Spokane author explores British adventurer

MISSOULA – The next great bicentennial is upon us. You’re ready, aren’t you?

No sooner did Meriwether Lewis and William Clark amble off into the sunrise when David Thompson came along, slowly making his way down from Canada.

He’s the guy who discovered the Kootenai farming tobacco in the Tobacco River country near Eureka in 1808. He’s the guy for whom Thompson Falls was named. He’s the guy who climbed Mount Jumbo one February morning in 1812 and mapped the Missoula and Bitterroot valleys for the first time.

Thompson was a London-born explorer, surveyor and trader for the Hudson’s Bay Co. and North West Co. He spent most of five years prowling the Columbia River basin of the Rocky Mountains starting in 1807 – the year after Lewis and Clark returned home from their western expedition.

Thompson is more the hero in Canada than in the United States. He was, after all, British and spent most of his time north of the 49th parallel. But his path sometimes intersected with President Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery.

Two hundred years later, they’re crossing paths again.

“The way the Lewis and Clark bicentennial elevated the general awareness of history and details of natural history and politics and landscape that sort of make our place what it is was really remarkable,” said Jack Nisbet . “It’s really one of the most successful history events I think I’ve ever imagined.

“Thompson’s bicentennial is different because he’s quite a different guy. But he does bump into them, especially Thomas Jefferson, over and over again during his life.”

Nisbet discussed Thompson’s life to about 60 history buffs at the Lolo Community Center. The program, sponsored by the Montana Committee for the Humanities Speaker’s Bureau, was hosted by the Travelers’ Rest Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.

A teacher, naturalist and writer from Spokane, Nisbet has written five books. Two of them were on Thompson: “The Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau” and “Sources of the River.”

Thompson first reached Montana in 1808, but his bicentennial celebration has indefinite parameters. The North American David Thompson Bicentennials last from 2007 to 2009. Regional commemorations are planned for the three years following that.

Nisbet looks at it in even broader terms.

“It’s been going on for 22 years as an explorer and it’s got five more to go,” he said. “Then as a surveyor it’s got another 30 to go after that. So he’s in it for the long haul.”

Chances are, the attention will root out some of the same revelations the 200th anniversary bash for Lewis and Clark did, particularly when it comes to understanding the natives they all encountered.

Thompson far outstripped the Americans in that department. He spent years among the Indians of the West, married a Cree, and consistently put his life and livelihood in their hands.

Lewis and Clark were on a 2 1/2-year military expedition, out in part to annex land and the people who lived on it in the name of the United States.

“That was incredibly different than the commercial aspects of David Thompson’s world,” said Nisbet. “It’s what makes their stories so different.”

Thompson called the Clark Fork River, from its head in Montana to the Columbia, the “Salish drainage.”

“That’s because Salish-speaking people lived on it, and they all spoke the same Salish language. Now we would say Flathead, Pend O’Reille, Kalispel,” he said. “It’s all the same people, all the same family groups. They’ll stay in Cusick, Wash., one week and they’ll stay in St. Regis the next week. It’s amazing how fluidly they go back and forth and how clean they are about it.”

Thompson was just 17 when the Hudson’s Bay Co. sent its young apprentice to a Blackfeet winter camp near Calgary, Alberta.

Yes, he was intimidated, Nisbet said. But he also spent long nights in lodges, soaking in the lore of the tribe, especially those imparted by a Cree elder. Saukamapee told stories of the time before the horse and gun, and of the scourge of smallpox he had survived seven years before.

Thompson came to understand the Blackfeet not as the “shadowy demons” others viewed them as, Nisbet said.

“By being inside this camp for a whole winter, Thompson gets inside their minds and is part of it. They know who he is just as much as he knows who they are,” he said.

Thompson’s mapmaking was prodigious, his travels extensive, his observations meticulous, his writings voluminous. In the Columbia plateau, he established trading posts he named Kootenae House at Lake Windemere, British Columbia; Kullyspell House near Hope, Idaho; Saleesh House at Thompson Falls.

Yet so much of what he did and who he was has yet to be discovered, Nisbet said. No one even knows what David Thompson looked like.

“It’s OK,” Nisbet said. “I’m happy to have David Thompson be enigmatic.”