Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  Frequenting local taverns in his youth, Pond grew up listening to stories from veterans just back from the French and Indian War raging on the frontier. “Thay Charmed me,” he wrote, so much “Marth & Gollatrey,” and in the summer of 1756, at age sixteen, with “a Strong Desire to be a Solge,” he enlisted in the Seventh Company of the First Connecticut Regiment. Soon he was on a ship up the Hudson River, bound for the front, delighted to be “in the Sarvis.”

  His regiment camped near Lake George, a long tail of water reaching north toward Lake Champlain and Montreal. Most of his fellow soldiers got dysentery, and though Pond stayed healthy, that winter he did little but shiver and pass the time. His enlistment was only one year, but he signed on with the regiment again in 1758 and returned to the same ground, this time to attack the French fort on the far side of the water. Pond was in the lead column, and lost in thick forest the British and French forces stumbled into each other. The Connecticut militia accidentally made first contact, and General Howe “being at the Head of the British troops with a Small side arm in his Hand…Ordered the Troopes to forme thare front to ye Left to attack the French.” Howe was immediately cut down, and though Pond’s fellow soldiers killed and scattered the ambushers, the fight descended into bedlam, every man for himself. Pond and “twelve Men of my aquantans” spent the night hiding from the French, within half a mile of their line. In the morning, the British reorganized and attempted a full open assault. It was a disaster. “Three forths ware Kild in the attempt,” Pond wrote, his fellow soldiers felled in waves that piled up before the French fort. The defenses held; Pond’s regiment retreated. “Thus Ended the Most Ridicklas Campane Eaver Hard of.”

  But Pond had developed a taste for the soldiering life. The next summer he crossed Long Island Sound to enlist in the New York militia, because he was sure it would see action. Based on his experience, Pond was promoted to sergeant, and he marched west with the painted Sir William Johnson and his Iroquois allies. He was there at the walls of Fort Niagara, wounded while laying siege, digging trench lines, moving an eight-gun battery to within 150 yards of the castle. The French surrendered twenty-five days later. The next summer, his fourth year of service, Pond was at Montreal and saw the end of the war.

  His wanderlust was only stoked. Twenty years old, Pond joined the crew of a merchant ship out of Milford and sailed to the West Indies. Upon return, he discovered his mother was dead and his father had left for Detroit. Pond ran the cobbler business until his father’s return and then moved to Detroit himself. He acquired beaver, otter, and raccoon pelts and shipped them to Albany, and as he became a man of means he made enemies. In 1772, one fellow Detroit trader challenged him to a duel. “We met the Next Morning Eairley and Discharged Pistels in which the Pore fellow was unfortennt,” Pond wrote. Having shot the man dead, Pond quietly left Detroit and returned to the West Indies.

  Sailing did not last; Pond had a desire to go west. In 1773 he traveled to Montreal, loaded up on trade goods, and made for Fort Michilimackinac. There he hired clerks and voyageurs and twelve canoes and set off farther into the hinterlands, beyond Lake Michigan. They portaged into the Mississippi watershed and paddled north to trade with the tribes on the plains. The Sioux were unlike any Indians he had met. They used dogs to haul sleds, and sliced the nostrils of their horses to help them breathe on long journeys to run down bison. Pond was on his own and, forced to improvise, learned small habits of the business: to carouse with his men and Sioux traders; that if you left small items on the counter for them to take, the Indians were more likely to come back. The next season, armed with belts of wampum, Pond helped broker a peace between the Ojibwa and the Dakota. And yet war was beginning at home. By then, Pond had thrown in his lot with the merchants in Montreal, not New York. Powder and blankets were hard to come by in New England, diverted as they were to the revolution. So as fighting in the thirteen colonies grew, Pond went north, with his new business associates, to Grand Portage, Lake Winnipeg, and beyond.

  Pond hardly left the northwest for the next decade, traveling only as far south and east as Fort Michilimackinac. Every year, he worked his way farther west, farther in, first to the Saskatchwine, then to the English River. He spent his winters trading, his summers paddling the headwaters of every tributary, drawing detailed maps that noted Indian tribes, landmarks, and even veins of silver in the Rocky Mountains.

  In 1778, Peter Pangman and several other American and Scottish traders found themselves working the same territory. With an excess of goods on the Saskatchwine, they pooled their supplies and sent Pond north of Île-à-la-Crosse, farther up the English River than they had yet traveled. He took five canoes, crewed by voyageurs and their wives, with Indian guides to show them the route to Athabasca, a Cree word meaning “where there are reeds.”

  A great portage lay between the English River and Athabasca. The Cree named it Methye, after the half catfish, half eel that swam the waters of the lake at the path’s southern end. It took Pond’s crew eight days to complete the twelve-mile carry, longer even than the Grand Portage. The land was thickly forested, a single uphill ramp until the last few steps, when a valley fell away beneath them in a most wondrous sight: a wide clear river flowing to the west. Pond named it the Pelican River, as so many of the shorebirds were flying overhead.

  The river soon joined a larger waterway flowing north, black bitumen tar oozing from the sandy banks; the voyageurs used the sticky gum to seal their canoes. The water was sluggish and shallow, and after several days of paddling, they stopped to build a home for the long winter. Pond named it the Old Establishment. This is where Matonabbee and Awgeenah found him and traded so many furs. They told Pond of rivers and lakes even farther north and said that they had led Samuel Hearne to the river of the copper mines, even as they traded with Pond to spite the Hudson’s Bay Company men. Those luxurious Chipewyan beaver furs made Pond a hero of Montreal, and yet it was this geography lesson from Matonabbee and Awgeenah that most fired his curiosity.

  In 1779, Pond was late returning to Grand Portage, the distance too far from Athabasca. He discovered that in his absence he had been included in a new partnership of fur traders, organized by the Frobisher brothers and Simon McTavish. Peter Pangman and his new partner, John Ross, were members as well. So was a Swiss man named Jean-Étienne Waden, who, for mysterious reasons, was also called the Dutchman. Waden had come to New France as a soldier, fought opposite Pond at Fort Niagara, then deserted the regular army and became wealthy as an independent fur trader.

  In the winter of 1781, Pond and Waden were assigned to the same post on Lac la Ronge, a shattered half-granite, half-mud lake just south of the English River. Smallpox ravaged the place, and the trade was bad. Pond and Waden were nominally in the same business concern, but the two did not get along. They set up houses side by side, and the two quarreled constantly. Pond was an originator, an explorer of new territories, and worked best when in charge alone. It was not an ideal assignment.

  One March evening in 1782, just before supper, Pond and Waden were arguing again. They retired to their respective quarters, but a few hours later two shots were fired. The report echoed across the compound, arousing a voyageur who ran to Waden’s house. There he found Pond and a canadien clerk named Toussaint Lesieur standing in the doorway. Inside, the Dutchman lay on the wooden floor, his left leg shattered and bleeding freely. “Ah, mon ami, I am dead,” Waden said to his voyageur. Two guns lay nearby, one fired, one broken. Pond picked up the second and walked away. There were powder burns all about Waden’s knee, bones splintered, two bullets embedded in the floor among pools of bright red blood. The voyageur asked what happened, and Waden said, “I will tell you,” and then he died.

  The next year, Waden’s widow in Montreal petitioned the government to make a formal inquiry into the matter. Pond was never charged with a crime. Neither was Lesieur, who headed to Athabasca soon after Waden’s death. He took the pox with him, the first time it ever entered that country.

  Pond re
turned to the Old Establishment. He traded with Awgeenah and the Chipewyan and pulled piles of furs out of Athabasca, but at the summer rendezvous of 1784 he rejected an offer to join the newly reorganized North West Company. Pond was offered one share and thought he deserved two, so he left for Montreal, which he had not visited in a dozen seasons, and no one heard from him for a year.

  Pond did not reappear in Athabasca until late in the autumn of 1785, just as snow and ice descended. There, he discovered a familiar but unwelcome situation: competition. John Ross of the New Concern had moved into his post and was trading in a department that, since Pond had first arrived in 1778, the Yankee considered his proprietary territory.

  All winter, Pond’s clerks fanned out about the Athabasca country. His trusted agent was a clerk named Cuthbert Grant, and Pond sent him north to Slave Lake to intercept the Chipewyan and Red Knife Indians before they could reach Ross or the Hudson’s Bay Company. Ross tried to keep up but was overmatched. Pond outmaneuvered and outmuscled him. Alcohol flowed, and one night, when a man tried to steal a robe, Pond “cutt the Beaver Indian on the head with his Poignard” to enforce his authority. Ross was gone when the English Chief arrived with the yearly bales of furs. That summer of 1786, Grant took the furs to Grand Portage, Ross went with him to report to the New Concern, but Pond stayed at the Old Establishment.

  The next season, competition grew even more aggressive. One winter day, several Chipewyan headed to Ross’s house to trade. But Pond’s men grabbed them, steering them back toward the North West Company shack. Ross saw what was happening, called several of his voyageurs, and confronted Pond’s crew. The fight was quick. Three voyageurs went for Ross. François Peche, Pond’s own devant, pulled a gun. Ross fell, and Peche fled into the wilderness.

  When the ice broke the following spring, the furs were shipped as normal to Grand Portage. But still Pond did not return. He paddled north from the Old Establishment, mapped the shores of Slave Lake—unconcerned over who his next New Concern bourgeois competition might be—and continued to formulate plans that had consumed his thoughts for a decade.

  * * *

  ————

  Alexander Mackenzie had forgotten his shirt. It was in a cassette, with his other necessary sundries, left behind at the rendezvous. Mackenzie didn’t realize the mistake until well into the journey, and after sending his trusted canadien guide, François Barrieau, back along the route to retrieve the heavy locked trunk, he was frustrated to learn that it had been lost overboard. The mischievous Mamaygwessey, or other blue men, making trouble. Every few days he wrote another letter to Roderic, first complaining of the lost time, then of the lost gear. “I have not now a Single Shirt,” Alexander wrote, “it will be the cause of all our misfortunes during the voyage.”

  The whole season was already fraught with delays. The emergency meeting, to negotiate the merger of the New Concern and the North West Company, had slowed his departure from Grand Portage, and Mackenzie’s letters were all anxiety. “You know that I am always in haste,” Alexander admitted. The HBC men were surly, the Cree were quarreling, and—Alexander didn’t have to put this in writing to his cousin—he was headed north, without his equipment, to spend the winter with a suspected triple murderer.

  At the summer rendezvous, some said Pond gave the order to kill Ross. And why not? Pond’s reputation preceded him. The fur trade was violent, but bourgeois were off-limits. Roderic thought that “being accused, at different times, of having been instrumental toward the deaths of two gentlemen who were in opposition to his interests, he was now on his way out of the country.” But first, Pond had to teach his replacement.

  Rumors buzzed about Pond like mosquitoes. Everyone said that he had shot Waden through the knee and left him for dead. Toussaint Lesieur himself had told Alexander about the incident while the two were at Île-à-la-Crosse in 1785. That winter, Mackenzie’s first in the north, Lesieur was a North West Company clerk, part of the competition, but his story was well-known; Mackenzie called him “the famous Lesieur.” Though Pond was never officially charged, Alexander thought his “innocence was not so apparent as to extinguish the original suspicion.”

  Mackenzie regrouped with all his men, guides, and canoes at Île-à-la-Crosse, before pushing north in search of the Athabasca country for the first time. Knowing that Roderic was following him to this last post, he left behind all of his cousin’s books, except “the History of England,” which he kept for himself. “You will pass the winter in the best manner you can.” Alexander promised to write often and said, “Remember me to all the men.”

  The chained lakes of the English River were over; a single wide arm of water stretched to the northwest, and Mackenzie followed, portaging to a prairie pond that “commands an open horizon.” Crossing quickly, Barrieau led the carry to Lac du Boeuf, “which is contracted near the middle, by a projecting sandy point,” Mackenzie wrote. But winter was coming on early. Ice on the banks, snow, short days, and Alexander was still thirty leagues from the Old Establishment. They made the lake’s far northwestern corner and found a small river, thin and rocky bottomed, a “considerable danger” for his birch-bark canoes. The cold struck hard, the stream froze in a snap, and Mackenzie and his men found themselves marooned. Five days they waited onshore, but the weather only grew worse. Mackenzie needed to move quickly, or he’d be cut off from his winter quarters. So, to lighten the loads, Mackenzie sent back two canoes and sixty pièces. Then he ordered the men to ready their axes in order to make way, and though “frequently obliged to break the ice we advanced slowly,” foot by foot, against the current. “I have scarcely any hopes of reaching Athabasca with the Canoes,” he wrote to Roderic.

  That winding, shallow, frozen river was twenty-four miles long, Alexander figured. It took his men two days to chop their way up, but once free from it, they had little opportunity to rest. They crossed the small Lac La Loche and at the far rocky shore stared down the thirteen-mile carry of the Methye Portage, the sole entrance to the realm of Athabasca.

  “The weather at this time was so severe that I lost all hopes of getting further,” Alexander wrote to his partners of the North West Company, “and our provisions were almost exhausted.” So he decided to ditch several canoes full of goods and make a run for it. He knew at least one brigade had gotten through earlier in the year. He and Pond would have some small amount of rum and powder to trade over the winter. Now his priority must be survival.

  In the driving snow, Mackenzie and his men decided to portage only three canoes. “The land is low and stony,” Mackenzie wrote, “and clothed in wood,” though the path itself was “an entire sand” of unsure footing. Partway through the trek lay a small pond, where they could float the boats for less than a mile; “a trifling respite of the labor of carrying.” And then, at the end, the coup de grâce, a “succession of eight hills, some of which are almost perpendicular.” Somehow, his men had to haul the three-hundred-pound canoes down the sheer face of the ice-clad bluff.

  And yet, from that thousand-foot precipice, Mackenzie also beheld “a most extensive, romantic, and ravishing prospect.” The Pelican River, wide and rushing and—this is the romance—flowing in their direction of travel, to the west. For the first time since the Winnipeg River, a thousand miles of hard labor behind them, they were headed downstream.

  Fully loaded with pièces, the voyageurs could spend over a week portaging the Methye. Mackenzie and his men made the run in three days. The cold gripped tighter, and even the fast-moving Pelican River started to freeze, “the ice driving so thick further on that there was no possibility of poling a canoe into it.” Mackenzie had no Cree or Chipewyan hunters with him and was desperately running out of pemmican, so he decided to split up the brigade. He hid the canoes and merchandise, to keep animals out, and then sent many of his men south, back down the portage, to establish their own winter quarters at the fishery on Lac La Loche. Mackenzie waited with Barrieau and a few other men for three days, until the ice cleared, and then paddled a s
ingle light canoe as quickly as they could to Pond’s fort. It still took over a week, though hunger drove them on.

  The Old Establishment was worn and frayed, a burly stockade, flooded in spring, snow drifted in winter. Peter Pond was there, waiting for Mackenzie. The two men had never met. Pond was almost forty-eight years old, with two decades of hard life in the pays d’en haut. Alexander Mackenzie was half his age. The Yankee son of a cobbler and the Scottish scion to a tacksman resembled each other only in geographic ambitions.

  On December 2, 1787, Alexander wrote to Roderic, guardedly. “This far my neighbor and I have agreed very well, and I believe we shall continue on the same footing for the Season.”

  * * *

  ————

  Fierce winter never relented. Mackenzie and Pond consolidated their men, ordered back every clerk and voyageur who had established a far-flung shack among the Chipewyan, including Cuthbert Grant and Laurent Leroux from Slave Lake. Leroux had worked as a clerk for Peter Pangman, and then for Ross in the New Concern, coming north to Athabasca in 1785 to compete against Grant for two seasons. But with such bad weather, so few trade goods, Mackenzie saw no reason to leave them stranded. In fact, he wondered how the Chipewyan would even work in such conditions. “By the ice we cannot expect a good hunt from these posts,” he wrote to his business partners.

  Trapped in that small outpost, with few goods to trade, few hunters about, and few visitors to interrupt, Pond and Mackenzie had many long days to talk. Pond liked to talk. He told everyone his plans, everyone who would listen.