David and Charlotte: the Love Story That Mapped a Continent

Canadians know quite a lot about David Thompson, the Welsh immigrant who mapped more of Canada and the United States than any other cartographer, and he was, frankly an amazing human being. We don’t know as much about his life partner, Charlotte Small.

Charlotte didn’t know the first thing about cartography or the fine instruments that David used to sight the stars and pinpoint locations on the ground. His great charts made her proud of her husband, but really were neither here nor there to a woman whose ancestors had walked these lands for millennia.

Charlotte Small was thirteen, the daughter of a Northwest Company trader and his “country wife”, mostly raised by her Cree family. As such, she knew the land, the wildlife, the local languages, the traditional medicines, and the legends. Legends about unknown places beyond the horizon.

We know of Thompson’s heroic explorations up the Mackenzie River to the Arctic, and his travel down the river which bears his name, the first European to have crossed the North American continent north of Mexico, a decade or more before Lewis and Clark. Thompson deserves to shine in the constellation of Canadian heroes.

But we overlook Charlotte. Patient, quiet, and resilient, she accompanied Thompson everywhere. When he looked out over the Pacific, so did she. As did their children.

Because along the way, almost incidentally, the Thompsons had thirteen children. Imagine our modern day space explorers casually taking along a family of thirteen. David and Charlotte’s children, thousands of miles from their ancestral home, watching their father observe the stars through his sextant and make notes in his papers, and watching their mother find the berries and the wild rice and the game, keeping the domestic side thriving along the way.

When David Thompson became too old to traipse the prairies, the mountains, and the tundra, he retired to Montreal. But unlike most of his colleagues, he didn’t abandon his “country wife”. No, Charlotte was his life companion and the mother of his children, so together they settled just outside Montreal where they lived into old age. Charlotte survived David by just a few months.