Historical Introduction

WitnessIn his long life, David Thompson both witnessed and contributed to the transformation of a continent.When he was born in Westminster in 1770, Britain ruled a string of burgeoning colonies, extending along the Atlantic seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida, and the Hudson's Bay Company was making its first tentative forays into the interior of North America to meet the challenge of Montreal-based fur traders.Still, the intimate contours of the West were known to few non-aboriginal people.By the time Thompson died in Longueuil in 1857, many parts of the American West were being occupied by settlers and prospectors: the Oregon Trail had been inaugurated in 1841, the first Mormon communities in Utah date from 1847, and the California Gold Rush began a year later.North of the forty-ninth parallel, the Red River Colony had been settled in 1812 but remained, as Thompson stated in his Travels, "an isolated Settlement" (iv.188, 228). 1 As Thompson himself predicted, this would not be the case for long.The Assiniboine River, he wrote, "every where flows thro' a pleasant country of good soil, and in time to come will no doubt, be covered with an agricultural population" (iv.147, 198); Ojibwa lands in the Upper Mississippi would "in time be in the hands of those that cultivate the soil" (iv.183, 224). 2 In the summer following Thompson's death, John Palliser departed for the West as head of 1 Pages of the Travels manuscript are identified by the number assigned them in the David Thompson Papers, MS21, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.These numbers consist of an arabic and a roman numeral.The former refers to the draft to which the page was thought to belong and was probably assigned by J.B. Tyrrell, while the second is the number that each page bears at its head, in Thompson's hand.Page numbers may not be sequential in this edition, as our understanding of the history of Thompson's composition of the work has evolved since numbers were assigned.For the twenty-nine Travels pages housed at the Archives of Ontario, see note on 47.For a complete discussion of the manuscript, see "Textual Introduction." 2 Gerald Friesen estimates that, of the 480,000,000 acres (194,250,000 hectares) that make up the modern provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, a mere 9,000 were under cultivation in 1857.Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 9.the British North American Exploring Expedition, a reconnaisance mission sponsored by the British Colonial Office to investigate whether the northern Plains could be settled, and the next year the geologist Henry Youle Hind travelled over the same region, assessing its agricultural potential on behalf of the Legislature of Canada.The transformation that Thompson foresaw was definitively initiated by the transfer of Hudson's Bay Company lands to Canada in 1870, and a world was thus lost as, in the words of Irene Spry, the region underwent a transition from "common property resources, to open access resources, and finally to private property."3 Thompson played a pivotal role in the prelude to this drama, in his writings preserving the memory of what was and in his activities preparing the way for what would be.Now, one hundred and fifty years after Thompson's death, his presence continues to pervade the places of the West, and he occupies such a place of prominence in the popular imagination that one may speak of a David Thompson awakening.Already memorialized in a river, town, mountain, highway, tourist region, and monuments and historical markers, during the current bicentennial celebrations of his activities west of the Rocky Mountains he has been the subject of renewed and intense popular and scholarly interest.Because of his prolific production of documents and the broad scope of his activities, he serves as a point of reference for people as diverse as canoe enthusiasts, local historians, epidemiologists, and linguists.He has been made and remade in several images, from mountain man to philosopher, hailed by J.B Tyrrell as "the greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced" 4 and by Victor Hopwood as "the foundation mythmaker of the Canadian West." 5 3 Irene Spry, "The Tragedy of the Loss of the Commons in Western Canada," in As Long as the Sun Shines and the Water Flows, ed.Ian A.L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), 203.Not all regarded this process as inevitable.One voice raised in opposition to white settlement belonged to Thompson's brother-in-law, John McDonald of Garth, who argued that a Native "confederacy" ought to be established west of the Mississippi.This scheme is described in Germaine Warkentin's "John McDonald of Garth and the Dream of a Native North-West," in Laura Peers and Carolyn Podruchny, eds, Gathering Places: Essays on Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories (forthcoming, University of British Columbia Press).

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