Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/254

198 learning, not at all. At the age of seven years a poor boy David Thompson had been placed in a charity school in London, and remained there seven years learning all that was taught, which included a little of navigation, and reading all that came in his way, for he was an omniverous reader. When he was 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 companionships 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 travels 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 competitors, the NorthWest Company, fur traders 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 Fraser 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 Canada, were at all ignorant of the goings and comings of Lewis and Clark in 1805–6. Those very same years Simon Fraser (and McLeod) penetrated to the waters of the river afterward named in his honor, and in the month of June of 1807 David Thompson descended the western slope of the Rocky Mountains by way of the pass at the head of the Saskatchewan River, which pass was afterward generously named in honor of a rival trader in the Hudson's Bay Company. The winters of 1807–8 and 1808–9 were both spent at the trading house built by him