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Original Essays | October 17, 2009

Jessica Maxwell: IMG God's Tea Party



My Catholic friend tilted her teacup like a fortune-teller. "You know," she said, "I think people who don't have God in their lives are like people... Continue »
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3 Burnside Americana- Frontier Men
15 Local Warehouse Biography- Historical
1 Remote Warehouse World History- Canada

Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West

by D'arcy Jenish

Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Epic Wanderer, the first full-length biography of mapmaker David Thompson (1770–1857), is set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries against the broad canvas of dramatic rivalries between the United States and British North America, between the Hudson’s Bay Company and its Montreal-based rival, the North West Company, and among the various First Nations thrown into disarray by the advent of guns, horses, and alcohol.

Less celebrated than his contemporaries Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Thompson spent nearly three decades, beginning in 1784, surveying and mapping more than 1.2 million square miles of largely uncharted Indian territory. Traveling across the prairies, over the Rockies, and on to the Pacific, Thompson transformed the raw data of his explorations into a map of the Canadian West. Measuring ten feet by seven feet and exhibiting astonishing accuracy, the map became essential to the politicians and diplomats who would decide the future of the rich and promising lands of the West. Yet its creator worked without personal glory and died in penniless obscurity.

Drawing extensively on Thompson’s personal journals and illustrated with his detailed sketches, intricate notebook pages, and the map itself, Epic Wanderer charts the life of a man who risked everything in the name of scientific advancement and exploration.

Review:

"Well illustrated and served well by a thorough bibliography, this imaginitive reconstruction will whet readers appetites to seek out the copious literature on Thompson, the epic wanderer."-Choice
(Choice)

Review:

"David Thompson was an important, if little known, explorer of the Canadian West. . . . Jenish tells this remarkable mans story from the journal Thompson kept throughout his life and the narrative he wrote in his old age. . . . We view the daunting hardships facing a fur trader working far beyond white settlement."-Journal of the West
(Donna Roper, Journal of the West)

About the Author

D’Arcy Jenish is the author of Indian Fall: The Last Great Days of the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy and the best-selling The Stanley Cup: One Hundred Years of Hockey at Its Best.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780803224520
Subtitle:
David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West
Author:
Jenish, D'arcy
Author:
Jenish, D'Arcy
Publisher:
Bison Books
Subject:
Canada - Pre-Confederation (to 1867)
Subject:
Historical - General
Publication Date:
June 2009
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
309
Dimensions:
8.90x6.00x.90 in. .95 lbs.

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