As statues, explorers stand still after life of historic travels together
ROY MACGREGOR Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 12:00AM EDT
You can strain your neck as well as your eyes travelling down the Columbia River Valley.
And yet there are times, when glancing down for a bit of relief, that you will see something as impressive as the ragged Rocky Mountains to the east and the towering Purcell Range to the west.
The statue to explorer David Thompson in the new park being constructed near the edge of this postcard town on the shores of Windermere Lake is a case in point.
He is not alone.
The world's greatest mapmaker - his remarkable story told this fall in a majestic historical novel, Kanata, by Don Gillmor - stands with Charlotte Small, the half-Cree woman he married when she was only 13 and stayed married to for the next 58 years, her death following his by a mere three months.
She has equal billing in Invermere, even though Thompson is by far the better known of the couple: the lame, half-blind little Englishman who mapped out, with stunning accuracy, nearly four million square kilometres of this vast continent. He was the first white person to travel the nearly 2,000 twisting kilometres of the Columbia, from its source near here, all the way to the point in the American northwest where it dumps into the Pacific Ocean.
David Thompson's is a great story of survival - from the death of his father when David was but two years of age, to the charity school in London where he fell in love with mathematics, to signing on with the Hudson's Bay Company at age 14, to a life of danger and adventure - but Charlotte Small's is hardly a lesser tale. She raised their 13 children while travelling herself more than three times as far as the renowned American explorers Lewis and Clark. She stuck with Thompson through next-to-impossible conditions, their later impoverishment and his bouts of blindness. It is said she stayed the night lying on his grave in Mount Royal, staring up at the stars that had guided them their entire lives.
The sculptor, Rich Roenisch of Longview, Alta., insisted she be included in the monument to the great mapmaker, and though there was some local grumbling about the propriety of paying tribute to a marriage that involved a 13-year-old child, there is nothing but pride to be found now in Invermere. Thompson, for that matter, could be called a child labourer when he set off on the ship that took him to Churchill Factory, where he began his apprenticeship.
Invermere Councillor Spring Hawes says it is "a strange commentary on our society that the female companion is so rarely recognized that we find it noteworthy when she is." A good point, as Hawes adds that "There is no doubt that behind the much recognized men who helped establish our country and its society, there were - and are - equally strong, adventurous and brave women."
Sometimes with partners; sometimes on their own; but rarely recognized. "I salute the artist," Spring Hawes says of Roenisch's celebration of both David Thompson and Charlotte Small. "But I am a woman who believes things are not entirely different now."
From the Toronto Globe and Mail