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magazine / ja07
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July/August 2007 issue |
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EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
David Thompson's living legacy
On a frigid December night in 1810, shortly
before his crossing of Athabasca Pass, which
became the main fur-trade highway across
the Rockies, explorer and fur trader David
Thompson— the man considered to be North America's greatest
map-maker — wrote a letter to a colleague, thanking
him for helping with his daughter's education.
"It is my wish to give all my children an equal and
good education; my conscience obliges me to it, and
it is for this that I am now working in this country."
That daughter was one of 13 children born to
Thompson and his wife Charlotte Small, a mixedblood
Cree woman from Île-à-la-Crosse in what was
then northern Saskatchewan. Historical records tell us a
great deal about Thompson and his accomplishments,
but we know almost nothing about his relationship
with the woman who shared his life for 58 years.
To mark the 150th anniversary of Thompson's death and the
200th anniversary of his first crossing of the Rocky Mountains
via Howse Pass, we invited novelist and essayist Aritha van Herk
to probe Thompson's own writings and archival sources for a
story of his marriage to Small, their history-making travels
together, their devotion to their children and their deaths as
paupers in Montréal within three months of each other in 1857.
Canadian history is filled with tragic and callous encounters
between the first Europeans in Canada and First Nations peoples.
Thompson and Small tell another, more hopeful story
about how this country was created.
In the years after he retired from the fur trade and was working
on his grand map, which accurately positioned lakes, rivers,
mountains and settlements across a land mass that stretched
from Hudson Bay to the Pacific coast, Thompson fretted about
his legacy. With age came illness and penury. To earn an income,
he began drafting a book based on the 77 notebooks he had
filled during his 28 years in the fur trade. That, too, remained
unfinished at his death. (In the 1890s, the manuscript was
obtained by geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who edited it for
publication in 1916 as David Thompson's narrative.)
While Thompson may not have been able to support himself
in his old age from the knowledge he had acquired during his
explorations, he needn't have worried about his legacy. His
reputation has been challenged by scholars but has survived
the critical scrutiny. And over the next four years, his life will
be celebrated in events across Canada and the United States.
On a more personal level, he and Small left a living legacy
through their children. The quote from the letter to his colleague
reveals an admirable and progressive feature of his character, in
that he made no distinction between the education he wished
to provide for his sons and that of his daughters.
Hundreds of their descendants are now scattered across
North America, if not the world. Among them is John Lennox,
a professor of Canadian literature at York University in Toronto.
Lennox traces his ancestry back to Thompson and Small's
youngest daughter, Eliza, who married Dalhousie Landell.
Thompson and Small are buried in the Landell family plot in
Montréal's Mount Royal Cemetery.
Lennox recalls that his grandfather, Charles Dalhousie Landell,
"talked a lot about David and Charlotte when we were young.
Bored us to tears, really."
But the stories stuck and were a source of "great family pride.
When I got older, I realized what they had done. It was Charlotte
who really fascinated me — and David's loyalty to her."
All these generations later, says Lennox, Small's genes are still
evident in the family. They were present in the rich hues of his
mother's features and remain in those of other relatives. His family's
historic bloodlines also nourish an indelible feeling of place.
"As descendants of David Thompson," he says, "we have
inherited a sense of belonging to this land through his direct
and lifelong encounter with its vastness. Through Charlotte
Small, we are equally rooted by being linked to the continuity
of human habitation of Canada from its beginning. For me,
this is a unique and precious legacy."
— Rick Boychuk
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