Explorer Stole a March on Lewis and Clark : History: British-born trader David Thompson blazed trail into the wilderness 20 years before famous pair.

SPOKANE, Wash. —  Jack Nisbet doesn’t want to belittle the legacy of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

But when the renowned American explorers were working their way up the Missouri River drainage in the early 1800s, they used points charted by David Thompson, a British-born trader who’d already been there, done that.

“You go into a good bookstore in the U.S., and there’s a whole shelf of Lewis and Clark, and they were out two years,” Nisbet said.

Lewis and Clark traveled the region from May, 1804, until September, 1806. Thompson spent 28 years exploring it--from 1784 to 1812.

Nisbet’s book, “Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America,” chronicles Thompson’s travels.

As a roving partner in the Montreal, Canada-based North West Fur Co., Thompson established fur-trading houses at sites that grew into some of the region’s first European settlements, including Spokane and towns in northern Idaho, Montana and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta.

He was the first to chart the entire length of the Columbia River, which he explored to its source. In 1814, he completed a map that guided travelers for years through the Western United States and Canada.

“He’s a very important explorer,” said University of Idaho history professor Carlos Schwantes, author of a textbook on the region. “He sort of got lost sight of, though, because of so many of the American explorers like Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike.”

Nisbet, 46, who lives in Spokane, said he became intrigued by Thompson more than 20 years ago, when the explorer’s name came up repeatedly during research for a natural history newspaper column.

The more he delved, the more he came to feel Thompson’s tale had not had a complete telling.

“I knew there was an audience for him, and that there hadn’t really been a book that dug into his journals and gotten into his story that way,” Nisbet said.

So he journeyed to Toronto and set about deciphering Thompson’s 77 handwritten field journals, housed at the Provincial Archives. The volumes contained detailed daily accounts of Thompson’s travels for the fur company and contacts with native tribes--some of whom had never before seen a white man.

Nisbet, who also has read journals from the Lewis and Clark expedition, said he developed an appreciation for Thompson’s ability to coexist with harsh nature and the region’s tribes.

“Thomas Jefferson set up Lewis and Clark to be heroes, and they were really good at it. But Thompson had some advantages over them. He had so much experience and he was much better at talking his way out of tight situations.

“When the Blackfeet stole horses from Meriwether Lewis, he ended up killing some of them. The Blackfeet stole horses from around Thompson all the time,” and he didn’t kill any, Nisbet said.

Thompson’s own “Narrative of Travels in Western North America” was published in 1916 by the Champlain Society in Toronto.

He was a businessman first, however.

On land inhabited by some tribes unwilling or lacking the proper tools to trap profitably--the Kalispell in northern Idaho, for example--he imported trappers from New York’s Iroquois tribe to take virtually all the beaver and other fur-bearing animals from entire river drainages, Nisbet said.

“So the Kalispell are left with no fur-bearing mammals, and they blame it on Thompson and the Iroquois,” he said.

Nisbet’s book also reflects his own travels, following in Thompson’s footsteps, and offers a picture of the lands and their peoples today.

At readings around the Northwest and western Canada, he said he learned that Thompson played a role in family history for some in his audience.

“I hardly have done a reading where somebody didn’t come up to me at the end and tell me, ‘Thompson got into a fistfight with my great-great-uncle’ or something,” he said.

The book, published last October by Seattle-based Sasquatch Books, has been distributed nationally through Barnes & Noble and other chains, and won the Idaho Library Assn.’s 1994 Book of the Year Award.

“Sources of the River” may become just one of the first works to reflect a resurgence of interest in Thompson, Nisbet said. At least two other authors are working on more academic biographies, he said, and a University of Calgary professor has been transcribing all of Thompson’s journals dealing with Columbia River exploration.

National Geographic will publish an article on Thompson in its March, 1996, issue, a spokeswoman said.

“The country is the way it is because of the way Thompson settled it, to some extent,” Nisbet said.