most successful of these young men would ultimately help shape a global market in furs. Finally, Pond’s story is a story of exploration, both geographic and cultural. Throughout his career Pond traveled to places little known to the world he came from. He exchanged goods and information with individuals from a variety of Iroquoian,Algonquian,Siouan,and Athapaskan cultures. This was the context of Pond’s intellectual life. He sought to learn about the most remote parts of North America and the people who lived there. Like many of his predecessors and contemporaries he preface ∙ xi speculated about western geography and about the best route to the Pacific Ocean from his fur-trading grounds.He drew maps of the western regions. In this he was participating in a great endeavor of his day, the goal of discovering what North America truly looked like. Writing a biography of a man who traveled widely involves traveling widely oneself. The research for this project took me to cities, towns, archives, libraries, and historical sites throughout the United States, Canada , and Great Britain. It also took me to many of the rivers and lakes that Pond traveled over. I learned about Pond by visiting the places he lived in...