Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site of Canada
Cultural Treasures
David Thompson
David Thompson was born to impoverished parents in Westminister, England, on April 30, 1770. At age seven, he was enrolled in the Grey Coat Hospital, a charity school for boys, where he received a "mathematical education." In 1784, at age 14, he apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company as a clerk, arriving at Hudson Bay in September.
His first two years in Rupert's Land, the company's territory in British North America, were spent on the shores of Hudson Bay at Churchill and York Factory. He was sent inland and stationed at several posts on the Saskatchewan River. He spent the winter of 1787-88 with the Peigan Aboriginal people on the Bow River where he learned much of the language, life and customs of the Aboriginal peoples of the northern plains and met the Peigan war chief, Kootanae Apee.
In the spring of 1788, Thompson returned to one of the company posts, Manchester House. In December, he broke his leg, an accident which changed the course of his life. The break was so severe that he was unable to walk with crutches until eight months after the accident, and was not completely mobile for more than a year. He spent the winter of 1789-90 convalescing at Cumberland House where Philip Turnor, the Hudson's Bay Company's astronomer, tutored him in surveying and practical astronomy.
Surveying and mapping the uncharted West became Thompson's ambition and eventually his greatest achievement. From this time onward he surveyed wherever he travelled in the West. The company outfitted him with a sextant, an artificial horizon, compass, thermometers, watches, Nautical Almanacs, and all the instruments and supplies necessary to carry out his surveying.
After two years at York Factory, Thompson returned inland in 1793 and traded, explored and surveyed in present-day northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, In 1797, believing the energetic and venturesome North West Company would use his skills better than the Hudson's Bay Company, he quit without giving the customary one-year notice and joined its (Canadian) rival. His new employers welcomed him to Grand Portage on Lake Superior, and set him to work immediately.
In his first year with the North West Company, he travelled 6000 km to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, to Sault Ste Marie and back to Grand Portage. He located the company's posts in relation to the newly established international boundary, the 49th parallel.
Two years after becoming a "Nor'Wester," Thompson married Charlotte Small, the mixed-blood daughter of a North West company partner, Patrick Small. David and Charlotte remained together for almost sixty years. They had 13 children. The first was born at Rocky Mountain House in 1801.
Thompson visited Rocky Mountain House briefly in the spring of 1800, but was back for a two-year stay that fall. During this time, he and his colleagues, Duncan McGillivray and James Hughes, engaged in several exploratory trips. In the fall of 1800, Thompson made two such trips, the first to the Red Deer River and the second to the Bow River. In June of 1801, he and Hughes were unsuccessful in their attempt to locate a pass through the Rockies above Rocky Mountain House.
Thompson spent the years from 1802 to 1806 travelling and trading from the Peace River area to Fort William on the shore of Lake Superior. He returned to Rocky Mountain House in the autumn of 1806, now a partner in the North West Company and anxious to fulfil the "Columbia Enterprise," the company's dream of a practical route to the Pacific and China. Alexander Mackenzie's 1793 route to the Pacific was impractical for trade.
Thompson spent the winter of 1806-07 at Rocky Mountain House making preparations to cross the Rockies. The Peigan Aboriginal people, who frequented the post, opposed establishing trade west of the mountains because their enemies, the Kootenay and Flathead peoples, could then acquire guns. Thompson seized an opportunity in the spring of 1807 to avoid the Peigans. He went up-river from Rocky Mountain House, through the later named Howse Pass to the Columbia River where he built Kootenay House.
For the next three years he explored, surveyed and established trading posts in present-day British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. His trek to the Pacific was without urgency. This changed in 1810 when he was returning east for a furlough and learned, at Rainy Lake, of the American John Jacob Astor's recently dispatched maritime expedition to the mouth of the Columbia. Thompson was ordered to reach the Pacific, "with all speed," to contend with this American effort. He and the Columbia brigade were halted above Rocky Mountain House by the Peigans who were attempting to stop the recently established transmountain trade. Seemingly, this courageous man lost his nerve. He delayed reacting to this situation briefly but soon regained his composure and, with assistance from Alexander Henry of Rocky Mountain House, led his men north, skirting Peigan territory. Early in 1811, Thompson crossed the Athabasca Pass and pushed on to the Columbia. Unavoidable delays prevented him from reaching the mouth of the Columbia River until July 15, 1811, four months after the Americans had arrived and built their post, Astoria.
Thompson's work in the West was now virtually at an end, culminating in his surveying of the Columbia River from its source to its mouth. He left the West in 1812 and settled in Terrebonne, Lower Canada, where he finished his Map of the Northwest Territory of the Province of Canada. During his 28 years in the fur trade, he had travelled 88 000 km. He had filled in the map of western Canada. His great map covered an area of 3.9 million square kilometres and parts of it were still being used into the 20th century.
Following the War of 1812, Thompson was appointed to the commission established to define the boundary between Upper Canada and the United States. In future years, he proved to be an unsuccessful businessman. Interest in his explorations in the Columbia arose, but waned quickly, during the Oregon dispute of the mid-1840s. Ill health and failing eyesight plagued his last years and prevented him from completing his memoirs of his western travels. Canada's greatest geographer died in 1857 near Montréal, in poverty and virtual obscurity.