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Reviews
THE MAPMAKER'S EYE: DAVID THOMPSON ON THE COLUMBIA PLATEAU
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by Jack Nisbet
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| Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2005. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 192 pages. $29.95 paper. |
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| WHY IS IT SOME EXPLORERS become culture heroes, while more deserving ones are relegated to obscurity? The sociopathic incompetent La Salle, despised by all he commanded, became a legend, while La Vérendrye's astonishing achievements were almost unknown until the twentieth century. Lewis and Clark's hasty dash to the Pacific now rates them coins and fan clubs, while David Thompson's meticulous five-year exploration of the Columbia River drainage barely gets him a footnote. |
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Jack Nisbet has set out to correct this injustice. This is his second book on Thompson, and it serves as companion to the David Thompson exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, which seeks to give this undeservedly obscure explorer his due. The handsomely illustrated book is a well-researched, well-written introduction to both Thompson and the land he was first to map. |
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The book skims lightly over Thompson's early years. Raised in a London charity school, he was apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company at fourteen and shipped to the Canadian arctic, never to return. After learning both the fur trade and cartography from the venerable company, he jumped ship to the more enterprising Montreal-based North West Company in 1797. When, in 1806, the company decided to open a new field of trade west of the Rockies, Thompson was the partner placed in charge of the expansion. |
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The majority of Nisbet's book follows Thompson's activities between 1807 and 1812, as he opened the transmontane fur trade and mapped the rivers straddling the U.S.-Canadian border in westernmost Montana, Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia. Based on the author's extensive study of Thompson's journals, memoirs, and maps, it follows him in almost day-by-day detail as the complex physical and social geography unfolds and becomes comprehensible to him. It is not a story of grand adventure; Thompson's métier was methodical observation and record-keeping, not derring-do. But his experiences give a vivid sense of daily survival, and of the extraordinary ingenuity and unassuming competence of the man, whether building a boat, measuring moose brains, or striking up cordial relations with native peoples. |
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The star illustrations are Thompson's own beautiful maps and watercolors, but the book also reproduces a wealth of hard-to-find images by artists Henry Warre, Paul Kane, and Gustav Sohon, who now take their deserved place beside the better-known western artists such as Karl Bodmer and George Catlin. Between the illustrations, Nisbet's own first-hand knowledge of the landscape, and the excellent maps, the reader gets an vivid feel for the country and never feels lost. |
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What the reader will not get is a very vivid sense of Thompson's personality. This may be just as well — since, truth to tell, he was a bit colorless; and who wants their explorers sober and moralistic? In the end, one cannot help but reflect that an explorer's fame — as opposed to his success — rests not so much on his aptitude for discovery as on his ability to present himself as an embodiment of his nation facing the future. Lewis and Clark were archetypes of the ambitious, westward-facing United States. Thompson was "merely" an intelligent observer and brilliant cartographer who sometimes disappears into his material. But he left us a rich legacy of information on the land and people he traversed, and thanks to Jack Nisbet we can all share it now. |
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| CAROLYN GILMAN
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| Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis |
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