Columbia Journals

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada and Global Spin: Probing the Globalization
Debate, and the co-author of Toronto Women.

Explorer, surveyor, map-maker, and fur trader David Thompson
(1770–1857) traveled extensively throughout the vast western
territories that are today Alberta, British Columbia, and the
northwestern United States. This book, which was originally published in
1994, is a reissue of David Thompson’s journals chronicling the first
dozen years of the 19th-century fur-trade frontier. Here is what a keen
and well-seasoned observer wrote down right on the spot, and there is
much “to discover and enjoy.”

Readers should be forewarned that these journals are not the dressed-up
literary narrative of his travels that he prepared for publication in
his own lifetime (and that has already, as editor Barbara Belyea notes,
“run through two Champlain Society editions” in the 20th century).
These journals are “filled with measurements and calculations” and
are “laconic in style.” As Belyea also aptly notes, the text is
inevitably “dry and difficult,” and the “reader must work hard to
create his or her own pattern of understanding.” Yet in the end the
“effort will be repaid.”

A minor quibble is that a typographical error on the second page of the
introduction incorrectly implies that Thompson “reached the Pacific
Ocean in 1784,” rather than “twenty-eight years after his arrival”
in British North America in 1784. But this is not a reflection on the
work at large. The appendixes include details of various Thompson maps,
three related maps by Aaron Arrowsmith, and an “Indian Chart.” This
valuable volume is now available in paperback for general readers.