Travels and Exploration

Southern and Central Alberta by David Thompson

Professor Richard I. Ruggles (1925–2008) was a Canadian geographer and professor at Queen’s University who specialized in historical cartography, especially fur trade maps and the mapping traditions of the Hudson’s Bay Company and Indigenous peoples. His best-known work is ‘A Country So Interesting: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670–1870’ (1970), which is still the standard reference on HBC mapping.

Ruggles carefully analyzed the surviving manuscript maps in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (HBCA), identifying their makers, techniques, and significance. He characterized the mapping of north-western North America as not just a technical exercise, but a blend of surveys conducted by those who traveled the landscape and of Indigenous knowledge. The many manuscript maps that were created were working documents for trade, not polished atlases, and yet they were, at times, surprisingly accurate. The individuals behind them were often little-known traders or clerks, surveyors and military men.

The early sketch maps were created by employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). These were rough, often based on Indigenous sketches and verbal accounts, described and or drawn by factors and traders at coastal posts and by their men’s journeys inland.

Eventually the HBC and North West Company (NWC) began to send trained surveyors, shifting from rudimentary made sketch maps to measured surveys. This would include Philip Turnor, the company’s first professional surveyor who was trained in England. Peter Fidler, Turnor’s student, who traveled, surveyed, and mapped the Prairies, and the Saskatchewan to the Rocky Mountains. And there was David Thompson, who worked for both the HBC and the NWC. Also trained by Turnor, Thompson became a prolific explorer and surveyor whose exploits stretch to the Pacific Ocean.

And finally, there were the American trappers, travelers and military men. This would included Lewis and Clark who had a different objective than participating in the fur trade, but who also produced sketches, maps and surveys of their journeys into the west.

Through research, I capture but a few of these explorers and lesser known travelers, who, by their own efforts and the efforts of their indigenous guides, helped map a continent.