First Visitor Trader Explored And Wrote About Our Region

It should be a felony, or at least a misdemeanor, to live in the Inland Northwest and know nothing about fur trader David Thompson.

Lecture over. Court adjourned. Let’s skip the sermonizing and simply explain exactly why David Thompson is so important: He was the first white man to tramp and canoe all over this part of the country, and he did it all before the War of 1812.

In 1810, he established the first non-native building in Spokane, the Spokane House trading post.

He was the first white man many of the Inland Northwest tribes had ever met. Before him, they had heard only rumors of white people.

He discovered the headwaters of the Columbia and was the first explorer to float its entire length to the Pacific.

He was at least as important as Lewis and Clark, and they shouldn’t get all the attention.

“Lewis and Clark were out for two years,” said author Jack Nisbet. “David Thompson was out for 27 years. And he made good maps. And he wrote a lot better than they did. David Thompson belongs to the continent.”

Nisbet, a Spokane teacher and writer, will be our guide through this story, and an excellent guide he is. Nisbet is the author of “Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across North America” (Sasquatch Books, $12.95 paperback), a highly readable history of Thompson’s travels.

Nisbet first became fascinated with Thompson back in the 1970s. Nisbet, a North Carolina native and Stanford graduate, was writing a natural history column for the Chewelah Independent at the time. He found that whenever researchers wanted data about the land before the white man, they always consulted David Thompson’s journals. Were bighorn sheep native to a certain mountain range? If Thompson mentioned them, end of discussion.

Nisbet’s curiosity about Thompson flowered into an obsession. He read Thompson’s journals, traveled his routes, studied his maps. Last October, nearly 20 years later, Nisbet produced “Sources of the River” to widespread praise.

The word “obsession” is Nisbet’s own.

“I’m real obsessed about David Thompson and what the world was like when he was here,” admitted Nisbet.

On this warm winter day, Nisbet has led us out to Riverside State Park, where the Little Spokane River meets the Spokane River a few miles northeast of the Spokane city limits. Somewhere in this field, or near that grove of pines, was David Thompson’s Spokane House, built in 1810.

“He describes it as being near open stands of yellow (Ponderosa) pine, somewhat like this,” he says, gesturing toward the parklike grove.

“Of course, no tree that is here now is even half old enough to have been there in 1810. It’s getting to be a pretty long time ago.”

A pretty long time ago is right. Thompson is the source of what scientists call the “baseline knowledge” of our region’s biology, ethnology, geography and geology. Which is one way of saying he’s the first guy who saw it and wrote it down.

For instance, here are some of the things one can learn from reading Thompson’s journals.

An important Indian “road” (a good trail) ran from Bonner’s Ferry to Lake Pend Oreille. Another, known as the Skeetshoo Road, ran from Lake Pend Oreille across Rathdrum Prairie to Spokane.

Indians habitually set ground fires to clear out brush for better hunting. Thompson often mentions that he is traveling in smoke.

Camas roots were an important part of life among the Indians on Calispell Lake near Cusick. He describes in detail the rituals involved in digging and preparing the roots.

The Columbia River flows northward in Canada before making an enormous U-turn and heading south and west toward the Pacific. This is common knowledge now, but it was news of the most momentous kind when Thompson first figured it out.

Thompson’s skill as a surveyor and map-maker set him apart from the other trappers and voyageurs. Skilled with a sextant, he took sightings everywhere he went, and he was the first to make sense of this regions’s confusing maze of rivers and mountain ranges.

He had to know where he was, because it was his job. Thompson was an employee of the North West Company, and he was out here for one primary purpose: to set up trading posts near Indian villages and to collect furs from the tribes.

He, or the men who worked for him, built trading posts throughout the Inland Northwest: At Kootenae House, at the Columbia’s headwaters near present-day Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia; Kullyspel House on the north shore of Lake Pend Oreille; and Saleesh House on the Clark Fork River near present day Thompson Falls, Mont.

Thompson especially loved the country around Saleesh House, and he wrote with some prescience: “It will become the abode of civilized Man, whether natives or other people; part of it will bear rich crops of grain, the greater part will be pastoral, as it is admirably adapted to the rearing of cattle and sheep.”

Maybe the Clark Fork was his favorite spot, but Spokane House was more important to his plans. When he sent his man Jaco Finlay out to build the post at the mouth of the Little Spokane, he knew that he had reached the edge of beaver country. Desert stretched out south and west. At Spokane House, he could collect pelts from the forests north and east and then transport them on the great Columbia River system highway.

“Thompson said, `Here are the people who live closest to where I want to be, and I can get in my canoe and get all the way to the Pacific or all the way back up to Athabasca Pass,”’ said Nisbet.

Athabasca Pass, north of presentday Banff, was the lofty slot through the Canadian Rockies that Thompson traversed on the way back to Lake Superior every year.

Lake Superior?

That’s right, Lake Superior, and back again. By canoe, by horseback and by foot.

“From Kootenae House to Fort William (on Lake Superior) is 3,000 miles alone, but he added this huge loop from the Flathead country, to here (Spokane) and then up the Columbia,” said Nisbet. “It was many thousands of miles. It’s amazing. And the other thing that’s hard to believe: He had 6 tons of furs with him.”

He was able to do this because of one remarkable bit of Indian technology: the birchbark canoe. Each canoe was light, maneuverable and capable of holding 2 tons of furs.

A canoe also could hold children, if necessary. In the spring of 1807, Thompson traversed the Canadian Rockies in the company of, among others, his three children. All were under the age of 6.

“Tough guys tended to be in the fur trade. Also, tough women and tough kids,” said Nisbet.

One fact alone is enough to set David Thompson apart from practically every other fur trader and explorer of the era.

“He was out 27 years, and he never lost anybody and never killed anybody,” said Nisbet.

Nobody under his command drowned, nobody died of rattlesnake bite, nobody was mauled by a grizzly, and nobody was killed by Indians. Nor, despite many tense situations, did he or any of his party ever kill an Indian.

This goes part way toward explaining why Thompson has practically become a cult hero in many parts of the Northwest and Canada.

“People are not only interested in him, they are fanatical about him,” said Nisbet, who recently was the guest on all-David-Thompson quiz show on the Canadian Broadcasting Co.

Everywhere Nisbet goes for readings of his book, both in the United States and Canada, people in the crowd are famished for information about Thompson. Usually, some of the people are “buckskinners” - dressed very much like Thompson and his traders might have dressed.

“These are people who like living off the land, shooting the kind of gun that Thompson shot,” said Nisbet. “They aren’t hippies and they aren’t survivalists. What they are is people who have some kind of sense of history and relive part of it.”

Thompson appeals to both the intellectual and romantic sides of people. He was a literate man with tremendous scientific curiosity, a man who would interrupt a 3,000-mile journey to stop and observe the water ouzel bird feeding underwater for a half-hour. Yet he also was as tough and resourceful as any mountain man, before or since.

And, in Nisbet’s opinion, he was also “the perfect guy to have first contact with a lot of the tribes.”

It was both his job, and his nature, to get along with the tribes.

“He was willing to take the time to meet with them and smoke with them,” said Nisbet. “They were not like ruthless savages. He treated them like people. He was a human being, and he traveled through this vast country like a human being.”

Yet his arrival was also a stroke of doom for the tribes.

“There are all of these Columbia Plateau cultures that were right downstream from here,” said Nisbet. “They were going for 9,000 years, and they were broken by his coming.”

Nisbet believes that even Thompson was aware of that fact. Some of his writings contain a hint of irony, a hint of wistfulness for a world that vanished the instant he set foot in it.

“He was aware that he changed everything,” said Nisbet. “He changed it, and it couldn’t help but be changed.”

ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo Graphic: Map of country David Thompson explored.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with story: A David Thompson chronology: 1770: David Thompson born in London 1784: Arrives at Hudson’s Bay as an apprentice. 1787: Winters with Piegan Indians in the foothills of the Rockies. 1801: First attempts to cross Rockies. 1807: Crosses Rockies and established trading post in the Columbia’s headwaters. 1810: Builds Spokane House. 1811: Canoes down the Columbia to the Pacific. 1812: Retires to Montreal. 1857: Dies in Montreal.