Added by you! David Thompson

David Thompson was a British-born fur-trader and explorer whose greatest contribution was mapping the Canadian Northwest. Thompson arrived in Canada in 1784 as a fourteen-year-old apprentice to the Hudson’s Bay Company. He learned scientific mapmaking— at that time a very rare skill in North America—while recovering from a broken leg, and left his employer to work for the rival North West Company in 1797. Thompson’s first great map of the Northwest, prepared between 1812 and 1814, accurately charted for the first time approximately 4 million square kilometres of territory, and was based on three decades of almost constant travel and survey. Described as “the greatest land geographer who ever lived,” he died penniless in 1857.