Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 12.djvu/209

DAVID THOMPSON AND THE COLUMBIA RIVER 201 and the habits and names of the Indian tribes and localities was not so common. David Thompson kept his note-book or jour- nal under all conditions of weather or travel, and made record of the daily camping places in scientific terms and with such exactness that these localities can be checked today with scarce a variation. His instruments were small, only such as were held in the hand, but his observations were accurate. A promi- nent engineer and scholar of Canada has had occasion to follow many of the routes of travel and gives, testimony to this fact. And this ability and habit were not based upon the diploma of any school or institution of learning, not at all. At the age of seven years and a poor boy David Thompson had been placed by his father in a charity school in London, and remained there seven years learning all that was taught, which included a little navigation; and reading all that came in his way, for he was an omniverous reader. When about fourteen years old (about 1783) the Hudson's Bay Company applied for a suitable boy to enter their service and he was then apprenticed to that Company for a period of seven years, and began life in the fur trade along the bleak shores of Hudson's Bay. His compan- ionships were improved to the utmost, and a spirit of ambition inspired him to outdo his associates. His love for exploration was influenced perhaps by the travel of Samuel Hearne, who was one of the officers over him. Considering himself held back by the ultra commercialism of the Hudson's Bay Company after due time he turned to their more enterprising competi- tor, the Northwest Company of Merchants of Canada, with headquarters at Montreal, and became a "Northwester." As such he was chosen, after some years, to push the trade across the continental divide further south than Peace river, where Simon Eraser crossed over, and thus it fell to him to find the sources of the long looked for "River of the West" which both Alex. Mackenzie and Simon Fraser had hoped to* find before him. Let it not be supposed that the Northwest Company of Mer- chants of Canada were at all ignorant of the goings and com- ings of the Lewis and Clark party in 1805-6. Those very same years Simon Fraser (& McLeod) penetrated to the waters of