"Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West" By D'Arcy Jenish (2004).
David Thompson (30 April 1770 – 10 February 1857) was an Anglo-Canadian fur trader, surveyor, and cartographer, known to some native people as "Koo-Koo-Sint" or "the Stargazer". Over Thompson's career, he travelled 90,000 kilometres (56,000 mi) across North America, mapping 4.9 million square kilometres (1.9 million square miles) of the continent along the way. For this historic feat, Thompson has been described as the "greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced".
. . .The land mass mapped by Thompson amounted to 3.9 million square kilometres (1.5 million square miles) of wilderness (one-fifth of the continent). His contemporary, the great explorer Alexander Mackenzie, remarked that Thompson did more in ten months than he would have thought possible in two years.
Despite these significant achievements, Thompson died in Montreal in near obscurity on 10 February 1857, his accomplishments almost unrecognised. He never finished the book of his 28 years in the fur trade, based on his 77 field notebooks, before he died. In the 1890s geologist J.B. Tyrrell resurrected Thompson's notes and in 1916 published them as David Thompson's Narrative, as part of the General Series of the Champlain Society. Further editions and re-examinations of Thompson's life and works were published in 1962 by Richard Glover, in 1971 by Victor Hopwood, and in 2015 by William Moreau.
Video Title: Uncharted Territory: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau. Source: KSPS PBS Public TV. Date Published: February 5, 2011.
