The Man Who Measured Canada

By Priit J. Vesilind

"Never heard of him," says Leon Charles, a young Cree and guide for our ten-day canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness. We're bouncing down a dirt road north of Missinipe, Saskatchewan, canoes strapped to our van, spewing a plume of dust into the fringe of the primordial forest that once cloaked North America.

David Thompson, I insist, Canada's most prolific explorer—the fur trader and surveyor who almost single-handedly mapped the nation's vast, unknown interior 200 years ago. He covered 80,000 miles by foot, horseback, dogsled, and canoe, defining a fifth of the continent, compiling 77 volumes of journals about its geography, biology, and ethnography. Equipped only with a brass sextant and a courageous heart, he made maps that rival images gleaned from today's satellites. He was, some think, the world's greatest land geographer.

Leon shrugs politely. This "white man's history" rings no bells.

Thompson, I tell him, made Lewis and Clark look like tourists. He should be one of Canada's most heroic figures. But "David who?" is what I often heard as I followed Thompson's restless life. No good biography, no photograph, not even a painting exists of the man. A smallish western river, a lonely highway, a town in Montana bear his name, but little else.

It's true that Canada does not readily fashion heroes. Its founders were those who refused to rebel. Its westward march was orderly, fueled by business opportunities, not buccaneering passion as in the United States. Native Americans were colleagues in the fur business, not obstacles to expansion. There were no six-guns, no massacres, no Davy Crocketts.

"Thompson's sin was that he was only successful," Ian MacLaren, a professor of Canadian studies at the University of Alberta, told me. "There was no disaster, no horror story. He wouldn't have made good TV."...

At least some of Thompson's anonymity was his own doing. He was a difficult man who took satisfaction in being the outsider—a white man among Indians, a Welshman among Scots, a pious man among the colorfully profane French voyageurs. He disdained the spotlight and discouraged casual friendships. He was no self-promoter, and thus when he wrote the narrative of his life, his Travels, he could find no publisher.

I used these Travels, spare but powerful accounts of virgin North America, as a guide to explore virtually unchanged segments of Thompson's trail, from Hudson Bay to the Rockies, to the mouth of the Columbia River and back to a quiet hamlet near Montreal. I found that he was not a mellow man. He wore out everyone around him. "A fine day," his log entries often started, even though it might have been 30 degrees below zero, with the north wind chewing on his tent poles. He challenged me to see things as he saw them, with optimism, with a fresh, relentless clarity. And he stirred in me that most North American of compulsions: to set forth, to see what lies beyond the next bend in the river.

There are six of us, with three canoes. Leon will paddle with Maria Stenzel, our photographer. Artist Greg Manchess will share a canoe with trip leader Colin Gilchrist, from Horizons Unlimited outfitters in Missinipe. Jim Davis, an old friend from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, will labor as my sternman.

Two floatplanes dump us partway down the Fond du Lac River, by a sand beach swarming with blackflies, where the air is acrid with smoke from forest fires. The Fond du Lac, bright and pure, cascades northwest through a sandy basin to Lake Athabasca. Thompson passed through here in 1796, searching for a quicker, eastern route to the lake, then the hub of the northern fur trade. We make camp on a carpet of reindeer moss, cranberries, and moose scat. Between us and our goal, the Chipewyan, or Dene, settlement of Black Lake: 130 miles of timelessness.

We are perched on the rim of the Canadian Shield, the elevated granite skirt that clamps around Hudson Bay, little changed since Thompson's day. He was the first to define this land of stunted pine and birch, wolverines and eagles; he called it "muskrat country" for its lack of big game and impoverished soil and considered it uninhabitable by white men.

"The whole is a wretched country of solitude," wrote Thompson, "which is broken only by the large gull and the loons."

The next day clouds roll from the northeast, dragging chill August winds and stinging rain into the Athabasca Basin. We plunge quickly into the first rapids, into stacks of icy foam that slap against our bows and soak us. Thompson knew this white water well. He too heard the whisper of the roar before the bend, scanned the dance of whitecaps, and saw the river drop like smooth paper shredding on the rocks. He too bent his knees against the thin shell of a canoe as water raged beneath, viscous as muscle.

Some 30 French and native workers normally accompanied Thompson on his trading treks. But his journey to Athabasca was pure exploration, and he was able to recruit only two callow Dene, Paddy and Kozdaw. Together they headed north from Fairford House, a trading post on the Churchill River, paddling into Reindeer Lake.

"Our chief dependence, next to good Providence," he wrote, "was on our net and gun."

Thompson had already spent half his life in the wilderness. At 14, fresh from London's Grey Coat charity school, he had stepped off a supply ship at Churchill Factory as an apprentice clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). The year was 1784, and Indian canoes, heavy with furs, were arriving daily from the interior. For weeks the campfires burned around the stockade, ptarmigan roasting, brandy flowing. Then the ship, packed with furs and whale oil, turned back for England, escaping before the ice stiffened.

By November four-inch-thick rime had formed inside the buildings, and as Thompson wrote, "All of our movements …; were for self-preservation. The cold is so intense that everything in a manner is shivered by it; continually the rocks are split with a sound like the report of a gun."

A city boy, Thompson exulted in the wilderness. He found noisy glory in migrating geese and took pleasure in the details of grouse feathers. He was not only bitten by mosquitoes, but he also examined, under a magnifying glass, the precise way they bit him....

The river is stretched smooth as gelatin today, and the rapids become trails of flashing sunlight that obscure rocks and ledges until we are dangerously upon them. Thompson and his Dene guides traveled naked from the waist down, so their clothes would be dry after a day of dragging their heavy canoe through the white water. Though our canoes are light and our gear is made of quick-drying polypropylene, my feet stay soaked, for the rapids attack in quick succession; one troll of a ledge hides beneath the flow and catapults our canoe over sideways to the current like some random hunk of driftwood. The river falls under us like a trapdoor, and I scrape desperately with my paddle, catching only air.

"Paddle, paddle, paddle!" Jim yells as we pinball among the boulders. We do not swim that day, but a few fuses blow among my nerves.

Thompson first took to the rivers in the summer of 1786, joining a 33-member fur brigade headed for the Canadian prairies, where the HBC hoped to undercut the rival "pedlars from Montreal," the North West Company, and gain the loyalty of the powerful Piegan Indians and other Blackfeet. The 17-year-old spent the second winter in the tepee of Saukamappee, an old Cree living among the Piegan, who filled his soul with history.

"We were anxious to see a horse, of which we had heard so much," Saukamappee told him. "At last, as the leaves were falling, we heard that one was killed by an arrow shot into his belly.... Numbers of us went to see him, and we all admired him; he put us in mind of a stag that had lost his horns, and we did not know what name to give him. But as he was a slave to man, like the dog, which carried our things, he was named the Big Dog."

When Thompson was 18, he broke his leg and was left to heal at a remote Saskatchewan trading post. There he met Philip Turnor, the HBC's premier surveyor, and voraciously absorbed mathematics and practical astronomy from the master. He began a daily journal and never moved another uncharted mile without fixing the position of key landmarks and trading posts, points that became the framework for his maps of North America.

Thompson later carried a sextant and a set of charts and tables wherever he went, more like a British sea captain than a trader. Because he had no ocean, he used a small pan into which he poured mercury, creating an artificial horizon to reflect sun, moon, and stars. In his kit were two thermometers, drawing instruments, and foolscap-size paper.

To his companions Thompson seemed a magician. They often saw him gazing for hours into the skies and called him Koo Koo Sint—the Man Who Looks at Stars. "I told them it was to determine the distance and direction from the place I observed to other places, [but] neither the Canadians nor the Indians believed me. Their opinions were that I was looking into futurity."

Today I check my own instruments: air temperature 52°F; water 61°. I had learned the rudiments of celestial navigation for this trip and take a sextant reading at noon, as Thompson always did. Delicately, delicately, I squint into the telescope of the instrument. I must bring the image of the sun down, with parallel mirrors, to meet the image of the sun that is reflected in the water of my artificial-horizon tray. And I must mark the exact second they meet, to begin my calculations for latitude. But my hand shakes, and blackflies nip my skin.

Latitude 57°16'12". I'm miles and miles off, according to our map. It's humbling. Thompson's calculations were within a mile of modern fixes.

On our fifth night we hunker down in a stand of spruce by Brassy Rapids, and Leon lands a 15-pound northern pike, a jagged-tooth predator that Thompson called "the water wolf." I ask Leon how he'd cook the pike if he were by himself. He cuts a green pine stick and jams it up the fish's mouth, and, without gutting it, props the pike over the fire like a hot dog....

We ride the Fond du Lac until it empties into Black Lake over Burr Falls, a wicked, twisting hose of water that we scan for soft spots but in which we see only possibilities of disaster. The half-mile-long portage past the falls is burned from the forest fires, the earth still smoking. I haul the canoe over it as if performing penance.

That night the aurora borealis curls in celestial rapids, roiling above the glow of our campfire like river dreams. "Sometimes there would be a stillness of two minutes," Thompson wrote of the northern lights, and then, "The dogs howled with fear, and their brightness was often such that with only their light I could see to shoot an owl at twenty yards."

In a rainstorm it takes us two days to paddle across Black Lake, but we arrive at last in the new Dene settlement of 1,500. Our canoe trip is finished; the floatplanes will arrive next morning to take us out. Thompson had no such escape. For him the tougher journey lay ahead, back upstream. His logbooks record that hardship was routine. Only the occasional pike netted, a rabbit snared, and the daily miracle of fire coaxed from flint and steel sustained the little party.

We walk up the hill with cramped legs, to see how the Dene live today.

"Never heard of him," says Dan Robillard, flashing a smile. Dan, the band chief at Black Lake, tells us that many Dene are returning now, that not just money but also nostalgia for the land brings them back: "We used to follow caribou all year-round. Now we just fly a charter airplane to the [Northwest] Territories in spring and shoot them. I've got two freezers full of meat."

As Thompson predicted, no white community presses the Black Lake Dene; the nearest connecting road is more than 80 miles away. Yet Black Lake is growing, even prospering, partly from a treaty settlement that compensates the Dene from uranium-mine leases. The town just built an 18-million-dollar school.

About 80 Dene still trap for lynx, marten, wolf, and fox, as well as beaver, and although prices have fallen in recent years, they have found an alternative market. "The Chinese," says Robillard. "They want us to send them 3,000 pelts a month."

We fly back high above the coiled river, over windfallen trees in piles like pickup sticks and swaths of forest burned down to the naked granite. I watch the wounded landscape gliding underneath, thanking Providence that we had made it without mishap. Thompson wasn't quite so lucky. He and his Dene guides continued 20 miles to the tip of Lake Athabasca itself but concluded that the entire route was too shallow and hazardous for freight canoes.

Misfortune struck on their return journey back upriver, when Kozdaw and Paddy were tracking—pulling the canoe with a rope around dangerous falls—while Thompson sat aboard and steered. The Indians stopped to argue about which side of a birch tree to take the line. The canoe drifted and took a sheer to the strong current: "In an instant the canoe was precipitated down the fall (12 feet) and buried under the waves," Thompson wrote, "and when I arose among the waves, the canoe came on me and buried [me] beneath."

Thompson's foot was ripped open by the rocks. Most of the clothes, food, gear, and weapons were lost, although Paddy retrieved the sextant box. "It was now [that] our destitute condition stared us in the face; a long journey through a barren country without provisions...almost naked, and suffering from the weather; all before us was very dark."

Wearing pieces of their cotton tent for warmth in a cold summer, the unhappy trio was reduced to near starvation in a week and raided an eagle's nest for food. Weak with dysentery from the eagle fat, they finally stumbled upon two tents of Dene, who gave them broth.

Thompson had surveyed another great swath of the northland, but his trip was a dead end for the HBC, and the bosses were not impressed. He was welcomed by a curt note from headquarters: Stop exploring and concentrate on business.

Thompson's soul must have fared poorly behind a desk or cramped behind a counter, trading furs for pots and pans and blankets. A year later, after two full tours with what he later termed the "mean and selfish" Hudson's Bay, he walked out the door and joined the rival North West Company at their summer summit at Grand Portage on Lake Superior.

Thompson was only 27 but already possessed with a messianic energy that burned out lesser men around him. The Nor'Westers pronounced him the company astronomer and surveyor and hustled him off to fix the locations of North West posts to determine if they fell north or south of the 49th parallel, the new boundary between British America and the United States.

He was also to explore the Mandan villages of the upper Missouri Valley and, incidentally, to locate the headwaters of the Mississippi, which had been a border point set by the Jay Treaty of 1794.

He did it all in ten months, driving himself and his entourage through sub-zero blizzards by dogsled, covering 4,000 miles of mostly uncharted territory, and earning the respect of Alexander Mackenzie, the company partner who had already forged routes to the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans. Thompson's trip should have taken two years, Mackenzie marveled.

To his freewheeling new partners Thompson must have seemed a sanctimonious pain in the stern. He refused to use alcohol as a trade item, and his partners goaded him for his piety. He often read to his illiterate men from the Bible, in French, as they smoked clay pipes by the campfire.

He grew to value the spiritual life of Native Americans. The Cree believe that "the earth is also a divinity, and is alive," he wrote. "If it was not alive it could not give and continue life to other things and to animated creatures. The forests, the ledges and hills of rock, the lakes and rivers have all something of the manito [spirit] about them."

And he did not hesitate to take a "country wife." Charlotte Small was nearly 14 and the daughter of a Cree and HBC trader Patrick Small. Charlotte's first child, Fanny, was born two years later; 12 more followed.

Intermarriages among whites and natives were accepted on both sides, even encouraged as kinship ties. The rival fur companies competed to cement such relations, then reached farther inland, hoping to keep one jump ahead of the others. By 1800 they were probing the Rocky Mountains.

The boundary between British America and the U.S. at that time extended from Lake Superior only to the Continental Divide. The rich Oregon Country beyond was claimed by both nations, and the British traders grew alarmed when Lewis and Clark left to survey the U.S. West, using one of Thompson's maps to get through Mandan country. In 1806, to press British interests, Thompson was sent to Rocky Mountain House near today's Calgary, Alberta, to find a practical passage across the Rockies for fur-laden packhorses.

I drive north from Calgary to test firsthand the great continental barrier that challenged him. On this summer day the prairie that Thompson predicted would, "in time, become the abode of Mankind" is in flower. Highway 11 cuts through a slice of countryside buttered with yellow canola fields and tufted with aspen, their trunks gathered like schoolgirls in stockings.

Near the town of Rocky Mountain House, on the North Saskatchewan River, only two stone chimneys remain of the old trading post, and to the west the land toughens up. David Thompson Highway cuts through pine woods so desolate that the car radio zips through the seek format like a hummingbird finding no flower to alight upon. The air is spiced with wood smoke, and the mountains shake out slowly like bears awakening.

Thompson wrote about these Rockies with a romantic heart: "The imagination was apt to say, these must once have been liquid and in that state, when swelled to its greatest agitation, suddenly congealed and made solid by power omnipotent."

But the massif was huge and hostile beyond the ken of Europeans, and the Nor'Westers suddenly had enemies. The Piegan, angry that traders had supplied guns to the Kootenay, their rivals across the mountains, harassed exploratory expeditions. When the Piegan in 1807 were drawn south to help avenge the death of two Blackfeet at the hands of Lewis and Clark, Thompson hurried up the Saskatchewan and crossed the mountains through a Kootenay route now known as Howse Pass, 80 miles northwest of Banff.

As usual, the family was in tow. "One of my horses nearly crush[ed] my children to death from his load being badly put on," he wrote, "which I mistook for being vicious; I shot him on the spot and rescued my little ones."

He reached the Columbia but didn't know it; the river deceived him because it flows incongruously north for 200 miles before looping back southwest to the Pacific. For the next four years Thompson explored the Columbia's tributaries into what is now Idaho, Montana, and Washington.

Competition for the Oregon Country escalated in 1810. The ships of John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company had rounded Cape Horn and were sailing north to establish the Columbia Basin as American territory, land that British Canada felt was part of its fur fiefdom. Thompson was sent to claim the watershed, but the Piegan again blocked Howse Pass and terrorized the expedition. Thompson fled, hastily, and Astor's men were first to arrive at the mouth of the Columbia.

Thompson's detractors have claimed he was a coward for not fighting the Piegan and that he cost the British their claim to the Oregon Country. Most historians now say there was no "race to the sea," as this final chapter of the fur trade was known, that the British were more interested in business than in dominion.

With a heavy heart Thompson had struggled north to the Athabasca River in today's Jasper National Park, determined to find an alternate route to Howse Pass. It was late fall, and he had spent 19 days building snowshoes and dogsleds for a thrust up the Athabasca and its tributary, the Whirlpool, to the cut in the mountains now known as Athabasca Pass.

On a chilly July morning I set off from Jasper on a four-day packhorse trip up the Whirlpool to trace this part of Thompson's journey. David Flato, our trail guide, and Tom McCready, a wrangler, outfit three horses, and we clatter on an old logging road into forests of melancholy spruce. The trail cuts from forest shadow to meltwater bogs and into sunlit halls of aspen where elk browse. It meanders along wind-raked gravel flats where the river separates into icy ribbons. A drizzling rain moves in to obscure Scott Glacier, a gray tongue flopped mightily between snow swept peaks. It's 48°F.

Thompson and his crew struggled up the Whirlpool in four exhausting days, the dogs wallowing through the snow on the frozen riverbed, while the hunters scoured the barren land ahead for vagrant game. Morale was low, the men surly, and each was daily eating eight pounds of pemmican—dried buffalo meat mixed with fat and berries. Thompson was disgusted. "One of my men named DuNord beat a dog to death," he complained....

Athabasca Pass arrives gently as a U-shaped meadow on a jumble of fresh quartzite blocks. The horses wade through meltwater to three small tarns. One pond is the Committee's Punch Bowl, named in honor of the London board of the Hudson's Bay Company; its chilly outlets flow both to the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans.

The pass, wrote Thompson, "was to me a most exhilarating sight, but...the scene of desolation before us was dreadful, and I knew it. A heavy gale of wind, much more a mountain storm, would have buried us beneath it.... My men were not at their ease, yet when night came they admired the brilliancy of the stars, and as one of them said, he thought he could almost touch them with his hand."

Thompson had found what Alexander Mackenzie and others had failed to find: a safe, navigable route to the western coast. For more than seven decades, until the Canadian Pacific Railroad threaded the mountains farther south in 1885, Athabasca Pass carried the bulk of the continent's fur trade.

Thompson's expedition reached the Columbia in 15 days, but the crew rebelled against Thompson's relentless pace. Five men turned back, and he was forced to winter at Boat Encampment by the hairpin turn the Columbia makes around the head of the Selkirk Mountains. Then he detoured toward established posts in the tributaries to recruit more men. When he reentered the main stem near Kettle Falls two months later, he stuck a British flag into the stern of his canoe, and at a rest stop he posted a notice, formally taking possession of the land for King George III.

"We continued our journey, amused with the seals playing in the river," and on July 15, 1811, "we arrived at Tongue Point, which...brought us to a full view of the Pacific Ocean." Fort Astoria of the United States, built two months earlier and manned by two former North West Company clerks, received him "politely." The question of territorial claims was not resolved until 35 years later.

On his return upriver Thompson became the first to have explored the entire course of the Columbia. He flattered the Indians, to deprive the Astorians of as many customers as possible. But many of the natives had finally realized that a swift erosion of their own culture followed in the Europeans' wake. For the next three decades violence plagued the region.

Thompson never again went west. In 1812 he settled in Terrebonne, near Montreal, and in two years completed his monumental, detailed ten-by-six-foot map of western Canada. Now in the Archives of Ontario, in Toronto, it was the definitive map of that region for more than 50 years.

While many traders simply left their native families in the bush, Thompson had his children baptized and his marriage solemnized in church. He settled at age 45 in Williamstown, Glengarry County, in today's Ontario, a retirement town for Nor'Westers, mostly Highland Scots.

I arrive at Thompson's old house in Williamstown under stars so lucid that I feel the old magician himself has conjured up the sky. He could talk for hours about the grandeur of the cosmic mechanism, if he could find someone to listen. Even here, in the company of colleagues, Thompson was the outsider—"that Welshman."

"He was not part of the Highland web of kinship," says David Anderson, who gives tours of the classic Georgian home, where he lives with his family. "And he wasn't a socializer."...

At age 67, Thompson surveyed the Muskoka region of southern Ontario to find an alternate canal route to avoid the Great Lakes. He trekked from Georgian Bay to the Ottawa River in a cedar canoe, through today's Algonquin Park, and through lakes now strewn with vacation cottages.

He forwarded his other maps to the British government in 1826, but when the British negotiated for the Oregon Country and Thompson offered firsthand knowledge, he was ignored. He chafed under the slights.

"He was a humble man, and he didn't have a hustler's mind," said Stanley Landell, Thompson's great-great-grandson, a retired businessman in Orillia, Ontario. "Everyone knew ... here was this chump."

Destitute, Thompson and Charlotte went to live with their daughter Eliza and her husband, Dalhousie Landell, in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil. He had sore feet and a collection of slippers, and in 1848 he was led, blind, to a doctor who relieved him of scleritis and a cataract. At 76, he still found the power to weave journals and memory into his Travels. His daughter Mary recalled that he would relive his adventures as he wrote, and, "we would hear him laugh heartily over them with tears streaming down his cheeks."

He died in 1857, ten years before Canada became an independent nation. Fifty years after his death the unfinished manuscripts were retrieved and edited by J. B. Tyrrell, a Canadian geologist, and published by the Champlain Society in 1916. Since then, scholars have worked to retrofit Thompson into history as one of North America's founding fathers.

At the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, Section C, Lot 507, an unkempt juniper pushes against the pedestal of a marble column scarred by acid rain. Metal rods protrude from where a bronze sextant had once been attached to its top. "Look who's buried here," I tell John Kalina, a mechanic at the cemetery for some 30 years. He squints at the inscription:

DAVID THOMPSON 1770-1857
To the memory of the greatest of Canadian
geographers, who for 34 years explored
and mapped the main travel routes between
the St. Lawrence and the Pacific.

"Never heard of him," he says.