Columbia Journals - Hardcover

Thompson, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773509895 ISBN 13: 9780773509894

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998

Synopsis

With the publication of David Thompson's "Columbia Journals", Barbara Belyea gives wider recognition to the fur trader, primary explorer, and cartographer who lived from 1770 to 1857. His "Columbia Journals" not only documents the North West Company's efforts to find good trade routes across the Canadian Rocky Mountains but reveals Thompson's personal interest in mapping the Pacific watershed north of California. His accounts give a detailed picture of the fur business during its greatest expansion and remind us of the extent to which the territory he explored has been transformed by settlement, roads, and hydroelectric dams. Thompson's journals trace the fur trade's westernmost expansion while his hand-drawn maps preserve a contemporary image of the country he explored. Belyea suggests that most previous historical research, based on Thompson's "Narrative", has overlooked this contemporary, professional record of the explorer's activities. Her analysis of generic differences between the memoir and the journal proposes a reassessment of the way sources have been used in histories of the fur trade. The extensive notes which accompany the "Columbia Journals" provide a documentary context for Thompson's own account. Details of Thompson's manuscript maps are included, together with the work of other cartographers of the period.

About this title

Review

"Columbia Journals allows us to evaluate David Thompson more fully as an actor in the history of the west, and to understand more critically the assessment and misinterpretations made by a number of earlier researchers." Richard Ruggles, Queen's University, Ontario

About the Author

Barbara Belyea is professor emerita of English, University of Calgary.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0773509895
• ISBN 13: 9780773509894
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Belyea Barbara