This portage linking the Saskatchewan and Churchill basins was long known and used by native travellers; it owes its name to a frog skin once hung here by Cree in derision of the Chipewyan's hunting abilities. In 1774 Joseph Frobisher first intercepted a Chipewyan trading party here en route from Lake Athabasca to the Hudson's Bay post at Churchill. Four years later Peter Pond carried the trade over the portage and into the Athabasca country itself. Thenceforth, for over fifty years this was an important part of the principal transcontinental canoe route of trade and exploration.