There can be few places on earth with more natural power or beauty than Canada.
So far on my journey across this vast country,
I've travelled through landscapes that range from the abundant forests
to the barren Arctic north.
I've met with First Nations and learnt their skills.
And I've followed the story of the fur trade
and the explorers who put their mark on this land forever.
Now I'm heading west to tell the story of the last great barrier to the fur trade
and of a boy from a charity school who put Canada on the map.
These majestic mountains are the Rockies.
They're high, they're massive, they're forbidding,
and above all else, they're a real maze,
and for the fur traders trying to get west to meet other tribes
and new fur-bearing grounds, they were an almost impenetrable barrier.
One man more than any other is responsible for surveying and mapping routes through.
That man's name is David Thompson.
It was the fur trade that opened up Canada,
but it was a piecemeal process
that was far from complete by the late 18th century.
David Thompson finished the job when he established a workable trade route through the Rockies.
In so doing, he united a land previously divided by this seemingly impenetrable mountain range.
He travelled 66,000 miles, that's equivalent to at least twice around the world,
by horse, canoe, and on foot, surveying as he went,
and he mapped a third of the entire land.
Today, sophisticated mapping and satellite imagery
make finding your way across unknown terrain easy.
But 200 years ago, it was a journey into the unknown
for a boy whose story begins half a world away, in London.
His humble Welsh parents had moved to the capital to earn a living,
but when David was just two years old, his father died,
leaving his mother impoverished.
You can imagine London in the 1770s,
it was a pretty sordid place to try and raise a child
and things could have gone badly wrong for him,
but fortunately, his mother managed to get him enrolled at the Grey Coat Hospital,
which was a charity school, and that was going to be the making of him.
BELL RINGS
Today, it's a girls' school, the playground chatter is all about Facebook and iPods,
and the atmosphere is pretty relaxed.
But when Thompson was a pupil, things were much stricter
and maths and morals were the order of the day.
London really fascinates me, there's so much history here.
This is the very staircase that David would have walked up and down
when he was a student here at the school.
But I'm sure back then, he couldn't have even dreamt
that he was going to become one of the most celebrated explorers of Canada.
Thompson showed an instinctive ability in maths,
a talent that meant his life would never be the same again.
There's a plaque on the wall of the school that I had the privilege of unveiling in 2007.
It's a sign of the importance of this man's work.
Yet you have to go to Canada to really see how famous he is.
2008 kicked off the bicentenary of his achievements.
To mark the occasion, a group of enthusiasts,
called the Thompson Brigade, spent three months paddling 2,000 miles
along many of the rivers and lakes which Thompson and his men had travelled.
I was honoured when they invited me to meet them.
Among the party was a direct descendent of the great man, Laverne Thompson.
What do you make of your... your ancestor?
I just...
I'm so proud to be part of the Thompson name.
If I can represent it in a small way during this brigade,
then I've done part of my job, or, you know, it's joyful thing.
I've had so many people come up to me and tell me things about David Thompson,
it would take me two lifetimes to learn.
He was a remarkable man. Oh, very much so.
I like the way he treated people fairly, he seemed like a very moral man
and treated people the way he wanted to be treated, overwhelming of the respect that people have for him.
You know.
It's fantastic.
The reason Thompson is held in such high esteem is simply this - he drew the map of Canada.
And that's why I'm here - to follow the journeys that created that achievement.
When Thompson left Grey Coat school at 14,
his skill in maths earned him an apprenticeship at the Hudson's Bay Company,
the company that dominated the Canadian fur trade.
He set sail for Canada, never to see his homeland again.
At that time,
the HBC was the biggest landowner in the world thanks to its utter domination of its trade,
a trade that relied upon the rivers and the forests that characterise Canada,
providing ideal habitat for the beaver whose fur was in such demand.
But this land was uncharted.
The maps needed to be drawn.
Thompson was the right man, in the right place, at the right time.
A time when the Hudson's Bay Company was funding exploration,
surveying trade routes and establishing more and more trading posts.
He was posted to the company's base in the east, Churchill,
to learn the basics of fur trading and book-keeping.
The Hudson's Bay Company had high hopes for David Thompson.
Early on, they had established he had good academic potential,
so when they posted him to Churchill,
they were careful to make sure there were instructions to keep him off of heavy manual duty
so that he could properly learn the business of the fur trade.
The man in charge at Churchill was none other than Samuel Hearne,
a hero of mine and the explorer who set the template for successful travel through this land.
He was the first European to walk to the Arctic Ocean.
He worked with the First Nations he met,
and he recorded everything in a journal - effectively a bushcraft bible.
Hearne's knowledge influenced many of those that followed him, including David Thompson.
Much later in life, he was to write of that time and of Samuel Hearne
and it's quite clear that the two men did not get on.
I've often wondered about that, though,
because there's so much of the methodology of Hearne
reflected in the way that Thompson himself travelled.
Little by little, Thompson acquired the skills,
knowledge and attitude that would enable him to fulfil his destiny.
Hearne taught him that to traverse this challenging land
he'd have to watch and learn from the native people.
Local knowledge could mean the difference between success and failure, even life or death.
For a novice explorer, perhaps the most the important skill.
as night draws in, is knowing how to light a fire.
When David Thompson came through this area,
he would have been making his fires with a traditional flint and steel.
It was one of the most important trade items, and you can use all sorts of things for tinder.
Bits of cotton cloth charred in the fire,
or, better still, bits of fungus.
There are quite a variety of different fungi that grow on trees hereabouts
that can be used for tinder.
That's what I've got in here.
What I need to do is to get the spark
to land into the...
in the right place on the edge of this tinder.
There we go. Once it starts to glow, like that,
I can tear off...part of that.
Hot... Once it gets going...
Let the wind help me.
I'll make sure I put the tinder back in the box while that's going.
Always keep your tinder dry.
This is the bark from a little bush that grows around here called cinquefoil,
and I'm gonna put that in there.
And there we go. Let the wind do the work.
Little bits of dead spruce on there.
I'm not rushing it, it's a windy day.
We don't want the tinder to all burn out before the fire starts.
There's no rush. And away it goes.
Thompson was learning bushcraft, becoming the woodsman who could chart this vast land.
The HBC wanted Thompson to learn the necessary skills to make him a fur trader and surveyor.
It was a career that Thompson valued,
but a career that could easily have come to an abrupt end.
When Thomson was only 18 years old, he had a serious accident.
It nearly killed him.
The forest is literally full of pitfalls if you don't know where to look,
and in fact, when it came to David Thompson,
when he was still a relative newcomer in the forest,
just 18 years old, he found himself in real trouble.
Just two days before Christmas, he was out in the forest
when he lost his footing and slipped down a bank, and managed to break his leg.
It was a very serious break, it was the femur of his right leg,
and in those days, that sort of injury was normally fatal.
In fact, his life was to hang in the balance for months.
He was moved to Cumberland House, perhaps because there, he could receive better palliative care.
And he was nursed back to health by Indian women,
who, seeing that he didn't respond well to the rich diet of sturgeon,
gave him berries when they came in season.
Perhaps the vitamins in them helped to fight infection.
But it was a very fortuitous time to have an injury.
It was almost as though Mother Fate had said,
"This is the time you should be at Cumberland House,"
because there, he was to make an acquaintance that would literally change his life.
Here, he met Philip Turner, who was the surveyor and astronomer for the Hudson's Bay Company,
and he recognised in young Thompson his mathematical ability
and taught him the skill of surveying that was to become Thompson's forte.
His tool of trade was the sextant, a piece of equipment developed
to find your location by using the position of the sun and the stars.
The sextant was a marvellous invention that was used to plot much of the world we know today.
To use it, I move the arm
to get an image of the sun on the silvered half of the mirror.
On the other half, I focus on the horizon.
The arm rotates to make the image of the sun line up with the horizon.
Once they're aligned, the numbers on the scale define the angle of the sun above the horizon.
With the help of written almanacs,
this information can be used to plot the exact location of the user.
But you do need a horizon to line up on.
If the sextant is even slightly tilted, the reading will be wrong.
I have never used one, so I've asked Allan Main,
who is an expert, to show me how to survey the David Thompson way.
So, when you look through here, you'll see an image of the sun.
Shades are used to darken it and protect your eyes.
This index arm moves the mirror
and allows you to position the sun optically on the horizon.
That's all very well at sea, isn't it,
because you've got a lovely flat horizon. Yes.
We've got the Rocky Mountains we've got the Buttes.
Exactly, and so he had to have another solution.
'So Thompson mastered the technique of making his own level using a dish of liquid.
'He'd cover it to protect it from the wind, and the surface became his artificial horizon.
'A filter protected his eyes
'and reduced the glare of the sun's reflection on even the brightest days.'
That's really working very well.
I can see the sun very, very clearly.
Would you like to have a try?
I'm gonna give it a go. Get a good stable position?
Yes. You got a spot where you can see the sun now?
Yes, I can see the sun really clearly. All right.
Got to get your eye position just right.
It's tricky, isn't it?
Now, I'm not seeing any sun at all. OK.
Sometimes what'll happen is if you're...
if the frame and the sextant isn't lined up in the same vertical plane as the sun and the image,
you may be accidentally measuring off to one side.
Yep, I'm with you. And so...
So, I need to look up there, really, don't I?
It's really tricky.
It is an art.
Very interesting.
Very difficult.
This is not an easy thing to do.
Obviously, you need...
It's the first time I've ever tried, so it's tricky.
I'm gonna hand it back to you
and watch the master do it.
'Thompson's business was mapping the wilderness of Canada.
'His devotion to this art
'stands out from all of the other explorers,
'particularly for the quantity and accuracy of the readings he made using a sextant.'
There we are.
Allan, it's fascinating getting involved in this,
because, of course, David Thompson could quite easily
have just made a good life for himself selling furs, you know,
and the perseverance it must have taken to do this
under such difficult circumstances is astonishing.
It's a true dedication to what he saw almost a calling for himself.
They found there was an aptitude there and he excelled at it.
I think you're right, but thank you very much.
It's been brilliant to come out and to try this.
I have a much deeper appreciation of the difficulties he faced.
'I might have trouble getting a reading,
'but the determination, skill
'and sheer single-mindedness of David Thomson
'is really starting to dawn on me.'
At the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company
is a letter David Thompson wrote to his employers at the end of his apprenticeship.
It shows just how single-minded he was.
A man whose future had been decided by destiny.
This is a letter that he wrote to his bosses back in England
on August 30th, 1790,
just as he's finishing his apprenticeship with the Hudson's Bay Company,
and it's in the most immaculate copperplate hand, and it says the following.
"Honoured sirs, the last winter I passed at Cumberland House
"with Mr Turner, of whom I have learned the theory
'and practice of practical astronomy.
'My improvement in that service I hope my work will show."
This is it, this is the nascent navigator
asking for the opportunity to go forth and show what he can do.
But the next bit is really fascinating.
"Your honours specified in the tenure of my indenture
"to give me at the expiration of my term a complete suit of clothes,
"both linen and woollen.
"In lieu thereof, I shall be much obliged to your honours
"to let me have a brass sextant by Dollond,
"of not less than ten inches radius,
"the index glass part-blacked,
"part quicksilvered,
"with two pairs of red and one pair of green shades.
"Your most dutiful servant, David Thompson.
'A sextant instead of a suit.
'It says it all.'
It's very moving to be this close to something that he actually wrote,
and especially this document,
because this is a young man
saying, "Give me a chance," and boy, did he prove worthy!
His apprenticeship over, Thompson was sent out to survey new trading routes,
starting as far east as Hudson Bay, he covered almost all of Canada.
His work initially took him towards Lake Athabasca, in the heart of the trading lands.
As he traversed this land, he met the tribes who inhabited it,
tribes like the Assiniboine, the Sioux, and the Ojibwe.
But for Thompson, the most important would be the Cree nation,
whose more universal language enabled them to act as go-betweens,
and the powerful and warlike Peigan, or Piikani tribe, who dominated the Northern Plains.
It was an old Cree warrior called Saukamappee
who taught Thompson the most about the life of the native people
when the two spent a winter together.
Thompson was holed up by the weather, and the old man and the young lad talked for hours on end.
It was a great friendship between them, and from Saukamappee, Thompson learned many things.
He learned of the man's history.
He also learned from Saukamappee of lifestyle of these plains people.
A lifestyle which enabled them to live off the land as they travelled.
Thompson needed to master their skills to make his way across this vast country -
skills which included the trapping of rabbits.
I'm going to show you an Indian trap that was used to catch rabbits.
It's a little different to the ones we've seen in the series so far
and this was taught to me by an Indian.
First thing I'm gonna do is I've got a trail here,
it's not much of a trail,
and I'm gonna put a hoop over the trail that I can attach my snare to.
First thing is to make this flexible.
'No matter how skilful Thompson was at surveying the stars and the landscape,
'without these basic survival skills, it would mean nothing.
'Success depended on details.'
There's already a trail here.
All I'm doing is creating a few more obstacles
to show the clear, easy path for the animal to take.
Now, of course, this wasn't a game for Indian women.
If they couldn't find food,
either they or their children would starve.
It was a deadly serious business.
'This long branch is going to spring-load my snare.
'Even with the arrival of the fur trade,
'wire for a noose was a rare commodity.
'Most of the time, they'd use bark or rawhide.'
And if you're using a natural material, it's not strong enough
to withstand the struggling of the animal that you trap,
which can also bite through natural materials,
and for that reason, the trap had to be springy
to lift the animal off of its front feet
to prevent it from biting... and breaking the snare.
I'm trimming all these branches off
so this branch will spring back quickly.
Only a few leaves has a very big dampening effect,
so it all has to be trimmed off.
Doing this neatly was considered to be critical for success,
that if you didn't go to all the right lengths out of respect for the animal you were hunting,
the belief was that the trap would not be successful and you would go hungry.
Now, believe what you will, I trust the word of the Indians
and they have a longer experience of this than I.
This is the snare - just a piece of rawhide.
Rawhide can be quite stiff when it's dry, it's more flexible when it's wet.
There is the noose.
What I was doing is checking the height.
It helps me know where to attach... this part to the stick.
Basically, a knot has to jam on the underside...
of this stick.
'With a pair of straight twigs and clips made from pine needles,
'I'm holding the noose open to make the chance of catching the rabbit more likely.'
And there we are.
I don't believe in trapping for the sake of television.
I've got no need for the rabbit at the moment,
so I'm gonna leave them in peace, but I'll show you what would happen.
I'll be the rabbit for the sake of the demonstration.
The animal comes through, he can go in either direction,
comes through and this is caught around it,
and it dislodges and is lifted off, over its front feet.
It doesn't lift it way up in the air,
just stops it fighting and is held until the hunter comes along and dispatches it.
It's very effective. It's hard to get out of, even for me.
This is a fabulous country built on bushcraft.
That's why I keep coming back.
As a place, it's certainly left its mark on me.
But look closely and the Mears mark is alive and well on the landscape too.
There's a handy thing to find in the forest -
a ready-made shelter.
But there's a bit of story behind this one,
because this is a shelter that I built about seven years ago.
It's a real case of here's one I made earlier!
That good-looking chap used spruce roots for binding
and thatched it with moss and spruce bows.
I am absolutely astonished, though, that it's still standing.
I had to come here, I couldn't be passing by and not come and have a look.
But when you consider this has withstood seven winters,
deep snow, it's pretty impressive.
What's really astonishing is that this root
that I've used to put the crossbar up is almost as strong as the day I made it.
There is an old adage - if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
And there's a case in point.
When the HBC opted to scale down explorations,
Thompson was offered a more desk-bound job.
He wasn't thrilled.
So when the rival North West Company head-hunted him in 1797,
Thompson jumped ship.
By now, Thompson's name was synonymous with accuracy, and his judgement was rarely questioned.
Andy Korsos is a cartographer
who has spent most of his life studying Thompson's maps and career.
When did your interest in Thompson first begin?
It began as a boy. I remember as a child, I was about seven or eight years old,
my schoolteacher wanted me to participate in this reading programme in the library
and I wasn't picking up a book and she was getting frustrated.
She sent me on my way and I found this book called The Map Maker,
and I was fascinated with this man who travelled the wilderness
and saw, you know, the First Nations and mapped the continent,
so right from the get-go, and as a result, I make maps today.
Fantastic.
How do his maps measure up to today's maps?
If you're going from point A to point B, extremely accurate.
With the technology today, you're not gonna get right on the exact GPS position,
and that type of comparison is probably unfair.
But from one point to another, if you were to take his observations
and measure those out and then compare them to the same measurement today,
he was very accurate - within 500 metres to a 1,000 metres in some cases.
I mean, that's astonishing. It is astonishing.
One of the challenges every map-maker faces
is how to convert a three-dimensional landscape into a two-dimensional representation.
How did he manage at that?
He makes an effort to incorporate 3D relief into his maps
in order to give you some idea as to the terrain that he travelled through,
and that was, I think, very important to him.
That type of accuracy allowed Thompson
to give some sort of measure of space and distance
for the partners that were residing in Fort William and in Montreal,
just how large the trading territory was in Western Canada.
As he crossed this land for the North West Company, he was drawing the map of Canada.
His work on the headwaters of both the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers
was instrumental in Thompson dictating to the Americans
exactly where the border should be between the two countries.
And even the Americans were in admiration and awe of Thompson.
Thompson was able to communicate with First Nations peoples,
was able to go through extremely rough territory
where a lot of the American surveyors of that day wouldn't go.
There were a lot of instances where the Americans would just accept Thompson's work
because they didn't want to go through the trouble.
It is astonishing. It's a real measure, isn't it, that his word was trusted.
If Thompson says that's where it is, well, no-one's gonna disagree with him. I mean, that's amazing.
It's exactly that. It's a true measure of what he was. Just a remarkable man.
It seems everything Thompson did
reflected his passion for and knowledge of geography.
In 1798, he hit one of the coldest winters on record.
Travelling using dog sleds, he was caught in a blizzard, miles from anywhere.
But Thompson was at home amongst the elements.
He simply used the direction of the wind to navigate, and so steered a course to safety.
But it wasn't just the elements that threatened Thompson.
When the snow finally cleared, he wasn't free from danger.
He and his men spent Christmas Day hiding from a Sioux war party.
It was a common occupational hazard of the day.
The tribes here were used to waging war with each other and there came to be a real problem for Thompson.
In fact, at one point, Thompson was warned that if he came back and traded with the Peigan's enemies
they would catch him, kill him and cut him up and dry his meat - it was pretty serious stuff.
In order to cover the vast distances of this land, Thompson travelled light, as the indigenous people did.
He adapted the First Nations' technique of carrying knowledge rather than equipment.
There might be room in a canoe for spare axe heads
but why carry too many handles when you are surrounded by wood?
Easier to make one when you need it. That's what I'm going to do today, I'm going to
take this piece of poplar and turn it into a handle for that trade axe.
Of course, you need an axe or a knife to do this with, and
perhaps there was no more important tool for the men travelling west than an axe and a means of cutting.
First thing is I'm gonna cut this down with a saw to a more
suitable length and I'm looking at it and seeing that there is
quite a nice shape in the grain of the wood itself, and I'm gonna try and retain that.
Today we're lucky we can carry these superb cutting tools with us.
Back in those days, any tool that was carried was incredibly valuable.
It had to be cared for
and really, really looked after.
This poplar is a nice, easy wood to work so I can get quick results.
But it's really a bit too soft.
But that's the thing, when you're out in this country you have to make do. Something Thompson understood.
Lets see how it splits.
Not ideal.
It's not splitting
quite the way I want it to.
But persevere.
And that's what I'm after. I can see an axe handle in this piece of wood and now I have to liberate it.
Very nice.
First job, I'm taking the bark off.
What I need to do now is to make that into a board. You can see this wood is easily worked
in comparison to the better timbers for making axe handles.
Do all of these jobs by eye, and you very quickly learn to judge things as you work.
Flatten this off as well.
But of course it really helps if the axe is sharp.
And the principal means of sharpening tools during the fur trade was with files.
We know that because files were traded all the way across Canada, but at some point a carpenter
employed in the service of one of the trading companies would have brought
sharpening stones with him to get a better edge, and how valuable they would have been.
So what I'm looking for is a board about the same width
as the axe head, so I'm pretty close on that now.
So at this stage I could start to think about the shape of the axe handle itself.
And for that you can take an old axe handle,
or your existing one, and use that as a bit of a guide, use a bit of charcoal
and just
give myself an outline to work to.
So coming quite close to this line, and now to carve the curve, if I stand this way you'll be able
to see what I do, I'm gonna move, the axe goes straight down and the wood bends around.
Like so.
Taking it really quite close to the line.
That's the rough shape sorted.
Now, to perfect those lines, I need one of my favourite tools. It's called a crooked knife.
It's a straight blade with a curve at the end and the curves
can vary from virtually no curve to an extreme curve like this, which is what I prefer.
I like that because I can make bowls and spoons with it as well as all the other jobs.
It really is a wonderful tool, and perfect for somebody who's very mobile in the landscape.
You can take this with you. It's like having a workshop.
I love working wood.
For me, it's therapeutic, but for Thompson his life depended on his ability to work with the land.
His epic journeys and endurance never fail to astound me.
It was craft skills like this that freed Thompson to explore wherever he was sent.
Travelling from the east, across Canada towards the Rockies.
The head's getting close to being fitted.
I had too much meat behind the head so I've taken some of that off and I'm now trimming this up,
making it a little bit more elegant, more gracefully balanced to the size of head.
Starting to feel nice.
I'm shaping it now to the hand and it's an important part of making an axe handle,
to get it just right.
Right is feeling comfortable.
It's fabulous to be working in the same way as Thompson in the very environment he encountered.
I'm starting to get a real feel for just how in tune with the land the man was.
The final stage now is to make and fit a wedge to really secure the axe head onto the handle.
The key thing with the wedge is that the grain must be lengthways,
otherwise it won't have the strength cos you have to drive this into the top here.
The wedge is very important.
It has to be done very carefully because without this the head will fly off in use.
You can see the wedge there, sandwiched.
And what I'd just like to do
just chamfer the top of that.
And that's the job done.
That's the temporary axe handle,
and a good one.
What I've just done would have been familiar to David Thompson, cos it was much lighter
to just carry the heads of the axes, the saws, the froes and the other tools that they needed.
David Thompson combined the skills of explorer and surveyor.
His work for the fur trade surveying trade routes also included establishing trading posts
where native people would be invited in and encouraged to build loyalty to a particular trading company.
Alcohol was a popular purchase in many of these, but Thompson's
moral upbringing from Grey Coats meant he refused to trade it.
He argued that it adversely affected the workforce, leaving them unable to turn up for duties.
That said, he would, however, trade firearms.
The fur trade saw a sea change in the technology available to First Nations.
It was a time of great change.
Scott Whiting, manager of the David Thompson National Historic Site
at Rocky Mountain House, talked me through the collection of authentic trade muskets.
You've got a lot of ability with it, in terms of you can use a single large ball
and have a fairly reasonably accurate weapon for long ranges, for big game,
but you could also fire small shot for birds, small game, rabbits, hares that sort of thing.
If worst came to worst, and you do hear stories of people firing gravel,
or taking the lead lining from trade tea chests
and tearing it up into pieces and chewing it in their mouth to make lead shot for it.
One of the earliest single-bore weapons was the versatile flintlock musket.
Even if you didn't have a supply of flint, I've heard stories
that may be somewhat apocryphal but people running out of flint simply walking along a river bed with the
fire steel and striker and striking rocks until they found something that gave them a spark.
It's feasible. You just need something harder than the steel. Exactly.
Oh, another piece that I might show you here but one that has been cut down by the end client.
Yeah, it's been sported. Made into a sporting gun, hasn't it really?
It's fascinating to see. It's quite rough and ready, isn't it?
They are, but they're very functional and they're really made so that they're quite simple to replace and
of course, in trading posts you would find not only complete muskets being traded but also musket components.
Thompson hunted with firearms, but these were also trade goods, technology provided by the fur trade
that fuelled competition between First Nations.
One of the things that really interests me about the journey that David Thompson made
is that he gets into the situation where he's got one tribe not wanting him
to trade or communicate with another because they don't want firearms traded to their enemies.
The firearms were a significant part of the story of the opening of Canada, weren't they?
Certainly, and very much so.
As you mentioned the Piikani people did not want to see firearms and metal projectile points things of
that nature traded directly to the Tenaha people who would then pass them on to the Salish and others.
MUSKETS FIRE
By the early 1800s Thompson had reached this historic site in the foothills of the Rockies.
This remarkable archaeological site is the remains of the
North West Company's trading post at Rocky Mountain House.
This was the last place to stock up with supplies before heading to the Rockies.
You can't see it today but just the other side of those trees about 100 metres or so away
is the site of the Hudson's Bay Company's trading post.
It's like two coffee shops on the high street competing for trade.
The trading companies would sell their own branded merchandise to get their name known.
Sitting here I'm trying to imagine what life would have been like at this post.
Back then there would have been much less vegetation here
and that would have created an intense sense of isolation.
This is an incredibly remote trading post.
The purpose of these places was to draw in the tribes to come and trade
and in the late autumn of the year 1800, the Kootenae came across the Rocky Mountains to trade here.
But they had such a hard time of it, they were so harassed by the Peigan, they said we're never coming back.
And that was a significant moment for Thompson because it was
then that he realised the only way to open trade with the Kootenae
was to cross the Rockies, and of course that's exactly what he set out to do.
The Rockies are a vast mountain range, peaking at more than 14,000 feet.
They stretch nearly 5,000 miles through Canada and North America.
The mountains and valleys crisscross against each other,
interlocking to form an almost impenetrable barrier.
For the fur trade, the rivers were the highways, on which they could travel at speed.
And ferry goods in large but manoeuvrable canoes.
The canoe made travel and transport of goods so easy that traders would
even carry them along river banks to get through unnavigable stretches.
The challenge for Thompson was to find a route into the Rockies
that allowed the use of the canoe for as long as possible.
This is where he found it.
Well, this was an important place in Thompson's journey.
This is the North Saskatchewan River and there in front of me is Mount Sarbach.
Just to the left if it here I've got the Mistaya River.
On the other side of it is the Howse River,
and the Howse River leads to the Howse Pass, and that was absolutely critical.
That was going to be Thompson's route across the Rockies.
Howse Pass was the most accessible pass,
but even today it's still difficult to cross.
There's no road up it and the path is covered in snow
for three quarters of the year.
Thompson's task was to chart the existing Indian path so that others might follow it.
Halfway across the mountains they hit a fierce and treacherous stretch of river.
Unable to go further on the water, it was time to trade for horses with local Indians.
I've joined up with another Thompson enthusiast, Al Bjorn, on part of that original pack horse route.
I think the change occurred when he spent more time going backwards than he
did forward in a canoe and that point was when the river... You look at the Saskatchewan river
when you go up there, when that thing gets...especially this time of year, when it is in June, which is
that river's in high water too and it's running pretty fast.
When it come to the point where they weren't getting anywhere it was useless.
They might as well park them there and take the horses and from there continue on.
There's no way you can take canoes up through the top end of this, you could never get them down.
There's that description, when he spends several weeks trying to go upstream.
In frustration, they go back and they do the journey that's taken several weeks in just a few hours.
That's right, yeah, yeah.
That tells a story.
Yeah. Why fight your head over it?
Get some horses, yeah.
When David Thompson came through here in 1807 it was June 25th,.
Now this river's just peaking, so he was in the highest water and
going down through those ravines and the shin tangle. There was a trail there but still
he had a heck of a time getting through that shin tangle.
It's horrendous to get through it at that time of year.
What is shin tangle? Shin tangle is if you took an entire thick forest of
big trees and alders and everything and then
have it sort just of collapse upon itself, and it becomes...
A nightmare, basically.
Yeah. And if you think of having to cut yourself through there. You don't have a chainsaw, you know.
You'd maybe have an old saw and an axe it's just, it's so labour intensive and would take so long
to get through. Especially when you're taking horses.
Where humans can duck under and over dead fall along the way, pack horses can't. So you're gonna have to cut.
It would take forever to get through that and every year
you'd have to redo it, you still have to. It's an incredible story. Oh, yeah.
The hardy lot they had to be to be coming over you know Howse Pass
and the wind blowing, and the rivers changing and the water coming up.
And there's little spots of quicksand where horses would go down and they'd be swimming in.
They had to be a pretty hardy and lucky lot to survive it all.
He was hardy and he was lucky.
In 1807 he successfully navigated a trade route through Howse Pass and down the Blaeberry River.
And he wasn't alone.
Unbelievably, his wife and three children were with him.
In 1799, he had met a native woman, Charlotte Small.
She was the daughter of a British fur trader and a Cree woman.
Charlotte was the perfect partner for Thompson educated, determined and eager for adventure.
Within weeks of meeting they were married.
For all Thompson's acclaim, his wife was clearly every bit as dedicated and resilient as he was.
They were a perfect team.
She supported him in all ways.
She travelled with him. She was a best friend to Thompson.
Had he married a European woman she might have gone home, he might have wanted to be with her,
he might have had to take her home, there were cases where European women just could not do well in the wild,
but because he was married to Charlotte Small
he was able to complete all of his expeditions and all his work.
Leanne Playter, who is writing about women in the fur trade, told me about her.
And later on in his journals he talks about how valuable she was to him,
not only in that she spoke Cree and English and was educated, but the connections that
she provided for him to other First Nations groups and the fact that she could decipher other dialects.
We're sat beside the Blaeberry River. A few family dramas that took place close to this. Yeah.
In fact, in June of 1807 when Thompson was opening the trade route over Howse Pass he had to cross
the Blaeberry with his party, and in his journals he talks about how harrowing and frightening that was.
He talks about how the men had to hold onto the manes and tails of
the horses while they crossed the river and were nearly swept downstream, along with their goods.
What he doesn't mention is that Charlotte also made
that same crossing with three young children all under the age of seven.
Make no mistake, this was a tough and risky life.
On one day at about three o'clock, they were reloading to continue on
their travels and discovered that one of the daughters was missing.
Thompson writes in his journal that they searched everywhere for her and finally
felt as though she had been lost, likely drowned.
And so they started looking in the river and looking in the log jams for her body, hoping to retrieve her.
Somewhere amidst the search another gentlemen, a person who is
on the party with them, Mr McDonald, discovered some tracks going upwards.
And so they started looking again.
And they found her at 8.30 that night, so 5.5 hours later against a snow bank.
Amazing story of the life of the wilderness family. They really were.
Absolutely and as a mother I'm not sure that I would have travelled a whole lot more after that.
But Charlotte did, she took all of her children with her.
You really admire her, don't you? Absolutely admire her, yes.
Her strength and fortitude and a little envious about her relationship with Thompson.
Even in this day you don't always have that friendship underlying your relationship.
This was the land that awaited them in the west.
Up to now it had effectively been a different country.
Explorers had made their way inland from the coast, but this land the size of
the United Kingdom and France combined had been separated from the rest of Canada by the Rockies.
When he'd crossed the mountains Thompson expected to find the Columbia river,
which would allow him to complete his passage to the coast.
But remember, there were no maps to guide him and what he encountered did not match his expectations.
This river really is strange. You just expect it to be going that way.
It's counter intuitive.
In fact this is the Columbia River.
What Thompson didn't know is that before it heads south
it goes north way up that way and loops around the far mountains.
The west side of the Rockies was a very different land.
The trees were different and the food resources were different.
Gone were the birch and the rabbits, replaced by cedar and salmon.
Thompson had to use nets.
That's the difficult bit of net making, I guess the start.
Basically the gauge sets the
size of the mesh
and with the needle
I can tie a neat sheet bend...
..to create the next gap.
And what I'm doing here is making the first part of the net.
If I slow down a bit I'll show you what happens. I bring the gauge up underneath this part,
pinch it with the thumb,
come through, pick up the loop there,
and now I pull that down to the gauge like so.
If I tilt the gauge and pinch here I get this slight opening.
I put the cord around my hand, take the needle behind these
first two and through there and that forms the sheet bend there.
I don't think a fisherman would give me a job on the basis of this.
I've been too busy chatting to the camera.
But I haven't made a net for a long while.
But it's interesting, as soon as you get back into it,
your hands remember the process and I think that's fascinating.
And I do remember the first time I learned to do this, thinking, "Wow, that's a really useful skill."
And I think that's exactly the experience that Thompson had with this as well.
So I've just about completed the next row here I'll show you.
And I can slide those off of the gauge.
You can see how that's all starting to work now, starting to come together nicely.
It's only a tiny little bit of netting, but it gives you the idea.
Once you get started, you really don't want to stop.
With a pass surveyed through the Rockies, Thompson set up a trading post at Kootenae House.
Over the next two years, he used this as a jumping off point to establish trading posts
in British Columbia and across the border in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.
He surveyed an alternative pass across the mountains and even found time to write and paint.
He clearly relished the pleasure the landscape brought him.
Thompson historian Ross Macdonald has brought me to a place Thompson painted from.
Whenever Thompson had an opportunity to get out, he'd take his gun.
He was always interested in food, but he'd spend
a lot of his time drawing, and this would be an example of the kind of thing that he was drawing.
Mountain ranges in here showing Mount Nelson.
Mount Nelson is the only peak in all of North America that David Thompson mapped that he actually labelled on
the map and in recognition of Admiral Nelson, who was a hero of Thompson's.
He's one of my heroes, too. It's interesting looking at it, because from here it looks
a bit like Nelson's hat, maybe that's what made him think of it.
I see though from this drawing that you've dragged me
a bit higher up this hill than we needed to come.
I'm not sure where Thompson would have sketched it from. I just like the view from here.
It's great, isn't it? Yeah.
But Thompson wasn't here to paint.
Finding a way through the Rockies opened up a trade route.
It also allowed Thompson to complete his life's work, a map accurately depicting the Canadian land mass
from Hudson's bay in the east, across the Rockies to the west.
It was the first time Canada could be seen on a map and marks the beginning of modern Canada.
When he reached the Pacific he had accomplished all he had set out to do.
He was the first European to navigate all 1,200 miles of the Columbia River.
He'd recorded a workable trade route across the breadth of Canada,
and he'd mapped hundreds of thousands of miles of uncharted land.
He was to be called "the greatest land geographer who ever lived"
and without doubt helped to create modern Canada.
But David Thompson, had discovered not only a passion for surveying, he also displayed a passion for
the world he was a part of, the people he met and the land he encountered.
Night after night he would stare at the darkening sky,
picking out Polaris and the other astronomical formations.
His commitment did not go unnoticed by those around him.
The Native people watched him and named him Koo Koo Sint, he who gazes at the stars.
The final leg of my journey takes me to the west coast of Canada,
a land where the cedar creates canoes, baskets and boxes.
Fish are caught with steam-bent hooks and the Pacific is the great provider.