THOMPSON
,
DAVID
(
1770
-
1857
),
explorer in British North America
;
b.
30 April 1770
in
Westminster
, and christened as ‘
Thompson
,’ but his father (
David
) and mother (
Ann
) had borne the surname ‘
Ap Thomas
’ until they moved to
London
. The father d. when the boy was three.
David
was educated at the
Grey-coat school
, until, in
1784
, he was apprenticed to the
Hudson Bay Company
. After serving for five years as
clerk
and
fur-trader
, he came, in
1789-90
, under the influence of the company's
surveyor
,
Philip
Turnor
, who taught him the elements of
astronomy
and of
triangulation
.
Surveying
and
exploration
now became his passion, despite the company's disapproval; he mastered several
Red Indian
dialects, and ‘with
Bible
and sextant in hand’ (he was also an aggressive ‘teetotaller’) he diligently
explored
and
mapped
. Learning from the
Indians
that there was a short route (shorter than by following the river) to
Lake Athabasca
, he explored it. In
1797
he transferred his services to the
North-Western Company
which, though it granted him two years’ leave for
exploring
, was yet not too willing to see him relegate
fur-trading
to a secondary place. Meantime, he had traced the
Red river
and the
Assiniboine river
to their sources, had followed the
Assiniboine
to its confluence (in the
Winnipeg
region) with the
Red
, had followed the downward course of the
Red
, and had found the source of the
Mississippi
. In
1799
he m.
Charlotte
Small
, a girl of mixed
Scottish
and
Indian
parentage, who thereafter accompanied him on all his journeys; they had seven sons and six daughters. He explored the course of the
S. Lawrence
to
Lake Superior
. In
1807
he crossed the
Canadian Rockies
; he discovered the source of the
Columbia river
, and was the
first white man to descend it from source to mouth (
1811
), mapping as he went — a journey of over 1,200 miles. He left the
North-West Company
in
1812
, settling at
Montreal
in order to
construct his great map of the Far West
, ‘the basis of every
Canadian government
map for 100 years, and it still cannot be surpassed for accuracy’ — it is now in the
Ontario provincial archives
; in
1816-26
he was
on the commission which drew part of the boundary
between
Canada
and the
U.S.A.
His latter years were years of adversity; he had moved, in
1836
, to
Williamstown (Ont.)
and
opened a shop
, but bad debts, reckless generosity, and the business failures of some of his sons, reduced him to penury. He d. at
Longueil
(on the outskirts of
Montreal
) in
1857
, and was buried in
Mount Royal cemetery
at
Montreal
. He and his work were completely forgotten till a later
geographer
,
J. B.
Tyrrell
, retraced his journeys and, in
1916
, published his diaries. There are now monuments to him, on his tomb at
Mount Royal
, in
British Columbia
, and in
North Dakota
; and the
Thompson river
in
British Columbia
was named in compliment after him though not actually explored by him. In
1957
the
Dominion government
issued a postage stamp to mark the centenary of his death.
Bibliography:
-
Dictionary of
American Biography
, , (1928-36, 1944, 1988)
(good references);
-
Dictionary of Canadian biography
,
Toronto / London
;
-
Maclean's Magazine
, Toronto
(Toronto),
9 Nov. 1957
.
Author:
Emeritus Professor Robert Thomas Jenkins, C.B.E., D.Litt., Ll.D.,
F.S.A., (1881-1969), Bangor
