Pond began his fur trading career with his father out of Detroit, Michigan. He traded throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin. Through his business he became acquainted with Alexander Henry, Simon McTavish and the brothers Thomas, Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher. They formed the North West Company which developed a fierce rivalry with the Hudson's Bay Company. In search of new fur resources he explored west of the Great Lakes. In 1776 1778 he wintered at a fur post he created at the junction of the Sturgeon River and North Saskatchewan River near present
day Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The site is today a National Historic Site.

In 1783 Pond's explorations led him to the Athabasca, a region stretching from Lac  le-Ö-la-Crosse to the Peace River. There he explored waterways around Lake Athabasca and determined the approximate locations of Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake from First Nations peoples of the area. From his notes and diaries Peter Pond drew a map showing rivers and lakes of the Athabasca region, including what was known of the whole area from Hudson Bay to the Rocky Mountains and interpolating his information to the Arctic Ocean or Northwest Passage.

English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke was born in 1887. The son of the Rugby School's housemaster, Brooke excelled in both academics and athletics. He entered his father's school at the age of fourteen. A lover of verse since the age of nine, he won the school poetry prize in 1905.

A year later, he attended King's College, Cambridge, where he was known for his striking good looks, charm, and intellect. While at Cambridge, he developed an interest in acting and was president of the University Fabian Society. Brooke published his first poems in 1909; his first book, Poems, appeared in 1911. While working on his dissertation on John Webster and Elizabethan dramatists, he lived in the house that he made famous by his poem "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester."