By Timothy Harper

David Thompson was a monumental figure in North American history. A fur trader, explorer and perhaps the greatest land geographer ever, he led expeditions safely through incredible hardship and danger. His journals made important contributions to our understanding of Native American culture and history. And he and his Indian wife had one of the great love stories of all time.

So why haven't you heard of David Thompson the frontiersman? No doubt one reason is that he spent most of his long life in Canada and, like most Canadians even in the early 1800s, he wasn't one to blow his own powderhorn.

Consider the hoopla -- documentaries, books, commemorations -- for the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's 1804-1806 expedition. Yet it's been said that David Thompson made Lewis and Clark look like tourists. Thompson covered 80,000 miles by foot, horseback, dogsled and canoe -- compared with Lewis and Clark's 8,000 miles. His maps, made with relatively crude instruments and seat-of-the-buckskin-pants reckoning, covered 1.5 million square miles and stand up well to today's satellite images.

David Thompson was born in England in 1770. His father died when he was young, and at age seven he was put in a school for orphans and foundlings. He showed an aptitude for mathematics, and at age 14 the Hudson Bay Company sent him to work at its fur-trading posts in North America as an apprentice clerk. Thompson learned the ritual of smoking tobacco with Indians for the palaver of fur trading, and devoted himself not only to ride, shoot, hunt and fish, but also to become a woodman in the Indian style.

"I had always admired the tact of the Indian in being able to guide himself through the darkest pine forests to exactly the place he intended to go, his keen, constant attention to every thing; the removal of the smallest stone, the bent or broken twig; a slight mark on the ground, all spoke plain language to him," Thompson wrote years later. "I was anxious to acquire this knowledge, and often being in company with them, sometimes for several months, I paid attention to what they pointed out to me, and became almost equal to some of them; which became of great use to me."

At 18, Thompson spent the winter in a camp of Blackfeet to learn their language. He began keeping journals describing the nature and people around. He developed a deep, lifelong appreciation of Native American culture, reflected in his descriptions of everyday life. Here's his description of a fishing scene:

"With a Woman or a Lad to paddle and steer the canoe, the Indian with his long spear, stands on the gunwales at the bar behind the bow, and ticklish as the canoe is, and the Lake almost always somewhat agitated, he preserve his upright posture, as if standing on a rock. On the Lake, especially in the fore part of the day, a low fog rises on the surface of the water, caused by the coldness of the water and the higher temperature of the air; which hides the Canoe; and only the Indian Man, with his posed spear ready to strike is seen, like a ghost gliding slowly over the water."

Unlike Lewis and Clark, who described their encounters with Indians in much the same way they cataloged the flora and fauna, Thompson could admire Native Americans as people, and even be envious at times. "Their walk is erect, light and easy, and may be said to be graceful," he wrote. "When on the plains in company with white men, the erect walk of the Indian is shown to great advantage. The Indian with his arms folded in his robe seems to glide over the ground; and the white people seldom in an erect posture, their bodies swayed from right to left, and some with their arms, as if to saw a passage in the air. I have often been vexed at the comparison."

Here's Thompson's description of they way Indians disciplined their children: "The Natives of all these countries are fond of their children, they have faults like other children but are not corrected by being beat. Contempt and ridicule are the correctives employed, these shame them, without breaking their spirit. And as they are all brought up in the open camp, the other children help with the punishment."

At 19, laid up with a broken leg, Thompson wintered with the Hudson Bay Company's top surveyor, who showed Thompson how to use his instruments. Until then, maps of Canada and the American Northwest were dominated by large blank spaces. David Thompson literally filled in the blanks that covered two-thirds of the continent.

Using a sextant, compass, telescope and watch, Thompson often took sightings while standing in a moving canoe. He used the position of the moons of Jupiter and sometimes hours of calculations for his reckonings. He found and mapped the headwaters of the Mississippi, Missouri and Columbia rivers. He was the first white man -- and maybe the first man, period -- to traverse the length of the Columbia. By 1812, he had done what many others, including Lewis and Clark, had tried but failed to do: map a navigable water route from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific.

"Fur traders, immigrants and adventurers followed this route until the Canadian Pacific Railroad was completed 74 years later," editor Barbara Belyea of the University of Calgary noted in Columbia Journals, a selection of Thompson's journal entries.

Across what are now Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Alberta, through much of present-day Montana, Idaho and Washington, wherever Thompson went he was often the first white man. The trading posts he built were the beginning of modern civilization.

Revolutionary change

"He was an agent of revolutionary change in the region: its history turns on the moment of his arrival," historian Jack Nisbet wrote in Sources of the River, a 1994 book retracing some of Thompson's journeys. Instead of skinning animals and using thorns to sew garments, Indians made clothes with fabric and needles that Thompson traded for beaver and other pelts. He brought iron arrowheads, the first pots and pans, good tobacco for peace pipes and guns that made the Indians more productive hunters.

Thompson was unusual among fur traders in that he did not like to trade liquor to Indians. "He saw many tragedies of abuse, maimings and killings that he attributed directly to the sale of liquor as a trade item," Canadian historian Pat McDonald said. In his journals, Thompson noted that Indian men were particularly interested in drinking, and often fought -- biting off a nose was not unusual -- when drunk. When he told one tribe that he would not trade liquor, "The Women were pleased, and said all the Men were fools that drank fire water . . . the Women in general kept themselves sober, and when the men were about to drink hid all the Arms, and Knives and left them nothing but their teeth and fists to fight with."

Once when he was packing for a trading trip, his partners insisted that he take along two casks of rum. "I placed the two Kegs of Alcohol on a vicious horse; and by noon the Kegs were empty, and in pieces, the Horse rubbing his load against the Rocks to get rid of it; I wrote to my partners what I had done; and that I would do the same to every Keg of Alcohol, and for the next six years I had charge of the furr trade on the west side of the Mountains, no further attempt was made to introduce spirituous Liquors."

Thompson apparently never had any gun battles with Indians, though he talked his way out of numerous sticky situations. The Blackfeet, especially, threatened him for trading guns to rival tribes. Thompson bargained, cajoled and once in a while tricked Indians, and he wasn't above giving a belligerent warrior a bloody nose.

Thompson was not a handsome man. He had weathered skin, deeply furrowed features, and dark hair cut straight across his forehead. He was short and compact, like the colorful French-Canadian voyageurs he often traveled with -- stubby, rough-hewn men who could paddle upstream for 18 hours a day. Singing all the while, they took brief breaks to light their pipes and consume a huge amount of either fresh meat or pemmican -- dried meat mixed with fat and berries. Thompson marveled: "In fact a French Canadian has the appetite of a Wolf, and glories in it; each man requires eight pounds of meat per day, or more; upon my reproaching some of them with their gluttony, the reply I got was, 'What pleasure have we in Life but eating?'"

Daily travel was difficult and dangerous. Fording a raging river, members of Thompson's party had to grab onto their horses' tails to keep from being swept away. Thompson's canoes, up to 40 feet long, bearing up to a ton and a half of furs, paddled by six to 12 voyageurs, sometimes had to be carried around rocks and rapids or pulled upstream with ropes. It once took Thompson three days to cover two and a half miles. Another time, his canoes shot 74 miles downstream in five hours. Going over one set of falls, Thompson and his men lost their canoes and almost all their gear. (He saved his sextant.) They were near starvation when they limped into an Indian encampment a week later.

Through it all, Thompson never seemed to lose his enthusiasm for whatever lay around the next bend or over the next mountain. "A fine day," he repeatedly exclaimed in his journal, even when it was sleeting or he was plagued by mosquitoes. He obviously enjoyed meeting people, white or Indian, and read the Bible and told stories around the campfire at night. White men nicknamed him the Philosopher.

Thompson was respected by Indians for his morality and fairness, and was occasionally asked to arbitrate their disputes. They called him Koo-Koo-Sint, or "Stargazer," and some believed he saw the future in the stars. When word spread that Koo-Koo-Sint was approaching a tribe's territory for the first time, chiefs would sometimes travel for days to meet Thompson and urge him to visit their villages.

"Both Canadians and Indians often inquired of me why I observed the Sun, and sometimes the Moon, in the day time, and passed whole nights with my instruments looking at the Moon and Stars," Thompson reported. "I told them it was to determine the distance and direction from the place I observed to other places; neither the Canadians nor the Indians believed me for both argued that if what I said was the truth, I ought to look to the ground, and over it; and not to the Stars."

At the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Neb., the resident historian, James Hanson, told me that Thompson's journals provided much of what we know about Native American life and culture before Europeans brought horses, guns, alcohol and disease. "He had an uncommon thirst for knowledge. He posed questions that other fur traders never asked," Hanson observed. "He had a special affinity for native people."

At 29, Thompson took a native wife: Charlotte Small, the daughter of a Cree woman and an English fur trader. Many white fur traders had one or more native families and most of them, like Charlotte's father, abandoned those families when they retired to the East or Europe. Thompson doted on his wife, and she often helped him in his work, including as an interpreter. When they started having children -- they had five while living in the wilderness -- Thompson often took the whole family on the trail. It must have been quite a sight: Charlotte, often pregnant, and a gaggle of small children in canoes or on horseback amid the voyageurs and Indian scouts, moving from camp to camp every night. During winters the family holed up together in cabins at trading posts.

Montreal

David Thompson left the West in 1812, at age 42. He had been in the wilderness for 28 years, and never returned. He took his family to Montreal, where he and Charlotte formally married and had eight more children. He worked as a surveyor, primarily charting U.S.-Canada boundaries, and his maps were official for both countries into the 1950s.

As he got older, Thompson slipped into blindness, obscurity and poverty. Money he had loaned and invested was never repaid. He spent years going through his old journals and writing a narrative to raise money. Charlotte and the daughter they lived with often heard him chuckling as he relived his adventures. But his narrative was not published until 1916, decades after his death. He finally pawned his sextant to buy food.

Despite all his woes, Thompson was not bitter in old age. He said he had accomplished "all that one man could hope to perform." He died in 1857, at age 87. Charlotte, his wife of 58 years, "proud to be the wife of such a fine man, who knew the ways of my people and would never disgrace me before them," died three months later.

Canadian parks and tourism officials are planning bicentennial activities in 2007 to mark the 200th anniversary of David Thompson's first crossing of the Rocky Mountains. For more on the committee or on David Thompson, go to the Web site www.davidthompsonthings.com  or www.davidthompson200.ca or contact:
David Thompson Bicentennial Committee
Box 517
Invermere, B.C.
Canada, V0A 1K0
Email: info@davidthompson200.ca