The Mapmaker's Eye

David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau

By: Jack Nisbet

Narrated by: Mark D. Mickelson

Complex, headstrong, curious, and resourceful, David Thompson is a hero in Canada, yet has remained largely unknown in the United States. Between 1801 and 1812, this fur trader, explorer, and cartographer established two viable trade routes across the Rocky Mountains in Canada and systematically surveyed the entire 1250-mile course of the Columbian River. In succeeding years he distilled his mathematical notations from dozens of journal notebooks into the first maps of the northwest quadrant of North America. Information from some of his earlier mapwork was even used by the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Author Jack Nisbet utilizes fresh research to convey how Thompson experienced the full sweep of the human and natural history etched across the Columbian drainage. He places Thompson's movements within the larger contexts of the European Enlightenment, the British fur trade economy, and American expansion as represented by Lewis and Clark. The Mapmaker's Eye is a fascinating chronicle of Thompson's life and adventures.

The book is published by University of Washington Press.

©2008 Board of Regents of Washington State University (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks

Not a driving book

My husband and I planned to listen to this as we drove cross-country on a canoe trip. This book does not lend itself to that environment as it is hard to “get into”, and we found the narration to be quite robotic.

Great story of exploration but poor narration

I loved this very interesting book about a Canadian explorer who was a brilliant hard-working rugged and generally kind person who treated people well regardless of their ethnicity. But the narration was not good at all. The narrator spoke in short bursts of words that seemed to create unnecessary and random pauses. The pauses seemed to have little to do with sentence or paragraph structure. And the bursts of words were spoken in a way that sometimes two or more words were just jammed together to sound like one word. It was confusing. A final comment is he needed to do a much better job of researching the pronunciation Pacific Northwest Native American words and names. I have lived in the Pacific Northwest for over 50 years and I found his pronunciations atrocious.