Epic Wanderer - the story of David Thompson

 

Epic Wanderer, D’Arcy Jenish

David Thompson might be the greatest explorer/navigator/surveyor/map maker in NA history, but because he was Canadian his exploited like Fraser and Mackenzie are seldom heard in the US.  Here was a man who traveled through the true NW from Lake Superior to the Arctic, across to the Klondike, down the cost and along the full length of the Columbia River to the Ocean.  His travels far eclipse Lewis and Clark, although the story does not have as many romantic characters in it.

He crisscrossed the mountains and the prairies and he established fur posts throughout the NW for the North West Company.  His great map hung in Fort William (a replica is still there) and he worked on the survey of the US/Canadian boundary as well as many other projects in Canada meaning he probably travelled further in NA than any person prior to the automobile and airplane.

He started at 13 as an indentured servant to the Hudson Bay Company and traveled extensively through the Arctic region from Hudson Bay before leaving that service and joining the North West Company.  His work was important and his duty to his work was extraordinary, but when he and his wife and children tried to settle, he was beset with problems.  He trusted too many people, loaned too much money to others and eventually became so poverty stricken that his last decade was as a pauper living with his children and nearly forgotten in his new country.

But fortunately he not only kept mapping notes; he also maintained a detailed journal that was converted in to an outstanding historical autobiography after his death.  Thanks to that we can reconstruct his life, adventures, and accomplishments.

Here are some interesting notes that are particularly interesting to those of us in MN and around Lake Superior.

“The annual meeting of the North West Co. at Fort William was usually a raucous affair, a few days in mid-July when the wintering partners, the clerks and the voyageurs from the posts of the vast interior gathered to eat, drink and dance, to share news, rumours and stories and to enjoy the camaraderie and conviviality of a larger society after months of isolation.  But the meeting of 1812 was different.

“On July 15, an express canoe arrived from the British garrison on St. Joseph Island bearing news that England and America were at war.”

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1822 - [May 24, David Thompson joined his men on the St. Lawrence.] "One month later, they reached Sault Ste Marie, a meagre settlement of fifteen log houses and a substantial trading post built by the North West Co., after the two companies'[ merger the year before. They spent three chilly days there before putting their canoe into Superior's waters. Thompson, who was fifty-two and for the first time feeling his age, complained at one point: 'I have put on two vest and 2 pr of Stockings and yet shiver.'"

"Dr. Bigsby, who was travelling with the Canadians [on the US/Canada boundary survey], called the country around Superior 'sterility itself, an assemblage of rocky mounds with small intervals of marsh.'  And General Porter, relying on second-hand accounts since he, like Barclay, was not in the field, informed Secretary of State Adams that the country was 'totally wild and uninhabited' and the climate 'so cold and inhospitable that a small portion of the year only can be employed in active duties.'"

 

On the boundary commission – “Thompson made the case for the St Louis [river] in a report to Barclay presented at a meeting of the joint commission at Albany in February 1824.  He maintained that it was the most substantial waterway that entered the lake from the west.  Furthermore, Fond du Lac was fifteen to seventeen miles long and part of the St Louis watershed, as the biggest lake immediately west of Superior and was, therefore, the mysterious Long Lake of the treaty [language].

“Thompson’s argument created a rift, one soon widened by other points of contention.  Barclay, acting upon advice from his agent, John Hale, insisted that as many as thirteen sizable streams flowed into Superior from the west and warranted investigation. The Americans responded by asserting that the boundary line should follow the Fort Williams – Kaministiquia River route to Lake of the Woods, a move that would have cost the Hudson’s Bay Co. the fur trade of the Rainy Lake district.  These issues were enough to keep the surveyors in the field for the summers of 1824 and 1825.”