New West Book Review & Interview

Carl Haywood’s Innovative Take on Explorer David Thompson

By Brian D’Ambrosio, Guest Writer, 7-04-08

	An illustration of McGillivray's River Crossing from Carl Haywood's book.

Canadian David Thompson is considered by some to be one of the shrewdest explorer-mapmakers to ever chart or trek a course. Following quickly on the heels of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Thompson is widely credited as being the first person to set up a commercial trading post in Montana, a northwestern business venture called Saleesh House. Several opinions have always existed relating to the post’s precise location.

Shunning foregone historical conclusions, Carl Haywood, author of Sometimes Only Horses to Eat ($24.95, Stoneydale Press), has not only raised serious questions about Thompson’s travels in northwestern Montana, but he has offered new interpretations of his own that certainly command confutation. 

In the interest of writing an exciting or inspiring book, too many historians and researchers refuse to confront the problems of their own pretense and ideology, the problems inherent in how they relate to their subject. Fortunately, Haywood’s well-documented analysis of Thompson’s life during the 1807-1812 Saleesh House Period brings no ostensible political agenda to the table, nor does he wish to express his own ideological inclinations. In fact, he’s quick to tell you that the book is not only about David Thompson, but it’s also written by David Thompson, and that he’s merely part of the presentation, an interpreter, something akin to an uninvolved bystander.

“I’m just kind of translating,” says Haywood.

The nearly 400 pages of ink, effort, and implacable determination belie such humbleness. Indeed, Haywood’s attentive dissection of Thompson’s journals brings the Canadian explorer to life in seminal and thought provoking ways, minus the distortional baggage. 

“Too often in history, you are looking at a caricature,” says Haywood. “Too often you’re looking at a figure that’s not a real person. I’ve focused on the person. In history, you usually see a portion, you only read about the general or the president, or you read romantic ideas about mountain men.”

By minimizing his authorial presence, Haywood allows for his book to find value not just as a record of what has been remembered but also as an interpretatively strong account of what has been seen.

“I’ve tried to present Thompson as a person, in his own words. At one point, the book mentions the starvation he and his men faced at Saleesh House, with Thompson trying to build a canoe, but he got so ill he couldn’t get out of his bed. He had to drag the canoe into his own quarters to his bed, so he could direct the finishing of it. While along the Columbia River, in 1811, he recorded that he’d been observing a comet. He also wrote about carrying canoes around portages and carrying a pistol for protection. These things humanize him.”

Thompson’s journals reveal him to be an apt businessman and surveyor, and an all-around savvy, calm, composed character. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t plagued by many of the same human instabilities troubling his time. To stave off the agony of starvation, he and his men ate plenty of horse and dog meat. One time, desperately hungry, they consumed a dead deer, stealing it away from the eagles and wolves. The rancid flesh made the men deathly ill. 

Carl Haywood has always been interested in the rugged vagaries of this type of frontier history. Living in Plains, MT., in the 1960’s and 70’s, working for the state forester, he first became aware of David Thompson. In the years that followed, buck skinning, horse packing, and camping in blizzards, provided him with ways to truly taste the authentic western experience.

“The camping and guiding I did wasn’t near the challenge as it was during Thompson’s time. With Thompson, he couldn’t just head back home, because home was 3,000 miles away.”

Haywood moved to Thompson Falls in 2003. Soon thereafter, he felt a strong scholarly interest in Thompson’s memory, and, when out one morning strolling downtown, discovered what he considered to be a counterfactual kiosk based on a significant distortion of area history. 

“I picked up a book about David Thompson and the Saleesh House (the phonetic spelling of Saleesh, the way Thompson spelt it, is used throughout the book) written by a local author, who was of the opinion that Thompson’s Saleesh House was on the south side of the river. I said to myself ‘that can’t be right’. My problem was that he had convinced the county historical society of this, and the informational kiosks downtown were printed with fliers and maps with Saleesh House on the south side of the river.

That’s what got Haywood inspired four and half years ago to track Thompson’s whereabouts. He wasn’t so much out to prove someone else wrong, or prove himself right, as he was to get the facts straight.

“Thompson spent 38 years in the fur trade,” says Haywood, who has amassed a David Thompson research library, with more than 100 related books, journals and newspaper clippings.

“He didn’t cross the Rocky Mountains to the West until 1807. There were few trappers here before him.  He wanted to do exploration and surveying work, but the Hudson Bay Company prevented him from doing it. After quitting, he, in 1797, went to the nearest North West Company post and signed up.”

Concentrating intently on a narrow expanse of years, Haywood uses transcriptions of Thompson’s journals made by Catherine White and Barbara Belyea, to guide the book’s narrative context, reinterpreting what he said, and just how he said it, as well as trailing his daily movements. Sometimes Only Horses to Eat focuses on Thompson’s years from 1807-1812.  With the primary exception of his 1810 trip to Rainy Lake, and his short trip to Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia River, in 1811, he was thoroughly immersed in both the business and commercial aspects of operating the Saleesh House. His first trip into what’s now Montana took place in 1808.

Haywood explains: “While trading with Indians along the river near Dixon, Mont., Thompson encountered the first of the American fur trapper during his time at Saleesh House.”

Thompson’s own logistical recollections of specific events, has urged Haywood to question previous historians’ assumptions as to the exact location of Saleesh House, and to reassess Thompson’s precise whereabouts during his lone visit to the Missoula Valley.

On November 9, 1809, Thompson camped briefly at a spot he thought would be a good location for another trading post. It was about sixty miles above Kullyspel House near the present town of Thompson Falls. Kullyspel House was the first trading post on the Saleesh River. It was in business for just two winter seasons: the hunting seasons of 1809-1810 and 1810-1811.

By reexamining Thompson’s own words, journals, and specifically detailed coordinates (and the explorer’s extensive descriptions of them), and with the benefit of modern GPS technology, Haywood puts the explorer on the north side of what’s known today as the Clark Fork River.

“Saleesh House appears to have consisted of a set of smaller quarters built to protect furs. It’s been mentioned in different journals, that there were seven buildings, but we don’t know for certain. If you read the journals, Thompson provided us with the latitude of the post.”

Thompson continued trading out of Saleesh House for three winters from the fall of 1809 until the spring of 1812. Saleesh House, later called Flat Head Post, remained in operation until the late 1820’s.

“It probably operated until 1828, and it appears to have burned down. I believe it was rebuilt in a different location and called Flat Head Post, which was used until the 1830s.”

Thompson, who more than likely had access to notes or journal reprints of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, arrived in the Missoula Valley with a fairly good sense of its topography and geography.

“He knew where Lolo Creek was,” says Haywood “He knew where Hellgate was.”

Thompson knew exactly where he was when he traveled through the Missoula Valley. But, according to Haywood, prior historians seem to have misidentified the precise location of his treads.

“He made one run into the Missoula Valley, in 1812, with a guide. T.C. Elliot and Elliot Coues both agree that he was on the top of Mount Jumbo. The compass bearings, distances, and descriptions, did not fit the terrain had he been standing on Mount Jumbo, because the bearings to these places would have placed the landmarks clear over in the Sapphires, on the east side of the valley.

“Thompson said he was on a high knoll in the valley, 4 miles due south to the confluence of two rivers (known as the Bitterroot and Clark Fork Rivers today). He couldn’t have been on Mount Jumbo, because that’s almost due west of Mount Jumbo. It doesn’t jibe. We shouldn’t be taking someday else’s word, instead of Thompson’s.”

Haywood’s controversial reexamination not only puts Thompson near the west side of Highway 200, but posits that he probably never even climbed Mount Jumbo at all. Whether the contrarious explanations of this forester-turned-author will be shunned by historians and academicians remains to be seen. Some, however, have already stated publicly that they agree with at least some of his assessments, including archeologist and historian Mark J. White (phone calls to other local historians, including UM Professor Harry Fritz, have not been answered):

“Mr. Haywood has tied the descriptions from David Thompson’s journals to features on the ground raising questions about myths that have been repeated for so many decades,” says White.

But, no matter the response, Haywood has gone out of his way to create a scholarly venture and to cultivate an environment where talk is meaningful. 

“There are going to be people in the historical community not willing to look at it, and who are going to base their assumptions on what other people have said. I based this book on what Thompson said, not on where I was told he was, or where I wanted him to be.

“I would like to get the archeologists here to confirm or refute some off the information that’s out there. There’s bound to be evidence out there. This book is what I think the historical evidence supports. I’m no expert; I just want to see the updating of fact based on historical evidence.”

Writers are accountable for what they write. Haywood has written this book as dispassionately as possible, while writing about his passion. Passion is integral to the art of persuasion that defines the politics of memory. Sometimes Only Horses to Eat is not meant to make the past familiar or more venerable or less venerable, but to make it tempting – and, ultimately, truthful.

Certainly, there are bound to be people who live in Thompson Falls who care not to learn the slightest bit of lore, myth, or fact surrounding the life of the man whose namesake blesses their town.

This is a real mistake, says Haywood. Not just because one’s lack of history is one’s lack of knowledge, but inasmuch that the valuable historical lessons of yesteryear’s hardship, peril, doggedness, and triumph, therein go unshared. 

“Thompson was here for just three years,” says Haywood. “But he covered thousands of miles, on foot, walking, canoeing, or on horseback. It’s unreal. He had a job to do and he did it. It has been estimated that he traveled 50,000 miles in his 38 years with the fur trade. I think it’s more than that, because it’s more than 3,000 miles back to Montreal just from Thompson Falls.”

David Thompson’s accomplishments are many, his bravery still admirable, his courage and resilience seemingly impeccable, but his legacy has been minimized, if not completely unrecognized, south of the Canadian border. The flip side of controversy is always attention, and anything Haywood can do to thrust attention toward Thompson’s exploits, is time well spent.

“Thompson was the first European trader to establish any kind of business on this side of the Rocky Mountains,” says Haywood. “But, since he was a Canadian, and since he was with the North West Company, he’s been brushed aside in American history books.”

Carl Haywood will discuss his book at David Thompson Days in Thompson Falls, Mont. on July 4-5, at the Libby Public Library in Libby, Mont. on July 14 (7 p.m.), at The Corner Bookstore in Sandpoint, Idaho on July 19 (1 p.m.), and information on his other regional appearances is available on his website.

Brian D’Ambrosio is a writer living in Missoula and the editor of the Clark Fork Journal. His second book, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry 1998-2008, will be available in July.

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