David Thompson

English explorer of Canada

• Born: April 30, 1770
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: February 10, 1857
• Place of death: Longueil, near Montreal, Lower Canada (now in Quebec, Canada)

Thompson traveled through most of northern and western Canada and was the first person accurately to survey river courses, trading post locations, and the U.S.-Canadian border. He also drew the first accurate maps of western Canada and recorded the customs and cultures of the indigenous Canadian peoples.

Early Life

David Thompson was the son of Welsh immigrants to London, where he was born. After he was educated in a London charity school in navigational mathematics, he was apprenticed to the Hudson’s Bay Company in May, 1784. As a company apprentice, he was responsible for maintaining account books and general clerical work first at Fort Churchill, in what is now Manitoba. He later worked at York Factory fur trading posts in British Canada.

In 1786, the Hudson’s Bay Company transferred Thompson to Cumberland House (Saskatchewan), where he joined a thirteen-man expedition to construct a new company post along the South Saskatchewan River. Between 1786 and 1790, he served at several company posts as both clerk and trader, and learned both the Cree and Peigan languages. In 1788, he severely injured his leg. During his recovery, he lost sight in his right eye. However, during his long recuperation at Cumberland House, he made good use of his time by studying mathematics, astronomy, and surveying under the company surveyor Philip Turnor.

Life’s Work

Although Thompson’s physical ailments disqualified him from accompanying a survey team to Lake Athabasca (Northwest Territories) in the spring of 1790, he wrote to Hudson’s Bay Company officials in London and requested a personal set of survey and observational equipment. While fulfilling his duties as a clerk, Thompson began collecting data for his future maps of the Canadian interior. In the fall of 1792, after the arrival of his new survey equipment, he was ordered on his first survey expedition into the Lake Athabasca region. He was assigned to produce an accurate chart of the region between the Nelson and Churchill Rivers, and find—it was hoped—a more direct river route to the fur-rich Athabasca region. Hudson’s Bay Company officials regarded Thompson’s mission as urgent because of the growing competition between their London-based company and the newly founded Montreal-based Northwest Company.

Thompson’s work in the Canadian west reflected the intense commercial competition for furs, alliances with native communities, and the quicker river routes to untapped fur-bearing regions. For his surveying work of 1792-1794, Thompson was promoted to official surveyor of the Hudson’s Bay Company in May, 1794. However, Thompson grew increasing dissatisfied with company management. In an autobiographical narrative that he composed shortly before his death in 1857, he cited the company’s lack of exploratory vigor and concern with sheer profit as reasons for leaving it to join the Northwest Company in May, 1797.

Thompson’s abandonment of the Hudson’s Bay Company for the Northwest Company left lingering bitterness toward him by British officials. However, Thompson was about to embark on the most productive and challenging period of his career. In the summer of 1797, the Northwest Company assigned him to survey the proposed international boundary between British Canada and the United States. In particular, Thompson was to guarantee that his company’s trading posts were north of the forty-ninth parallel.

During Thompson’s year-long mission, he proposed that the origin of the contested Mississippi River was at Turtle Lake (Minnesota), well south of the newly delineated border. That conclusion barred British-Canadian traders legal access to the Mississippi River. Thompson’s 1797-1798 expedition provided the basis for his first maps of central Canada and the Lake Superior littoral. Through the remainder of 1798-1799, he charted river routes from Northwest Company posts in Saskatchewan to Lake Athabasca.

On his return to the company post at Grand Portage, on what is now the Minnesota-Ontario border, in the spring of 1799, Thompson married Charlotte Small, a Meti woman who was the daughter of a company manager. Thompson and his wife eventually had a total of thirteen children, five of whom were born at various Northwest Company trading posts. Unlike many other European men who married native women, Thompson remained committed to his wife and children through the rest of his life.

The expansion of the fur trade toward the Rocky Mountains and the attempt to find a navigable river route to the Pacific Ocean occupied the remainder of Thompson’s career with the Northwest Company. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory by the United States in 1803 and the success of the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition in 1804-1806 further pressed Thompson’s company to secure a river route to the Pacific, ahead of American and Hudson’s Bay Company claims.

In July, 1808, another Northwest Company employee, Simon Fraser, charted a route to the Pacific. However, his river route proved dangerous, as it was filled with rapids and waterfalls. Moreover, the company’s situation on Fraser’s route was complicated by the fact that the company had been trading with the Peigan people, who wanted to retain their status as middleman traders between the company and the Pacific coastal tribes. Consequently, the Peigans were less displeased with the prospect of more European traders entering their territory.

Thompson’s exploratory expeditions in western Canada from 1806 to 1812 were shaped by the need to find a less problematic river route to the Pacific. After several years of attempting to locate and survey the headwaters of the Columbia River, the Northwest Company sent Thompson on an urgent mission to find it. His exploring party was delayed, and nearly captured, by Peigan war parties, but Thompson finally reached the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River in July, 1811. Unfortunately for the Northwest Company, Thompson found a trading post of the American Pacific Fur Company already established at the mouth of the river.

Although disappointed that his discovery was spoiled by the presence of the American traders, he later recorded his personal satisfaction in surveying and charting the Canadian interior from Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific expedition was Thompson’s last for the Northwest Company. He, his wife and five children traveled back to Montreal, where Thompson settled into semiretirement with an annual pension of one hundred pounds from the company. During this period, he began organizing and completing accurate maps for the company and completed his first map in 1814.

After the War of 1812, Thompson was hired by British government officials to complete surveys of the U.S.-Canadian border. His survey of 1817-1827 fixed the modern border but also reportedly caused bitterness among British-Canadian officials who thought he had been too accommodating with the American survey crews, who has wanted him to make sure that British-Canadian trading posts were on the northern side of the border. Resentment against Thompson, first for leaving Hudson’s Bay Company in 1797 and for his border survey of 1817-1827, may have been a partial reason for both his later financial problems and his long-overdue recognition for his contributions to Canadian history.

The last decades of Thompson’s life were beset by financial difficulties and poor health. With the bankruptcy of the Northwest Company in 1825, Thompson lost his pension. His maps of the Canadian interior found few buyers, and for several years he supported his family with surveys of townships and proposed canal routes. By 1840, Thompson was so indebted that it was reported he had to sell his survey equipment. In 1845, he and his wife moved into the home of one of their daughters at Longueuil, near Montreal.

Now seventy-five years old, Thompson saw his health rapidly decline but finally began to organize his journals and travel notes for publication. In 1851, he went completely blind and never finished journals. His death in Longueuil on February 10, 1857, attracted little public attention.

Significance

David Thompson remained almost forgotten in history until 1916, when Canadian historian Joseph Burr Tyrrell published David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in Western America, 1784-1812. His exploratory and cartographic work for the Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Companies affected British imperial expansion in North America and the fur trade—both of which needed accurate geographic knowledge. Thompson’s maps of the Canadian interior were the most accurate for their period and demonstrate the increasing technical and mathematical skills required in the cartographic sciences.

In addition to their value as collections of geographical data, Thompson’s journals are rich ethnographic portraits of Canada’s indigenous peoples, their customs, stories, and spiritual beliefs. His respect for, and interest in, Native Canadians moreover highlights the codependence and cross-cultural contacts between Europeans and Native Americans in economic, exploratory, and imperial endeavors.

Although Thompson undertook his explorations and surveys around the same time as the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, he received little attention in Canada until the early twentieth century, when Canadian nationalists and historians “resurrected” him to exemplify Canadian national spirit and pride during and after World War I.

Bibliography

Jenish, D’Arcy. Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003. A popular historian, Jenish uses Thompson’s journals, notebooks, and other materials to chronicle his life and explorations.

Lavender, David. Winner Take All: The Trans-Canada Canoe Trail. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977. A broad narrative of French and British explorations of western Canada and its links with the fur trade. Chapter 21 covers Thompson’s expeditions.

Nisbet, Jack. The Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2005. A chronicle of Thompson’s life and expeditions, focusing on his travels in the Columbia River country.

Pole, Graeme. David Thompson: The Epic Expeditions of a Great Canadian Explorer. Canmore, Alta.: Altitude Publishing Canada, 2003. Recounts Thompson’s expeditions during his twenty-eight years in the fur trade.

Rich, E. E. The Fur Trade and Northwest to 1857. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967. A broad socio-economic and political narrative and analysis of the Franco-British fur trade system and its shaping of modern Canadian history. Excellent chapters on the Hudson’s Bay Company and Northwest Companies.

Thompson, David. David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in Western America, 1784-1812. Edited by J. B. Tyrrell. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1916. Reprint, 1968. An edited collection of Thompson’s unfinished autobiographical travelogue. Several of Thompson’s maps and drawings are included in the volume, as are a separate envelope of his smaller regional Canadian maps. Occasionally inaccurate details, dates, or locations should not take away from the nearly encyclopedic amount of information on indigenous Canadian peoples and the Canadian environment.