Peter Pond

Peter Pond (1739/40-1807) opened up the Athabasca region to European awareness, exploration and, ultimately, economic development.

Although his father was a shoemaker, Pond, according to his own colourful account, was descended from five generations of “all waryers [warriors] Ither by Sea or land,” a legacy he followed. Born in Milford, Connecticut, Pond initially apprenticed in his father’s trade, which lacked the excitement he craved: “I found [staying] at home was too inactive a life for me.” He looked to the military to satisfy his desire for adventure and fought in the French and Indian War. After serving four years, he retired and next embarked upon a seafaring venture to the West Indies that occupied three years. What followed was

an interlude that must have seemed strangely quiet to this adventurer. He returned to Milford, married and fathered at least two, maybe three, children; he later described this period as the only “three years of my life I was three years in one place since I was sixteen years old to sixty.”

Pond’s questing nature turned then to the work that made him famous, or perhaps infamous, and he travelled west to join the fur trade business, probably in 1765. Operating at times in partnership and at others independently, Pond gradually began working his way farther north and west, all the while expanding his network of connections and honing the skills required of one who traded in the distant wilderness.

The strategy that set Pond apart from the dominant trading group of the day, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), was his willingness to venture into First Nations territory himself to acquire the valuable furs at their source rather than expecting indigenous hunters to travel long distances to him; he believed he would acquire more furs by relieving them of their “long, toilsome, and dangerous journies.”

It was in 1778 that Pond first set out for the region natives knew as Athabasca, and he emerged the following spring with only a portion of his total haul of made beaver, or prepared beaver pelts, as the total weight was too great for the canoes to carry. He returned and spent the next ten years trading in and exploring the Athabasca region in the northwest. Among the carefully recorded observations he made during this time are references to “tar” oozing from black-stained banks of Lake Athabasca. Pond

reported that Indians used it to caulk their canoes and concluded that, in the absence of a clearly identifiable source, it must have migrated from a more northern origin.

Pond’s accomplishments as an explorer are numerous. He pushed farther north and west than any other trader at that time; he was the first fur trader to cross Portage La Loche (also known as Methye Portage) to the Athabasca River and Lake Athabasca; he was the first to record the general features of the Mackenzie River system. It was his efforts that others, notably Alexander Mackenzie and Alexander Henry, built upon and that formed the foundation of the North West Company, the HBC’s most ardent rival in the hotly contested fur trade. Furthermore, it was Pond who was the first non-indigenous person to observe the oil sands where they lay.