Freshwater Passages: The Trade and Travels of Peter Pond

A fur trader and explorer, Peter Pond (1740–1807) became one of the first English-speaking men to see much of North America, traveling its rivers and lakes from Long Island Sound to Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

At sixteen Pond joined the provincial army to fight in the Seven Years’ War. He tried his hand at seafaring, before turning his attention to the Great Lakes fur trade, exchanging British manufactured goods, tobacco, and rum for furs and skins hunted by members of Algonquian nations. He spent two winters on the Minnesota River trading with Dakotas before setting his sights to the lands of the Cree and Assiniboine in what is now Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In 1778 he made a pathbreaking voyage to the homelands of the Chipewyan around Lake Athabasca, farther northwest than any trader from the Eastern Seaboard had previously been.

Pond became a partner in Montreal’s North West Company, drawing some of the earliest maps of central Canada, and organized the westernmost parts of the Canadian fur trade on behalf of merchants in Montreal. He developed ideas about what lay between his own explorations and contemporary voyages of Captain James Cook in the North Pacific. He shared these ideas, most notably, with Alexander Mackenzie, who would reach the Arctic and Pacific Oceans overland from Lake Athabasca shortly after Pond retired from the trade.

Whereas previous depictions have caricatured Pond as a quarrelsome brute, Freshwater Passages presents him as an intellectually curious, proud, talented, and ambitious man, living in a world that could often be quite violent. David Chapin draws together a wide range of sources and information to present a nuanced and multidimensional portrait of Pond.