David Thompson, the Fur Trade, and the Discovery of the Natural History of the North Woods

Abstract

On May 21, 1797, David Thompson quit the Hudson’s Bay Company and began walking 80 miles to the Nor’West Company’s trading post at Reindeer Lake in northern Manitoba. Upon arrival, he immediately embarked on a 1,600-kilometer inland voyage in a 6-meter-long birch-bark canoe with a brigade of hivernants, French voyageurs originally from the Loire Valley. The hivernants wintered over in the Far North and traded with the Chippewayan Indians, the central and largest of all the Athabascan tribes, for beaver, lynx, snowshoe hare, and other furs. His route took him southeast down the chain of kettle lakes inside the terminal moraine to Lake Winnipeg, up the Winnipeg River to Lake of the Woods, then up the Rainy River to Rainy Lake. From here, he proceeded east through the North Woods of present-day Minnesota and Ontario across numerous lakes carved by the ice sheet. On July 22, Thompson, the hivernants, and the cargo of furs arrived at the western end of the Grand Portage at the head of the Pigeon River flowing into Lake Superior.

David Thompson, a trader and an explorer in the beaver fur trade, compiled some of the most extensive observations of the natural history of the North Woods and the boreal forest in the decades after the American Revolution.