Mapmakers look to past for direction

The Northwest’s first cartographer used quill pens and parchment paper, but had much in common with mapmakers who use computers and satellite imagery some 200 years later, a historian said Wednesday.

David Thompson, who mapped the western regions of what’s now the United States and Canada, had to use a sextant to estimate locations while someone else paddled the canoe, naturalist and author Jack Nisbet said. Today’s mapmakers get precise measurements through GIS – geographic information systems – aided by fast computers and sophisticated software.

Nisbet told a conference of GIS users from around the region meeting this week in Spokane that Thompson shared many of their problems and even anticipated their computer systems by nearly 200 years when he set out on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company to “fill up the blank spaces” on the map of North America.

When Thompson began making maps in the late 1700s, he had the most modern equipment that the industry could produce — the quadrant, sextant and telescope. He had to keep copious notes and make complicated calculations, said the author of “The Mapmaker’s Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau.”

But he couldn’t devote all his time to mapmaking, Nisbet said, just as some GIS workers have to do other things. “He had to trade furs. He had to do sales reports. He had to make money.”

Thompson filled his maps with information on mountains, waterways, settlements, trails and passes. Sometimes, there was too much information, Nisbet said, showing a picture of the map Thompson drew of the area where Spokane and Coeur d’Alene now are.

“What a mess. You’ve all had that experience,” he told the contemporary mapmakers, many of whom work for local, state or federal agencies. GIS maps can be created to show everything from individual land parcels in a city to the environmental cleanups at Superfund sites to areas vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis.

GIS can project layers of different data – topography, political boundaries, waterways and roads – to create complicated maps. Thompson once proposed layers of maps for the West, with its rivers, geologic formations, tribal people and possible places for settlement, although his London publisher turned the idea down.

During the dispute over where the boundary between the United States and Canada should be, Thompson weighed in with a suggestion that the politicians of the day didn’t follow. He wrote letters, “calling the political leaders blockheads,” Nisbet said.

But the biggest similarity between Thompson and today’s mapmakers is the end result of what they produce, he said: “You want to present the information to people in a way they can use it.”

Reproductions of some of Thompson’s maps are on display for the 2006 Northwest GIS Conference, which continues through Friday at the downtown Doubletree Hotel, along with a variety of seminars and demonstrations of hardware and software for today’s mapmakers to present information in ways the public can use.