Honoring the Forgotten Pathfinder of the Columbia
After decades in an unmarked pauper's grave, the explorer who first traced the Columbia River to the sea finally receives his due.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
David Thompson, whose grave in Mount Royal Cemetery, Montreal, was recently located, was the first white man to follow the Columbia River from its source to the sea. For many years, an unmarked plot served as the final resting place for this great pathfinder of the Pacific Northwest. After nearly seventy years, his grave is to be fittingly marked. A more enduring monument stands on the shore of Lake Windermere, the site of the first permanent post west of the Continental Divide, where pioneers, traders, and mountaineers recently gathered for its dedication. Born in London in 1770, Thompson apprenticed with the Hudson’s Bay Company at 14. He paddled and rode across the territory between Lake Athabasca and the mouth of the Columbia throughout his life. A notable geographer, his 1814 map of the Northwest served as the primary guide for American mapmakers for years. It was Thompson who first located the source of the Columbia and pushed into the Flathead and Pend Oreille country of Eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana. His men established a fort near present-day Spokane in 1810. Though he descended to the mouth of the Columbia, he arrived just months after John Jacob Astor’s American party, ensuring the region remained American. Thompson died in poverty in 1857, despite a life of monumental achievement.
“For many years an unmarked plot was the pauper's grave of this great pathfinder of the Pacific Northwest.”
Thompson's legacy remains central to the history of Eastern Washington, yet his personal poverty and long-neglected grave mirror the way history often overlooks the explorers and laborers who physically mapped and built the infrastructure of the West. His connection to the founding of Spokane highlights the often arbitrary nature of national boundaries in the early fur trade era.
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