Museum Musings
In the late 1700s, independent fur traders from Montreal were intercepting members of the First Nations who had traditionally sold their furs to the Hudson Bay Company at York Factory by travelling the waterways inland on rivers such as the Saskatchewan. As a result, in 1774, Samuel Hearne founded a Hudson Bay Company post at Cumberland House. This led, by 1776, to the independents establishing a post even further up the Saskatchewan near present day Prince Albert.
This post was established near the mouth of the Sturgeon River, also called the Net-setting or Setting River (Bucketona-Sipi), and known to us today as the Shell River. The actual location of the mouth of the river at the time was east of the current mouth, as the river has twice since then changed its opening into the North Saskatchewan.
It is difficult to identify exactly which traders came together at this post, known as the Sturgeon Fort, as few of the independent traders’ records (if indeed there were any) remain. Such information as can be determined tends to come from the records of the Hudson Bay Company, notably from the Cumberland House and Lower Hudson House journals of that era. Of the independent traders, only Peter Pond appears to have written his memoirs, and that document records only the earliest years of his life (the later years, if he wrote about them, are said to have been destroyed by a fire in the kitchen of his home).
Names such as Peter Pangman, Isaac Todd, Alexander Ross, and Joseph Frobisher have all been suggested as having been present in addition to Peter Pond. It was, in fact, Joseph Frobisher who encouraged a loose union amongst these independent traders wherein they could share trade with the First Nations and in the profits in proportion to what they put into it. It should be noted that for the two winters that Pond stayed at Sturgeon Fort (which typically he referred to as Fort Pond), he did not join in this union.
Peter Pond was born to a family of nine at Milford, Connecticut on Jan.18, 1740. He received little schooling and was expected by his parents to go into the trade of his father, a shoemaker. At the age of nineteen, he enlisted with the Suffolk County Regiment, much to the objection of his parents. Re-enlisting a second time, Pond served in the battle against Montcalm, a battle he termed in his memoirs “the most ridickles campane (ridiculous campaign) ever hard of”. A third enlistment saw him rise to Orderly Sergeant, with a subsequent enlistment resulting in him receiving a commission. His fourth enlistment ended when the troops under Amherst were successful in accomplishing the surrender of Montreal.
Thus ended Pond’s military career, one which revealed his extraordinary physical prowess, but also his ability to command men.
After his military experience, Pond’s restlessness led him to travel to the West Indies, the first of two such trips he would take in his life. He then returned home to Milford, marrying and fathering two children within three years. Pond himself noted that between the age of sixteen and sixty, this was the longest period he spent in one place.
For the next six years, he lived the life of a fur trader in what is now the American mid-west. Although life was hard, he emerged successfully from his apprenticeship. It was during this time that he fought a duel with another man in which, in Pond’s words, his opponent was “unfortnant” (unfortunate). Pond claims that he reported the occurrence, but nothing came of it because there was no one to prosecute him.
Pond then took his second trip to the West Indies and, upon his return, entered into a partnership with a trader from New York. With his apparently fine business acumen, Pond was so successful that upon return in the spring he was able to buy out his partner. Pond could now be considered to be a master trader, a position he achieved as a result of his natural shrewdness, strict attention to business, a keen understanding of the First Nations people and of his competitors.
In 1774-75, Pond fulfills the role of the peacemaker on the Mississippi. Near the beginning of August that year, word arrived that war had broken out between the Chippewas and the Sioux, an event which could prove very detrimental to the fur trade. The commanding officer of the local garrison called a council of the fur traders to discuss ways of settling the dispute. The fur traders determined to make large belts of “wampum”, three for each waring tribes. The commander then wrote a speech which Pond was asked to deliver, along with the belts, to the chiefs of the Sioux tribes. They were asked to assemble at Pond’s trading post, and then to accompany him to Mackinaw where the other chiefs were to assemble. Although a delicate mission, Pond was successful and seven chiefs and some other conscripted men went with him to the grand council. This success ended Pond’s time on the Mississippi (and this is where his journal, or memoirs ended).
Hearing from traders such as John Finlay and Thomas Curry that the Northwest was a more profitable region for fur, and coupled with Pond’s constant desire to see new territory, brought him to Lake Dauphin in 1775.
Fur traders seldom stay in one location for long, as the supply of furs tends to be exhausted. This seemed to suit Pond quite well, as he spent the next few years wandering this area known to us as the Canadian Northwest. During these travels, Pond prepared the very first map. As the first cartographer, his map is considered by some the most enduring testimony of Pond’s contribution to the geography of North America. It was on this map that Sturgeon Fort was located, marked “P.P. 1776-7”.
Pond later travelled to the English River (the Churchill) and to the Athabasca, where he pitched his tent on the Elk River, about forty miles (about sixty-five kilometres) from the Lake where he wintered in 1778/79. When he was returning to Montreal in 1781, he wintered on Lac la Ronge. It was here that he encountered Jean Etienne Waden, a Swiss fur trader. Waden, being a man of strict probity and known sobriety, led a very different lifestyle to Pond. There was an expectation from the newly organised Northwest Company that Waden and Pond would trade a “jointstock”. This arrangement did not suit Pond’s independent nature, and he and Waden did not get along. Understandably, this led to disagreements and one night, when Pond and Waden’s clerk, Toussaint Lesieur, were visiting in Waden’s cabin, Waden was shot through the leg and bled to death. Later, in May 1783 (fourteen months after the event), a voyageur named Joseph Fagniant (sometimes spelled Fagnant or even Sagnant) later swore an affidavit that either Pond or Lesieur had shot Waden. As Fagniant was not present at the shooting, he lacked credibility, and his notarised statement was not acceptable in the place of a live witness. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, in his book written nineteen years later suggests the two men were tried and acquitted in Montreal in the winter of 1784/85. But no evidence of a trial exists.
A second charge of murder was rumoured with respect to Pond. In 1787, while enroute to the Athabasca, he came into conflict with John Ross. Competition between Ross and Pond grew bitterly keen and, in June of that year, Ross was shot in a scuffle with one of Pond’s men. Two men were tried for the murder, but there was no mention of Pond’s name during the hearting. In fact, there was evidence that Pond was elsewhere at the time of the shooting.
Another theory with respect to Pond’s inappropriate behaviour suggests that Pond carried out the spread of smallpox in order to wipe out the First Nations people. His travels amongst the various First Nations tribes appears to coincide with the incidence of smallpox in each area, and it is theorised that he knowingly presented infected blankets as gifts to the people with whom he was trading. Again, there is no actual evidence that he was involved in such a practice but, given the other examples of his wrong doing, it is a theory which cannot be ignored.
Peter Pond died in poverty at the age of sixty in Milford, Connecticut, in 1807.
In the late 1920s. Professor Arthur S. Morton of the History Department at the University of Saskatchewan determined that the site of Peter Pond’s trading post near Prince Albert had definitely been found. Two subsequent archaeological digs have occurred on the site, the most recent in the mid-1960s when his garbage pit was being eroded by the North Saskatchewan River. Unfortunately, the site has since been totally eroded, although in conjunction with the Prince Albert Historical Society the University of Saskatchewan did obtain ownership of the site and, on Sept. 7, 1955, as part of Saskatchewan’s Golden Jubilee, a cairn was unveiled on the site by a descendant of Peter Pond’s, also Peter Pond, from Newhaven, Connecticut before a crowd of 150 people.
fgpayton@sasktel.net
