Northern Wilderness episode 5 – Koo Koo Sint – The Star Gazer: David Thompson was a Briton who helped change the face of Canada. He mapped nearly four million square miles of North America. This would be an impressive feat today – in the 1800s it was, quite simply, staggering.
Thompson effectively paved the way for trade from coast to coast in Canada, strengthening the status of the country and defining the borders that kept Canada independent from the US. Ray explores Thompson’s footsteps across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. He draws on a new set of bushcraft skills and local knowledge, and explores the mapping techniques used by Thompson.
Ray Mears goes on an epic adventure into Canada’s unforgiving, yet inspiring wilderness.
Northern Wilderness episode 5 – Koo Koo Sint – The Star Gazer
David Thompson (30 April 1770 – 10 February 1857) was a British-Canadian fur trader, surveyor, and cartographer, known to some native peoples as Koo-Koo-Sint or “the Stargazer”. Over Thompson’s career, he traveled some 90,000 kilometres (56,000 mi) across North America, mapping 4.9 million square kilometres of North America along the way. For this historic feat, Thompson has been described as the “greatest land geographer who ever lived.”
On 2 September 1784, Thompson arrived in Churchill (now in Manitoba) and was put to work as a clerk/secretary, copying the personal papers of the governor of Fort Churchill, Samuel Hearne. The next year he was transferred to nearby York Factory, and over the next few years spent time as a secretary at Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, and South Branch House before arriving at Manchester House in 1787. During those years he learned to keep accounts and other records, calculate values of furs (It was noted that he also had several expensive beaver pelts at that time even when a secretary’s job would not pay terribly well), track supplies and other duties.
On 23 December 1788, Thompson seriously fractured his tibia, forcing him to spend the next two winters at Cumberland House convalescing. It was during this time that he greatly refined and expanded his mathematical, astronomical, and surveying skills under the tutelage of Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor Philip Turnor. It was also during this time that he lost sight in his right eye.
