April 22, 2004

Plains Folk: David Thompson

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

One of the oddest and most forlorn historical monuments in this part of the country is the David Thompson Memorial, in the Souris River Valley, McHenry County, North Dakota. It is a granite sphere, scored with lines like those of latitude and longitude, sitting on a granite base. The occasional visitor stoops to read that David Thompson, 1770-1857, “Geographer and Astronomer,” passed through the vicinity in 1797-98 and mapped the country. The Great Northern Railway gave the land to the state and erected the marker in 1925.

The name and adventures of David Thompson remain obscure to Americans, although they have become more familiar in recent years to Canadians. He will be more celebrated now with the publication of “Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West,” written by D’Arcy Jenish and published by Doubleday, Canada. (An American edition is soon to appear from the University of Nebraska Press.)

If you’re unfamiliar with David Thompson, don’t feel bad, because as Jenish notes, “He died penniless and obscure in 1857 and remained unknown to the Canadian public,” let alone the American, until 1916, when his autobiography was unearthed and published. After that, Thompson won modest acclaim as an explorer and mapmaker of western North America.

From Jenish’s splendid biography we learn how Thompson was brought to America. We find out how as a boy of fourteen, he was pulled from a charitable school in London, shipped across to Churchill, on Hudson Bay, and put to work as an apprentice clerk for the Hudson Bay Company.

The apprentice learned not only clerking but also how to catch fish through the ice, how to snare ptarmigan and many other skills required for survival. He took a particular interest in surveying. By age sixteen he was on his way inland to assist in the establishment of South Branch House, on the South Saskatchewan River. By the end of his apprenticeship, in 1791, the Hudson Bay Company had tabbed him as promising and useful and presented him with a sextant and set of instruments for making celestial observations.

Thus began Thompson’s career as an explorer, first for the Hudson Bay Company, and after 1797 for its rival, the Northwest Company. In 1797-98, he trekked from Grand Portage west and south to the Mandan villages on the Knife River, coming closer to perishing traveling there in December than he had in far more northerly climates. Subsequently he traveled down the Assiniboine, up the Red, and across to the waters of the Mississippi, an amazing journey that resolved much of the map of the interior.

Thompson is best known for his far-western explorations. Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific in 1793, Simon Fraser descended the river renamed after him to the sea in 1809, but it was Thompson who finally completed the descent of the great river of the West, the Columbia, in 1811.

It was during the journey west in 1810-11 there occurred an episode for which Thompson was much criticized, as he failed to rendezvous with company associates at Rocky Mountain House. People said he turned coward in the face of the threatening Piegan Indians. Jenish lets Thompson off the hook, saying he just got lost.

I suspect what occurred was an instance of discretion on Thompson’s part. You have to wonder how he was able to travel with small parties tens of thousands of miles through threatening country and tribes. I find the answer in that I cannot find anywhere in Thompson’s epic story an instance of a shot fired in anger. Thompson practiced adroit diplomacy and, I suspect, knew when to shrink from a fight, thereby living to explore again and, he hoped, make his maps of the country.

He believed his maps would be much prized and would bring him wealth for his retirement. His hopes never materialized; his investments in Upper Canada went sour; and thus Thompson died poor and bitter, working away at the memoir that eventually would resurrect his fame. Now, with Jenish’s biography, the man gets his due.

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