Kanata (12 page)

“Do you map cities?”

“No.”

“Cities are what people want now. New York grows so fast. Four hundred thousand people, half of them criminals.”

“Your president, as you know, is keen on westward expansion …”

Coleman looked at him with a blank face. “There are several books on the North West. Have you read …”

Coleman went to the back of the shop and his hands circled the air in front of a shelf until he pulled a book out.

“Here it is. The man was captured by savages. Lived like one for years then escaped. Died in Philadelphia. The sort of thing you might like. The price is reasonable.”

“My maps.”

Coleman smiled slightly, a dark, unfortunate smile. “There isn't much call for maps at present. It's all adventure, it seems.”

Coleman's face had a finality to it. Thompson had come to New York for nothing. Coleman gave him the name of another publisher, Wainscott and Son, who published maps. Thompson walked the fifteen blocks to Wainscott, who wasn't interested either.

“If you want to leave them, I'll take a look. I can't promise anything.”

Thompson left with his maps, still unwrapped, and began to walk along Eighth Street, past a boy who was begging.
“Have you something, sir?” he pleaded, his hand, streaked with soot, thrust upward. Thompson had nothing for himself even, and kept walking. The boy yelled a string of curses after him.

He heard several languages around him, a coarse, rich cacophony, and observed faces, dark-eyed people who moved as if they were late for an appointment. The streets were filled with commerce, moving goods, selling them. Groups of young men lingered at corners, waiting for the cover of night. Laundry waved from staircases and railings, white underclothes and dark coats and dresses, giving the buildings an unfinished look. There was a row of buildings burned to the ground, charred timbers lying like giant sticks and a group of children played among them. Thompson had never seen such a concentration of people in such a small area. They competed for the same resources: work, food, money, water. It was a city filled with dire opportunity. The natural laws were stretched thinly and tribes huddled each night, bound by blood or religion or language or nation, waiting for morning. Lines were redrawn as the city slept.

How would he map this city? It was a grid, each block containing a separate constellation. He walked to Mrs. Ogilvie's boarding house, past her disapproving stare, through the smells of cooked cabbage and boiled meat to his small room. He spread his map of the Oregon Territory across the bed and ran his finger along the borders he had drawn. The Americans invaded as he was creating the map, and now he was trying to sell them maps of the country they weren't able to take. If they had taken the country, he thought, his maps might be worth a great deal.

T
he soft October evening light left long shadows, and the maples were the colour of fire. Thompson sat on the wooden chair and observed Montreal through the window of their rooms. Coleman was an ass. Arrowsmith were crooks. Mackenzie over-rewarded, the Americans untrustworthy, the British blockheads. The Peigans had guns, the Irish were dying.

“What?” Charlotte was nudging him gently. He hadn't realized he was talking out loud. The light was almost gone. They couldn't afford to light the lamp at night and the room became slowly black.

In the morning he went over the list of all he had sold: his surveyor's chains (twenty-six pounds), his theodolite, his good coat (five pounds, ten pence), a bed, the leggings of a Mandan dress, his navigator's instruments, books. Only his maps, it seemed, wouldn't sell. By October there was no money nor the promise of any. He and Charlotte moved in with his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, William Scott, an engineer, an efficient man who bore the presence of his in-laws with an air of pragmatism. Thompson had come to a decision. He would write his own book, not an entertainment, as Irving had intended, but an adventure nevertheless. He had hundreds of pages of journals. People read adventure, as Coleman had said.

The writing went slowly and his hand shook by late morning and by November the room was often too cold to work. His son-in-law rationed the lamp oil and he couldn't write at night. At any rate, he was too exhausted and his eye wasn't strong enough to work by lamplight.

On February 14, Thompson woke in the chill of their room, the residue of a dream—Saukamappee standing on Tenth Street in New York, eating roasted chestnuts and
laughing—still in his head. He stared into blackness. There were a few seconds of suspended disbelief, followed by a flash of betrayal—Don't abandon your God especially when it seems He has abandoned you—then the simple fact of that darkness. Thompson was blind.

“Charlotte.”

“Hmm.”

“I'm blind. I can't see.”

She sat up and looked at her husband, who was staring blankly at the far wall. She looked into his eye, looked at that solemn face, with its child's trust and fear. The blackness wasn't absolute. There were shades, blue-black, grey-black, a few pricks of light that appeared like stars and were quickly extinguished.

At nine that morning Charlotte led Thompson to Dr. Howard's office on Queen Street. In the small waiting room there was a child with a shirt wrapped around his head as a bandage. After an hour, Thompson and Charlotte went into Howard's office. He was a small, thin man with a large moustache. He sat in front of Thompson and lit a candle and passed it across his line of sight, moving closer and then withdrawing.

“What do you see, Mr. Thompson?”

“A glow, faint.”

“Can you see shapes?”

“No.”

“When did you lose your sight?”

“I lost the sight in my right eye when I was eighteen. Sixty years ago. The other eye, I awoke blind this morning.”

Howard drew closer and stared into his eyes. Thompson could feel his presence, the human warmth, the proximate breath.

“Did you ever see a doctor regarding your right eye?”

“No. The sight was lost from working by candlelight and staring at the stars.”

“You don't lose your eyesight from staring at the heavens, Mr. Thompson. You have cataracts. There is a chance your sight can be returned.”

Howard rustled around the brown bottles that were against one wall.

“I'm going to fumigate your eyes with hydrocyanic acid,” he said. He brushed Thompson's eyelids with veratria, and applied the acid. Then he set up a small machine that generated arcs of spidery light and moved it around the orbit of Thompson's eye. Thompson could see distant lightning. Charlotte watched this necromancy in silent horror.

“For the next two weeks, Mr. Thompson, every morning upon waking I would like you to drink a wine glass filled with a mixture of gentian, a small quantity of sulphate of magnesia, and sulphuric acid.”

The mixture was predictably awful, a witch's brew that burned and sent bile upward. Thompson was glad he couldn't see it.

Three months later, he saw shapes moving on Craig Street as Charlotte led him on their daily walk. “Is that a carriage?” he asked her.

“Ahead of us. Yes.”

“There are people passing.”

“Yes. You can see.”

“Not clearly. But there are shapes, dark shapes. I see movement.”

“Your eyes are returning.”

“Perhaps.”

The shapes were indistinct, dark presences against a dark background.

After a month, he returned to his book, his sight returned, the unknowable hand of God surely. The mission begun at the age of fifteen was still unfinished. The writing was slow. He and Charlotte left Elizabeth's home, shunted to his son Joshua's house, where they felt equally unwelcome. Cholera arrived, killing a thousand Montrealers. Thompson was afflicted yet survived, a small miracle. His book languished. He was without a publisher, and finally without energy or hope. He abandoned the book, but continued to write in his journal. His last entry was February 1851, “Steady snow with ENE wind and drift. Bad weather.”

He spoke less, and read the Bible. “The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” He supposed he had done that. What was cartography but making the path straight for the next traveller? There would be a trickle then a flood; the lines he had drawn would contain millions. He had done what God had asked of him and had received no reward on this earth.

It was still dark the morning Charlotte awoke and looked at her husband and knew that he had been claimed. She held him for three hours while the house slept, talking softly into his dead ear, telling him that she loved him when she was a child and loved him still. Her hand rested lightly on his chest. He was eighty-seven.

Elizabeth and Joshua buried him in the cemetery on Mount Royal. Five of his children were there, watching the simple wood lowered into the ground with a mixture of loss and relief.

Charlotte sat by his grave, ignoring the children's pleas to come home. They finally left her to her grief. When it was dark, she lay on the grave, felt the fresh earth on her back, and watched Jupiter's slow circuit before falling asleep.

THE DEAL

1864 –1905

So it didn't end well.

Billy was alone in the room, but Michael still spoke in a low, almost conspiratorial voice. Thompson's maps were used into the twentieth century, though he was unacknowledged as the mapmaker. But they were his. You could tell because he made certain errors and they were repeated in the pirated editions; in a way, these mistakes were his signature. His journal—which ran to hundreds of pages—was eventually published in 1916, after it was discovered by a geologist named Joseph Burr Tyrrell. It was Tyrrell who pronounced Thompson “the greatest land geographer who ever lived.” Fewer than five hundred copies of the book were sold; it was hardly news anymore and the country was at war and wasn't interested in the past.

How do I know Thompson was my great-great-grandfather? Especially given that I was descended from Tristan, the illegitimate son. Despite its pitfalls, the oral tradition has some benefits. My mother, Catherine, knew the story, the names, and I pieced it
together from what I had read of Thompson. A tenuous claim? Of course. But people lay claim to brilliant ancestors (and exaggerate their brilliance) all the time; it's an epidemic. It gives us hope and something to pale beside.

But all history has pitfalls, including the one I'm telling you. Consider the sources. Diaries are self-serving, journalism is a narrow trade, witnesses are unreliable. Everything tainted by politics.

At any rate, with Thompson, the West was mapped: Now people knew what was there. The next question, of course, was: Who will govern it? At that moment, it was still owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, which had not yet become a department store, and which had five million square miles of land sitting on its books as a kind of perverse inventory. Rupert's Land (named for Prince Rupert, the King's cousin) was filled with Indians, an inconvenience that could become a burden or, worse, like in the U.S., a series of bloody wars. If you claimed the land, they would be a responsibility, an onerous one. But if you didn't claim it, the Americans surely would. And if they claimed the West, they might claim everything.

A
ll empires are eventually undone. They collapse through war, attrition, debt, ambition, and finally, a lack of meaning. The Indians came to the idea too late, much too late, looking for an empire as Napoleon sought his own. It wasn't a great time for empires, as it turned out.

As Napoleon prepares for the slaughter at Borodino, the American president James Madison declares war on Britain and makes plans to invade Canada. The acquisition of Canada, Thomas Jefferson says, will be a mere matter of marching. Jefferson has read Alexander Mackenzie's
Voyages to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans
(which contained uncredited versions
of David Thompson's maps). So has Napoleon, both of them idly wondering if this new territory is worth conquering.