DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Peter Pond - Fur Trader and Adventurer" by Harold Adams Innis. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
This work presents an incredible biography of Peter Pond, a Canadian explorer who was one of the first Europeans to enter the Canadian interior. Pond was a soldier with a Connecticut Regiment during the French and Indian War. Moreover, he was a fur trader, a founding member of the North West Company and the Beaver Club, and a cartographer. The writer skillfully covered all the significant events of Pond's life, giving the readers an authentic source to learn about the daring explorer.
Sir Alexander Mackenzie is known to schoolchildren as a great Canadian explorer who gave his name to the country’s longest river, but hardly anyone could name the man who mentored Mackenzie and mapped much of northwestern Canada before him. Soldier, fur trader and explorer Peter Pond, the subject of this long overdue book, is a man whose legend has been forgotten in favor of those who came after him. Much of Pond’s life is shadowed in mystery. Historian Barry Gough uses Pond’s surviving memoirs, explorers’ journals, letters written by acquaintances of Pond, publications in London magazines and many other sources to track and reconstruct the life of one of the last of the tough, old-style explorers who ventured into the wilderness with little more than a strong instinct for survival and helped shape the modern world.
Best known for his writings on economic history and communications, Harold Innis also produced a body of biographical work that paid particular attention to cultural memory and how it is enriched by the study of neglected historical figures. In this compelling volume, William Buxton addresses Innis's engagement with the legacy of the fur trader and adventurer Peter Pond. Harold Innis on Peter Pond comprises eight texts by Innis, including his 1930 biography of Pond as well as his writings on the explorer's myriad activities. The book also features a collection of eight letters exchanged between Innis and Florence Cannon, a descendent of Pond with a strong interest in her ancestor's life and times, and an unpublished 1932 article on Pond's 1773–75 activities as a fur trader on the upper Mississippi, written by Innis's former student R. Harvey Fleming. Situating Innis's writings on Pond in relation to his broader body of biographical work, Buxton interprets what these texts tell us about Innis's intellectual practice, historiography, and the writing of biography. The book explores how Innis's perspectives shifted with changing intellectual and political circumstances and shows that his advocacy of Pond as an unrecognized "father of confederation" challenged conventional views of Canadian nation-building. A critical edition of previously overlooked biographical texts, Harold Innis on Peter Pond traces what these writings disclose about the biographer's character and values even as they discuss their subject.
Peter Pond, a fur trader, explorer, and amateur mapmaker, spent his life ranging much farther afield than Milford, Connecticut, where he was born and died (1740–1807). He traded around the Great Lakes, on the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers, and in the Canadian Northwest and is also well known as a partner in Montreal’s North West Company and as mentor to Alexander Mackenzie, who journeyed down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Sea. Knowing eighteenth-century North America on a scale that few others did, Pond drew some of the earliest maps of western Canada. In this meticulous biography, David Chapin presents Pond’s life as part of a generation of traders who came of age between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Pond’s encounters with a plethora of distinct Native cultures over the course of his career shaped his life and defined his reputation. Whereas previous studies have caricatured Pond as quarrelsome and explosive, Chapin presents him as an intellectually curious, proud, talented, and ambitious man, living in a world that could often be quite violent. Chapin draws together a wide range of sources and information in presenting a deeper, more multidimensional portrait and understanding of Pond than hitherto has been available.
First Crossing recounts an adventure of epic proportions -- in equal parts romantic, historically significant and compelling. It is the story of Canada's most famous explorer, Alexander Mackenzie, who in 1793 became the first person to cross the continent of North America north of Mexico. With a mix of wonderfully readable text, historical and contemporary photographs, and archival maps and illustrations, here is fresh insight into what drove Mackenzie to undertake his dramatic and dangerous quest for the Pacific Ocean, and how his daring secured Canada's legacy.
The purpose of this report is to describe the fur trade that took place at Grand Portage between Europeans and Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this period Grand Portage was important for many reasons. A strategic geographical point in the trade route between the Great Lakes and the Canadian Northwest, it was best known as a trade depot and company headquarters in the period between 1765 and 1804.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier covers early Euro-American exploration and development of frontiers in North America but not only the lands that would eventually be incorporated into the Unites States it also includes the multiple North American frontiers explored by Spain, France, Russia, England, and others. The focus is upon Euro-American activities in frontier exploration and development, but the roles of indigenous peoples in these processes is highlighted throughout. The history of this period is covered through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on explorers, adventurers, traders, religious orders, developers, and indigenous peoples. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the development of the American frontier.
