David Thompson

In October 2005, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane opened a one-year exhibit exploring the western travels of Canadian fur agent and cartographer David Thompson. When Lewis and Clark journal editor Gary Moulton walked through the exhibit and perused some of Thompson’s original field journals, he was immediately struck by similarities between the writings of the London-born furman and his American contemporaries. Thompson’s diaries shared likenesses in energy, awareness, syntax, and turn of phrase with many passages from the record of the Corps of Discovery. The longer Professor Moulton and I spent in the exhibit, the more we realized that this was no coincidence: the life and times of these three explorers intertwined in a number of odd and interesting ways, often brought together by far-reaching hand of Thomas Jefferson. Tracing these connections opens a window onto every conceivable aspect of the period of contact that rippled across the greater Northwest before and after the passage of the American captains and the British trader.

David Thompson was born to Welsh parents in the village of Westminster, just on the edge of London, in April of 1770—exactly the same year that William Clark was born in Virginia, and only four years before Meriwether Lewis. Although Thompson’s father died when he was one and little is known of his mother, the boy received a solid mathematical education at the Gray Coat Hospital, a charity school on the grounds of Westminster Cathedral. In May 1784, David Thompson, aged fourteen, sailed across the Atlantic to begin a seven-year clerk’s apprenticeship with the Hudson’s Bay Company, initiating a long career of trade and exploration that would eventually carry him to the mouth of the Columbia River.

During that same month of May 1784, Thomas Jefferson was traveling the opposite way across the same ocean, assigned to join U.S. envoys Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris. While Jefferson negotiated his way through different strata of Enlightenment society and succeeded Franklin as ambassador to France in 1785, young David Thompson learned the basic skills of the Canadian fur trade, including accounting, wilderness survival, practical natural history, and how to pay attention to local tribal knowledge in order to stay alive. While Jefferson improved his French, Thompson picked up Cree, which as a trade language extended clear across the Prairies to the Rocky Mountains.

Separated by age, an ocean, and the most different social positions imaginable, the two men nonetheless shared a keen interest in astronomy, which at that time included the discipline of practical surveying. Upon Thompson’s graduation, the Gray Coat school had presented him with a fine Hadley’s quadrant and a copy of the Nautical Almanac—the Hudson’s Bay Company hoped that the boy would become not only a clerk in the fur business, but also a surveyor who could codify routes through their business empire. Thompson showed enthusiasm for the goal, and at the end of his apprenticeship requested that the company supply him with scientific instruments rather than the standard new suit of clothes.

In time he collected a good Dollond sextant, a four-foot Dollond achromatic telescope with three different lenses, two accurate chronometers, and a full kit of drawing instruments that would enable him to make precise maps.

Thomas Jefferson followed a similar path. When he traveled to London on diplomatic business in the spring of 1786, one of his first side trips was to the shop of instrument maker Peter Dollond. There he purchased a telescope and other scientific instruments.^[2]Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 151. Peter Dollond’s father John had patented the first achromatic lens for telescopes, which eliminated the blur of color refraction. These lenses allowed astronomers to make crisp shots on the edges of heavenly objects. Surveyors such as David Thompson used such shots in conjunction with astronomical tables to accurately set their timepieces—a crucial beginning to the determination of a correct longitude. Among the instruments Thomas Jefferson used at Monticello was a four-foot Dollond telescope with three achromatic lenses and a collapsible pot-metal tripod, which fit snugly in an oblong wooden case. In his writings, David Thompson describes using exactly the same instrument to make his observations in the Saskatchewan, Athabasca, Peace, and Columbia River drainages.

David Thompson’s career in the fur trade soon gravitated west from Hudson Bay. In 1787, Bay Company officials assigned him to a small party that traveled to Lake Winnipeg and up the Saskatchewan River all the way to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where they wintered with a large camp of Piegan (Pikani or Pikuni) Blackfeet. The teenaged Thompson spent his months in the tent of an elder named Saukamappee, who spoke Cree and had survived the 1780-81 smallpox pandemic. From Saukamappee, Thompson absorbed Blackfeet culture and heard stories that stretched back to the days before horses and guns. But the boy also saw into the future, forming relationships with young tribal leaders who would interact with both British and American interests during the first decade of the next century.

Two winters later, posted on the North Fork of the Saskatchewan River, Thompson suffered a leg fracture that laid him up for most of the next year. He spent an eight-month convalescence rediscovering his math skills and learning cartography from professional surveyor Philip Turnor. Thompson’s first surviving map, drawn during his canoe trip back to Hudson Bay during the last year of his apprenticeship, showed promise that the company encouraged.

In 1792, while David Thompson searched for a northerly route from Hudson Bay to the rich fur grounds around Lake Athabasca, Thomas Jefferson attempted to mount a western exploring expedition led by the French botanist Andre Micheaux. That spring, the American captain Robert Gray described the mouth of the Columbia River, and George Vancouver’s lieutenant William Broughton surveyed the first one hundred miles of the river upstream, to a point just past modern Portland. In December, a party of Kootenai Indians left the source lakes of the Columbia River and crossed the Rocky Mountains on an ancient trail to meet Piegan Blackfeet associates for a session of gaming and trading. The Blackfeet brought along a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk named Peter Fidler, who had trained in surveying with David Thompson under Philip Turnor. This meeting marked the first recorded contact of furmen with a Columbia Plateau tribe, and the beginning of a Kootenai connection that would color the way David Thompson experienced the upper Columbia, Kootenai, and Clark Fork/Flathead/Pend Oreille drainages.

In 1793, Alexander Mackenzie made his historic crossing of the continent, moving from the Peace River drainage across an easy portage to the Parsnip and Fraser Rivers. Mackenzie thought he was on the Columbia, the Great River of the West; although he broke off the main stem to follow a tribal trail to the Pacific at Bella Coola, he assumed that he had found the key to a practical trade route. At that time, Mackenzie was working for the North West Company, the aggressive and bitter rival of the Hudson’s Bay. When he described his journey and visualized the prospects for transcontinental trade, the news buzzed through the fur trade world and beyond. Thomas Jefferson ordered a copy of Mackenzie’s book as soon as it was published, and also made sure he obtained London cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith’s latest North American map, which included coordinates from fur trade surveyors like young David Thompson.

In the spring of 1797, David Thompson defected from the Hudson’s Bay to the rival North West Company. At North West’s Grand Portage supply depot on Lake Superior for summer meetings, the company’s new surveyor met managing partners from Montreal and “wintering partners” who worked in the field. They presented Thompson with a grand challenge of navigation and business that involved visiting various company posts beyond Lake Winnipeg to determine their exact coordinates, then moving south on the Red River to visit the cluster of Knife River Villages on the Missouri River, in what is now North Dakota. Part of Thompson’s instruction, which sounded almost like a nod to mammoth and fossil enthusiast Thomas Jefferson, was to bring back any large bones that he might run across.

Thompson began the assignment by assembling a crew of French-Canadian voyageurs—French would be his everyday work language for the next 15 years. With their help, he fashioned sledges to haul trade goods and bartered for sled dogs with Lake Winnipeg tribes. Traveling at a steady pace no matter what the conditions, he charted the coordinates of several posts in the Assiniboine River country, then made a Christmas dash to the Knife River Villages. Thompson remained there long enough to record considerable information about the cultures and local landscape before working his way east through the headwaters of the Mississippi drainage, eventually postulating that a lake in northern Minnesota was the true source of that river. Although his nomination proved to be a few miles off, Thompson did establish that the Mississippi rose south of the 49th parallel, which had far-reaching effects on the North West Company’s trade network.^[3]David G. Malaher, “David Thompson’s Surveys of the Missouri/Mississippi in 1797-98.” Paper presented to the 9th North American Fur Trade Conference & Ruperts Land Colloquium, … Continue reading When Thompson rendezvoused with company partners for the 1798 summer meetings at Grand Portage, Alexander Mackenzie reckoned that their new surveyor had accomplished two years work in ten months. Excepting that Thompson had failed to find any mammoth relics, his first expedition for the Nor’Westers was marked as a great success.

Upon the completion of his journey, Thompson created a map that he called “Bend of the Missouri River.” Drawing on his own sextant work, the chart supplied the first accurate longitude for the villages at the confluence of the Knife River. The mapmaker marked each settlement in the cluster by tribe and dwelling type, and included a census of adult males. He delineated stream flow with delicate feather arrows, followed major tributaries upstream far enough to give shape to the drainage, and included topographical features such as the Turtle Hills. Many of the map’s details relied on carefully gathered tribal information.

Thompson’s “Bend of the Missouri” found its way from the British envoy in eastern Canada to Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, who delivered it into the hands of the President. Jefferson himself penciled a note on the map reiterating the coordinates figured by “Mr. Thomson Astronomer to the N.W. Company in 1798.” On the back of the chart another note reads “A sketch of the North Bend of Missouri. This belongs to Capn. Lewis.”

In the fall of 1800, David Thompson and his new mixed-blood Cree wife Charlotte Small were posted to Rocky Mountain House, the North West Company establishment furthest up the Saskatchewan River. In early October he traveled up the Red Deer River to meet another Kootenai band who had crossed the Continental Divide. After trading with this group, Thompson sent two of his voyageurs back west with the tribal party in anticipation of the establishment of a trade house in the new Columbia District.

Company partner Duncan McGillivray arrived at Rocky Mountain House soon after the Kootenais and two voyageurs departed, and proceeded to set in motion an ambitious North West plan to make Alexander Mackenzie’s transcontinental fur business a reality. McGillivray and Thompson rode south to visit the same Blackfeet camps where Thompson had wintered as a teenager. They asked Piegan elders for permission to bring Iroquois free trappers onto the east slope of the Rockies, then continued up the Bow River for a closer look at the mountains they would have to traverse to reach the Columbia. Both of these furmen studied natural history, and reveled in the wealth of mammals they saw in the upper Bow drainage. When McGillivray shot a large Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, Thompson carefully recorded the ram’s horn and body measurements in his journal.

In the spring of 1801 the Nor’Westers made a serious attempt to cross the Rocky Mountains and establish their first post in the Columbia country. With Duncan McGillivray incapacitated by rheumatism, agent James Hughes took charge of the small party; Thompson served as the surveyor and second in command. Foundering under the unfamiliar difficulties of mountain travel, the group never made it to the Continental Divide, and in his report to the Company partners Thompson explained both the trials of spring runoff and the necessity of an expert guide. He made it clear he would learn from the experience, and was eager to try again.

McGillivray, meanwhile, returned to the east, and in time delivered a dried Rocky Mountain sheep skin to Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill’s Lyceum of Natural History in New York. A keen follower of western exploration, Mitchill had recently taken over editorship of the Philadelphia-based scientific journal Medical Repository from Jefferson’s close friend and Corps of Discovery medical advisor, Dr. Benjamin Rush.

In an 1803 issue of Medical Repository, Mitchill published Duncan McGillivray’s “Account of the Wild North-American Sheep.” McGillivray’s letter described how during an expedition up the Bow River with Thompson, he had broken off with an Indian guide to have a shot at a small herd of animals that the Cree called “ugly rein deer.” While Thompson was busy taking a meridian altitude, the two hunters brought down four mountain rams in all. Thanks to Thompson’s observations, McGillivray was able to include an exact latitude and longitude for the spot where he had taken the sheep that ended up in Dr. Mitchill’s museum.

Thomas Jefferson certainly subscribed to Medical Repository. If he didn’t see the article immediately, an 1803 letter from a friend called the president’s attention to McGillivray’s mention of the Missouri and Saskatchewan Rivers in the Repository account. No matter when Jefferson read the story, he would have gleaned details from it about the natural history of a new western mammal, British movements on the east slope of the Rockies, and the surveying skills of David Thompson.

Using Thompson’s Map

After Thompson’s 1801 attempt to cross the Divide, fur trade rivalries and the Napoleonic wars sidetracked North West Company efforts to establish trade in the Columbia District. These same elements helped Thomas Jefferson to acquire the Louisiana Territory and push ahead with his own long-held plans to follow the Great River of the West to the Pacific.

When Lewis and Clark worked their way up the Missouri in the fall of 1804, they had in their possession a copy of Thompson’s “Bend of the Missouri” map. After the captains established their first winter camp at the Mandan Villages in late fall of 1804, they had an opportunity to check the accuracy of Thompson’s coordinates, censuses, and topographical information recorded seven years before.

Soon after the turn of the new year, North West Company trader François-Antoine Larocque arrived at the villages for his company’s annual trading session. During his stay, Captain William Clark told Larocque that he disagreed with the longitude Thompson had calculated for the place, explaining he believed that the British surveyor had placed the villages too far to the west. The position of the villages on Clark’s 1814 map, although not Thompson’s exact reading, is closer to the fur trader’s mark than the Fort Mandan observations of Lewis and Clark.^[4]See also Larocque at Fort Mandan.

Rocky Mountain Crossings

When they reached the Rockies in the fall of 1805, Lewis and Clark experienced the same kinds of problems with mountain travel that had impeded David Thompson in the fall of 1800 and the spring of 1801—wider and more separate mountain ranges, wetter and milder weather on the West Slope, a shortage of grass for horses and meat for men. The captains did eventually make their way from the Bitterroot Valley across Lolo Pass to the Lochsa, Clearwater, and Snake drainages, reaching the long-sought Columbia River at what is now Pasco, Washington. They made the initial formal survey of about 200 river miles along the Columbia before they meshed with Lieutenant Broughton’s chart at Point Vancouver. From there they continued to the tidewaters and established their winter camp for 1805-06 at Fort Clatsop.

Meriwether Lewis’s return across the mountains in 1806 was marked by a skirmish with Blackfeet on the Marias River, very near the 49th parallel. Fur traders at Rocky Mountain House soon heard the Piegan version of the battle, as well as accurate information about the men and movements of the American party as they returned downstream on the Missouri. Tribal people knew that two of the Corps of Discovery turned around at the Yellowstone with the intention of trapping furs, and that numerous parties had already been up the Missouri for the same purpose.

This western movement of trappers is clear in Clark’s journal for the lower Missouri section of the Corps of Discovery’s journey, and at least two of the men mentioned by Clark—Charles Courtin and François Rivet—would later be named in Thompson’s Columbia journals. Other unnamed free trappers, known to both Meriwether Lewis and Thompson as “Illinois River men” after their point of origin, certainly drifted into the Columbia District in the wake of the American Expedition as well.

Canadian free trappers had been crossing the Continental Divide north of the 49th parallel at least since Thompson dispatched his two voyageurs west with a Kootenai band in 1800 and introduced Iroquois trappers onto the east front in 1801. In the late summer of 1806, the Nor’Westers dispatched scouts up the North Fork of the Saskatchewan River to widen one existing Kootenai trail so a trading expedition could embark the following spring. David Thompson arrived back at Rocky Mountain House in October to serve as both lead fur agent and surveyor of the push across the Divide.

In June 1807, Thompson led an expedition that included his wife Charlotte and their three small children across the Divide via the Howse and Blaeberry Rivers. Striking the Columbia near modern Golden, British Columbia, he moved south, upstream, to the source lakes of the great river. There he established his first trade house among Kootenai acquaintances who had been asking for such a post for at least 15 years.

In August, a tribal party from the south arrived at Kootanae House with news of American activity, and probably were the deliverers of a ten-point proclamation and letter signed by two men who claimed to be officers in the U.S. Army. Although no Army records match those officers’ names, both documents warned British furmen off what they said was American land. A second letter that reached Kootanae House later that fall repeated the threat, but since no land west of the Continental Divide had yet been assigned by treaty, Thompson knew his North West Company explorations were perfectly legal. He would, however, factor the activities of these shadowy Americans into his plans for the “Columbia District,” as the North West Company called all their new business territory within the river’s drainage. “This establishment of the Americans will give a new Turn to our so long delayed settling of this country,” he wrote, “but in my opinion the most valuable part of the Country still remains with us.”

While there has been plenty of speculation as to the identity of these letter writers,^[5]Moulton, Journals, 8:464n (17 September 1806); Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 358-360; Harry M. “John … Continue reading the only written documents from the Columbia District for this period come either from Thompson’s hand or from recopies of his letters and speculation by British fur agents operating on the Saskatchewan. These primary writings contain only a few scattered mentions of Americans operating in the area. Beginning in November 1809, at the Saleesh House post Thompson established on the Flathead River, the surveyor did do business with a free trapper who may well have been the same Francois Rivet who worked for Lewis and Clark during their trip up the Missouri River to the Mandan villages.^[6]Moulton, Journals, 2:528-29, 8:311. Rivet, along with other free trappers Thompson employed including Bellaire, Bostonae, Desjarlaix, and Kinville, were characterized as Illinois River men who were constantly running afoul of the Blackfeet.

In February 1810, Thompson helped Francois Rivet and others distribute the furs and personal effects of an American trapper he called “Mr. Courter” who had been killed in a skirmish with Blackfeet in the Hellgate area. This name might well match with a “Mr. Coartong” who appeared in William Clark’s lower Missouri journal.^[7]Moulton, Journals, 8:311. Manuel Lisa was certainly operating in eastern Montana by 1807, and some of the other outbound traders Lewis and Clark met on their way down the Missouri may have made it over the Continental Divide to compete with Thompson. But until some undiscovered documentation appears, the story of their interaction in western Montana and northern Idaho will remain murky.

The Illinois River men were only part of the waves of French-Canadian, Scottish, Cree, Assiniboine, Iroquois, Hawaiian, and mixed blood furmen that David Thompson introduced into the Columbia District. Although Thompson later wrote that Blackfeet raiders killed the last of the Illinois River men, many of his other employees settled down with Plateau-culture wives and raised families, changing the social fabric of the region. Descendants of those families remain in the greater Northwest, long after Thompson and all remnants of the fur trade have disappeared.

A more direct connection between Thompson and the Corps of Discovery arrived at Kootanae House in December 1807. This was a copy of a lengthy letter written by Meriwether Lewis that described the American expeditions’ journey across Lolo Pass, canoe trip down the lower Columbia, winter at Fort Clatsop, return trip across the Continental Divide, and Lewis’s 1806 movements up the Marias River. The North West Company’s possession of this letter was not necessarily a matter of thievery or espionage; at this time many dispatches on route were seen as public documents, to be published in local newspapers along the way. This particular one might have been addressed to John Hay, a friend of Lewis’s who was both a Missouri postmaster and a keen follower of western affairs. The original has never come to light, and no one knows how the only known transcript of this important letter made its way to David Thompson at Kootanae House.^[8]Jackson, Letters, 1:335-43.

As Thompson established his circle of trade on the Columbia’s eastern tributaries over the next four years, wintering in the field and traveling back to Lake Superior for resupply each summer, he continued to make diligent observations all over the Columbia District. He pioneered a second route across the Canadian Rockies at Athabasca Pass in January 1811, then ran a hastily-built cedar plank canoe down the Columbia River from Kettle Falls to the Pacific during two historic weeks of July 1811.

The moment Thompson intersected the Corp of Discovery’s route at the confluence of the Snake and the Columbia, he set up his instruments very close to the spot where Lewis and Clark took their coordinates and made a sextant shot on the position; he did the same when he crossed Lieutenant Broughton’s survey for the lower river. Besides connecting the geography of the lower and upper Columbia, Thompson’s journal entries also add perspective on the annual cycle of river heights, runoff, tribal ethnography, and salmon runs—for example, where William Clark canoed among spawned out salmon carcasses near the mouth of the Yakima River in October, Thompson described a July fish run that Yakima people were harvesting with a carefully crafted seine net 8 feet wide and an astonishing 300 feet long.

After a few days’ visit with John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company crew at Astoria, Thompson crossed the river to what is now the Washington side to view Cape Disappointment and the Pacific Ocean before returning upstream on the Columbia. A thousand river miles later, when he reached the confluence of the Canoe River at the very peak of the river’s northern hairpin turn, he completed the first formal survey of the Columbia from source to mouth. In all Thompson’s surveys added about 900 river miles to the initial chartwork of Broughton and the Corps, and the furman stretched that farther by making initial surveys of the Kootenai, Flathead/Clark Fork/Pend Oreille, and Spokane drainages.

Thompson spent his last winter in the west at his Saleesh House post in western Montana performing his usual activities: buying food from tribal hunters; building everything from canoes to waterproof chests; managing the families at the post; trading with a wide variety of visitors; exploring the surrounding countryside as time permitted, keeping track of local natural history and weather; working out his course books for future mapwork; painting watercolors of surrounding mountains; and listening to tribal elders. Guided by a Kootenai man he called Le Gauche, the surveyor visited the Clark Fork valley near the modern town of Missoula in February of 1812. There he climbed a foothill west of Grant Creek (near the mouth of which Meriwether Lewis is believed to have crossed the river on 3 July 1806) and looked south into the Bitterroot Valley. With Le Gauche’s help plus the letter written by Lewis that Thompson had copied into his journal at Kootanae House in 1807, Thompson was able to visualize the Corp of Discovery’s route from Traveler’s Rest over Lolo Pass to the land of the salmon.

After David Thompson returned to Montreal in summer 1812, he was 42 years old; although he pursued an active life for three more decades, he never traveled west of Lake of the Woods again. But the Columbia District remained on his mind, and he revisited it constantly as he worked his meticulous survey books into five great maps of western North America.

The first two of these large charts were undertaken for the North West Company, and Thompson completed them in 1814—exactly the year that William Clark finished his own large map of the American West that hangs today in Yale’s Beinecke Library. Both men created fascinating documents, seminal to their times. Clark’s was highly accurate along the line of exploration traveled by the Corps. To the north of the Columbia and Snake confluence, his great map showed his limited understanding of the upper Columbia as a rough arc that encompassed major tributaries and lakes mentioned to him by tribal informants.

Thompson also made use of tribal information on his maps, but within the North West Company circle of trade, his many return trips and use of multiple informants allowed him to achieve a finer level of detail. Outside of the circle, Thompson was able to incorporate the work of his mentors Philip Turnor and Alexander Mackenzie, as well as his peers John Stuart, Simon Fraser, Peter Fidler, and William Clark himself to flesh out the Athabasca, Saskatchewan, Peace, Fraser, Missouri, and Columbia River drainages in the first accurate chart of this whole vast region.

The North West Company partners hung one of Thompson’s first two maps in the dining hall of their Lake Superior headquarters, where westward-leaning furmen and adventurers like Ross Cox could relive their travels or dream of journeys to come.

At the upper end of the hall is a very large map of the Indian country, drawn with great accuracy by Mr. David Thompson, astronomer to the Company, and comprising all their trading posts, from Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific Ocean, and from Lake Superior to Athabasca and Great Slave Lake.^[9]Ross Cox, The Columbia River, ed. Edgar I. and Ann R. Stewart (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), 332. For an impression of the imposing size of Thompson’s map (c. 96 x 84 inches), … Continue reading

International Boundary Commission

Even after he delivered these charts, Thompson did not stop thinking about the West. Around 1816, while working as chief surveyor for the International Boundary Commission on lines through the Great Lakes region, he sent an atlas prospective to a London publisher visualizing four 4′ x 10′ sheets that would lay geological, topographical, natural history, and tribal information over the territory covered by his original large maps. Although the proposal was turned down, Thompson doggedly pursued different versions of his idea over the next quarter-century. Convinced that accurate cartographic work should be an essential element in the boundary delineation between Great Britain and the United States west of the Continental Divide, he dispatched versions of his new maps to London in 1823 and again in 1843. Boundary negotiators apparently ignored them, and Thompson’s vision of a border that ran from the 49th to the 47th parallel along the Continental Divide, cut west to the juncture of the Columbia River near modern Vantage, Washington, then followed the middle of river’s course to the Pacific, was never realized.

The most complete of Thompson’s charts, called “Map of North America from 84∫ West to the Pacific Ocean,” was far ahead of its time in the way it layered information onto accurate river courses and watersheds. Prominent among its features are traditional tribal names for creeks and rivulets that feed the major rivers; descriptions of landscape and ethnographic features carefully inked into place; dotted lines for tribal routes that connected different drainages; and a bold yellow line that traced the route of his fellow explorers, Lewis and Clark, on their own journey to the Great River of the West.

Even as Thompson’s travels intertwined with those of the American captains, the influence of Thomas Jefferson continued to hover over them all, interlacing the disciplines of human and natural history, bold exploration and careful observation, science and storytelling. Jefferson had placed fossil-finding, with a particular eye for mammoth remains, high on his Corps of Discovery instruction list. Meriwether Lewis even stopped on his way down the Ohio River to collect fossils from a famous sinkhole called Big Bone Lick, which he tried to send back to Jefferson. New country and the rigors of their journey might have blunted the captains’ enthusiasm, but William Clark did pick at his famous fossil rib along the Yellowstone during the latter stages of their return journey. A few years before the Corps embarked, David Thompson had been told to search for fossils in the Prairies, and he also wondered about a large bone he saw on the Peace River. Neither explorer was able to incorporate such relics into their larger world view in the way that Jefferson did, but a series of incidents in the northern Rockies forced Thompson to confront what they might mean.

Thompson’s ‘Big Foot’ Encounter

During Thompson’s first fall and winter at his Kootanae House post at Lake Windermere, British Columbia, he became acquainted with an elder he called “the Old Chief.” In Thompson’s field journal entry for 28 September 1807, the surveyor wrote that:

The Old Chief & others related that in the Woods of the Mountains there is a very large Animal, of abt the height of 3 fms [fathoms] & great bulk that never lies down, but in sleeping always leans against a large Tree to support his weight; they believe, they say, that he has no joints in the mid of his Legs, but they are not sure as they never killed any of them, &  by this acct they are rarely or never seen.^[10]Barbara Belyea, ed., Columbia Journals: David Thompson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 70.

Thompson recorded many tribal tales during his time in the fur business, and he didn’t put any particular stock in the truth of the Old Chief’s tale—”this is no doubt some Animal of their Nurses Fables, as they cannot say they ever saw the least remains of a dead one”—but the size, the bulk, the tree-leaning, and even the odd idea of kneeless legs all contain whiffs of mammoth lore. In fact, an early English Bestiary that Thompson might have seen at the Gray Coat School described African elephants as jointless beasts that leaned against trees to sleep.^[11]Oliver Rackham, Cambridge University, personal correspondence with the author.

In January, 1811, during his first crossing of Athabasca Pass, Thompson’s party came across a long line of outsized tracks in the snow, which he dutifully measured at eight by fourteen inches. His mixed-blood hunters insisted these were mammoth tracks, but Thompson decided they more likely belonged to an old grizzly bear that had worn its claws off.

When Thompson recrossed the pass that fall, he recalled the tracks and listened to his men:

October 6 The Mountain close to the Campmt [encampment] where I observed is said to have a large Lake on its top where there are several of those large unknown Animals. They are said to live on Roots, Moss, &c &c. but nothing as yet appears of their being carnivorous.^[12]AO Journal 27, 6 October 1811.

Although these journal entries have been cited in cryptozoology articles as early evidence of a sasquatch, David Thompson and his men were thinking only of elephants. When Thompson wrote his autobiographical Travels thirty years later, he fleshed out both the winter and fall incidents with his own conjectures. Familiar with recent Siberian findings of whole mammoth remains, he wondered if so grand an animal might really live in the Rockies. He emphasized that the men who had told him about the beast were trusted veterans of mountain crossings who believed what they were saying. He described large bones that had been found in the eastern United States, and connected the veneration of such bones with the Osage Indians, as if he was familiar with Lewis and Clark’s attempt to collect such artifacts from Kentucky.

Although Thompson still insisted he thought the large tracks on Athabasca Pass belonged to an outsized grizzly bear, he proceeded to retell a Delaware Indian story about large, mammoth-like beasts in eastern North America. These mammoths wreaked havoc until a great spirit named Kee che Kee hurled Thunder at them, killing all but one large male who escaped to the far west. The tribe and the story line appear to be lifted directly from the pages of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1783 and widely popular among natural history enthusiasts.^[13]Jack Nisbet, Visible Bones, 70-91. Thompson ended his version of the Delaware story with musings that sound a little like the mentor that he never met, a true traveler speaking to his armchair companion:

The circumstantial evidence of the existence of this animal is sufficient, but notwithstanding the many months the Hunters have traversed this extent of country in all directions, and this Animal having never been seen, there is no direct evidence of it’s existence, yet when I think of all I have seen and heard, if put on my oath, I could neither assert, nor deny, it’s existence; for many hundreds of miles of the Rocky Mountains are yet unknown, and through the defiles by which we pass, distant one hundred and twenty miles from each other, we hasten our march as much as possible.^[14]David Thompson, Travels, iii.307.

Pine Creek Mammoth

Thompson went on to remark on the absolute lack of large fossil bones in the Columbia country, and wondered why the East could be so rich and the West so barren in this respect. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps, would simply have responded that he wasn’t looking hard enough.

As soon as homesteaders arrived to break ground in the Inland Northwest,  big bones began to rise from the earth. In 1876, two brothers near Rosalia, Washington—on a farm not far off the tribal trail David Thompson used to make his way from the Snake River to the Kettle Falls in summer 1811—wrested an 800-pound fossilized skull from a spring behind their house. The relic ended up in the American Museum of Natural History, where taxonomists used it to define the species Mamuthus columbi, Columbia mammoth. It took some time, but the new name has finally overtaken the former common designation of Jefferson’s mammoth (see Giant Sloth Bones, megalonyx).^[15]Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 43-44.

Sources

Primary Sources

Journals. David Thompson Collection. Archives of Ontario F443, Toronto. (cited as “AO journals”).

Notebooks, David Thompson Collection, Archives of Ontario, Toronto.

Travels. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Other Sources

Bedini, Silvio A. Thomas Jefferson, Statesman of Science. New York, McMillan, 1990.

Belyea, Barbara (ed.) Columbia Journals/David Thompson. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994.

Fidler, Peter. “Journal.” Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Jackson, Donald (ed.) Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents 1783-1854, 2. vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Jenish, Darcy. Epic Wanderer: David Thompson & the Mapping of the Canadian West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

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