Mapping history

These journals, written in fur trader/ explorer/mapmaker David Thompson’s spidery hand, have been on quite a journey:

“Packed over the snowy Canadian Rockies in the years from 1807 to 1811.

“Transported in canoes on the Columbia, Kootenai and Spokane rivers.

“Hauled back over the Rockies.

“Rowed back to the Great Lakes and on to Montreal.

“Socked away in vaults in provincial government archives in Canada for more than a century.

“And finally, placed on a jet plane in Toronto and flown to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, where they are now on display in the exhibit, “The Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau.”

“I brought them personally on the plane as a carry-on, in a reinforced case,” said Gillian Reddyhoff, from the Archives of Ontario in Toronto. “I mean, I did not let those things out of my sight.”

Why all this caution?

“Because those are national treasures,” said Marsha Rooney, MAC’s history curator.

Meaning Canadian national treasures, yet they are also Inland Northwest treasures. Thompson’s journals are the first written accounts of our region’s geography, tribes, flora and fauna.

Lewis and Clark, of course, paddled the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers a few years earlier. Yet it was Thompson who ranged over the Spokane River, the Pend Oreille River, the Clark Fork, the Kootenai River and the upper Columbia River. He later became the first person to document the entire Columbia, from Canadian source to Astorian mouth.

This ambitious new exhibit also includes the first objects ever loaned to the MAC from the Smithsonian Institution: a collection of period surveying instruments, including a sextant and an artificial horizon.

A series of early Paul Kane and Henry James Warre paintings and sketches illustrate what the land looked like shortly after Thompson’s era. The Kalispel Tribe contributed a full-length replica bark canoe.

The rest of the exhibit was carefully constructed from tribal artifacts and natural history objects (a stuffed beaver, to name one) from the MAC’s own collections.

Yet when Rooney and Thompson scholar Jack Nisbet of Spokane first started planning this project nearly four years ago, they knew what they craved as a centerpiece: Thompson’s journals.

The only problem: The Archives of Ontario had never, not once, loaned them out.

The MAC asked for them anyway.

“We stuck our necks out,” said Rooney. “But we thought, they’ll never get here if we don’t ask.”

Reddyhoff admits that it was a “tough decision” for the Archives of Ontario.

“They are very rare, extremely fragile and extremely valuable, from a historical perspective as well as a monetary one,” said Reddyhoff.

“The monetary value, I really would not like to make public, if you don’t mind.”

Yet the Archives finally approved the loan of 10 Thompson journals. It came down to this: They trusted the MAC, and they felt the exhibit was worth it.

The journals are displayed in clear plastic boxes, under low light and careful humidity and temperature controls.

The David Thompson exhibit came about partly because the MAC was unable to book any of the traveling Lewis and Clark bicentennial exhibitions.

The MAC was still under construction at the time and had not yet acquired a quality-control track record. So the MAC was searching for a logical alternative.

Just about that time, Nisbet approached the museum with the idea. With Nisbet’s research and the MAC’s ability to gather and display the objects, it seemed like a “great collaboration,” said Rooney.

Then Nisbet received a commitment from the Washington State University Press to publish a companion volume. The entire project became a “win-win,” in Rooney’s words.

This large-format illustrated paperback, also titled “Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau” (WSU Press, 180 pages, $29.95), hit bookstores just as the exhibit opened on Oct. 8. It provides a more detailed exploration of the exhibit’s main themes.

Thompson has been described as this region’s Lewis and Clark, but in many ways, his story has more depth. For one thing, Thompson returned to the region year after year, from 1807 to 1812.

“Lewis and Clark came through and went back, but seldom do you think of what happened next,” said Rooney.

Thompson’s journals cover topics ranging from Indian languages (he compiled a Salish vocabulary), to the logistics of the beaver trade (beaver pelts had to be transported across the continent in 90-pound “packs”), to mountain zoology (the skunk has the “most abominable, horrid smelling liquid that can possibly be imagined”).

“I love the connection between the geography and the fur trade history and the native history as well,” said Rooney. “I would hope that people come out of this exhibit with a little more perspective.”

In fact, Rooney has hopes that this exhibit will be a “sleeper blockbuster.”

“I hope all the history lovers descend on it,” she said.

If nothing else, viewers will feel the sense of connection that comes from seeing the actual pen-scratchings of a historic figure.

“There’s nothing like coming face-to-face with an original document,” said Reddyhoff.

“It’s totally rare to have these documents and sketches back in their place of origin,” said Rooney. “And it may not happen again.”