David Thompson

Belyea, Barbara, ed.

Columbia Journals of David Thompson. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994.

David Thompson ranks among the great explorers of North America. The empirical data that he accumulated in the course of extensive, pioneering explorations in the vast reaches west and northwest of Lake Superior constitute an immense body of historical material about the state, trade, geography and native peoples of those places in the early 19th century. Biographies of Thompson have been written, but the best way of showing Thompson at work is through his journals. This book examines Thompson's activities in the Columbia River country for an 11-year period beginning in 1800. After Mackenzie's famed 1793 expedition from Lake Athabasca to Pacific tidewater on the British Columbia coast, follow-on explorations and map-making had to be done. The task was undertaken by David Thompson. The text of this book consists of journal fragments, and the editor has provided notations and other explorations plus an introduction to the whole. The work is illustrated and contains copies of some of Thompson's map segments. It also has an index and bibliography. The editor is interested in the texts as literature and as a record of time and circumstance, and is thus less interested in the significance of Thompson as part of the general record of Canadian achievement in exploration and discovery. Readers will, therefore, find little drama here. Even so, the texts speak from themselves and are now available for others to draw their own conclusions — a vitally important contribution.

Hopwood, Victor G.

David Thompson Travels in Western North America, 1784-1812. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1971.

David Thompson, undoubtedly one of Canada's greatest explorers and mapmakers, was also one of the finest travel writers of his era. His own account of his years in western Canada was still incomplete when he died in 1857. This book prints key selections from Thompson's narrative, and blends with them sections from the numerous journals and reports. This is, therefore, the first modern edition of the work for general readers. Thompson landed at Churchill Factory, Hudson Bay, as a boy apprentice, in 1784. From that time until he left the west, in 1812, his account is one of eloquence and authority. He tells the story of 28 years of travel across 55,000 miles. His duty to his employers, the Northwest Company, was surveying. He carried out great surveys and explorations reaching to Sault Ste. Marie, to the sources of the Mississippi, to the upper Missouri, and to northeastern British Columbia, and finally to the west side of the Rocky Mountains, including the northeastern tributaries of the Columbia River, and the great river itself from its headwaters to its estuary on the Pacific Ocean. This book details Thompson's achievements as scientific explorer, geographer, cartographer, and naturalist. It also includes a careful analysis of Thompson as a skilled writer, and shows Thompson's narrative as one of the world's great travel books.

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