[8] His mother, Mary Hollenbeck Welles (born in Athens, Pennsylvania, 6 May 1803; died in Paris, France, 4 December 1879), was a poet.

Against his parents objections, he decided against attending Yale University and chose to study and travel in Europe.

After graduating, he traveled extensively through the mining districts of Europe for the purpose of studying geology and metallurgy by direct observation.

[10] After graduating, Pumpelly moved to Tioga Point, now Athens, in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, where he was soon appointed a Justice of the Peace, and became land agent for the Hon.

[11] and the coalfields of northern China[10] After this, he made the first extensive survey of the Gobi Desert, and explored Mongolia and Siberia.

In June 1870, he was living in a rooming house in Cambridge, Mass., where former slave and abolitionist author Harriet Jacobs also resided.

[13] When the U. S. Geological Survey was established in 1879, Pumpelly organized the division of economic geology, and as a special agent of the Tenth Census he planned and directed the investigations on the mining industries, exclusive of the precious metals, and prepared volume xv of the Census Reports on "The Mining Industries of the United States" (Washington, 1886).

From 1879 to 1880, he conducted at Newport, Rhode Island, an elaborate investigation for the National Board of Health as to the ability of various soils to filter spores from liquids and from air.

In 1879 Pumpelly introduced the idea that the numerous lakes of the Canadian Shield are the result of the creation of basins due to the stripping of an irregular mantle of weathered rock by glacier erosion.

This idea was subsequently adopted by Alfred Gabriel Nathorst used it to explain the great number of lakes existing in southern Sweden.

He was the great-grandson of Thomas Handasyd Perkins; and a grand nephew of William Morris Hunt, an American painter.