David Douglas was a Scottish botanist, best known as the namesake of the Douglas fir and for estimating the heights of Mount Brown and Mount Hooker to be about 17,000 feet above sea level. He worked as a gardener, and explored the Scottish Highlands, North America and Hawaii, where he died [1].

Douglas made three separate trips from Britain to North America. His first trip, to eastern North America, was from June to late autumn of 1823. The second was to the Pacific Northwest, from July 1824 returning October 1827. On 1 May 1827, Douglas crossed the Athabasca Pass:

After breakfast, about one o’clock, being well refreshed, I set out with the view of ascending what seemed to be the highest peak on the north. The height from its apparent base exceeds 6000 feet, 17,000 feet above the level of the sea. After passing over the lower ridge of about 200 feet, by far the most difficult and fatiguing part, on snow-shoes, there was a crust on the snow, over which I walked with the greatest ease. A few mosses and lichens, Andreae and Jungermanniae, were seen. At the elevation of 4800 feet vegetation no longer exists not so much as a lichen of any kind to be seen, 1200 feet of eternal ice. The view from the summit is of that cast too awful to afford pleasure nothing as far as the eye can reach in every direction but mountains towering above each other, rugged beyond all description; the dazzling reflection from the snow, the heavenly arena of the solid glacier, and the rainbow-like tints of its shattered fragments, together with the enormous icicles suspended from the perpendicular rocks ; the majestic but terrible avalanche hurtling down from the southerly exposed rocks producing a crash, and groans through the distant valleys, only equalled by an earthquake. Such gives us a sense of the stupendous and wondrous works of the Almighty.

This peak, the highest yet known in the northern continent of America, I felt a sincere pleasure in naming MOUNT BROWN, in honour of R. Brown, Esq., the illustrious botanist, no less distinguished by the amiable qualities of his refined mind. A little to the south is one nearly of the same height, rising more into a sharp point, which I named MOUNT HOOKER, in honour of my early patron the enlightened and learned Professor of Botany in the University of Glasgow, Dr. Hooker, to whose kindness I, in a great measure, owe my success hitherto in life, and I feel exceedingly glad of an opportunity of recording a simple but sincere token of my kindest regard for him and respect for his profound talents.” [2]

His third and final trip started in England in October 1829. On that last journey he went first to the Columbia River, then to San Francisco, then in August 1832, to Hawaii. Douglas died under mysterious circumstances while climbing Mauna Kea in Hawaii at the age of 35 in 1834. He apparently fell into a pit trap where he was mauled to death by a bull.

Athelstan George Harvey [1884–1950] published a biography in 1947 [3].

After incorporation by English royal charter in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company was granted a right of “sole trade and commerce” over an expansive area of land known as Rupert’s Land, comprising much of the Hudson Bay drainage basin. [1]

The charter was conferred by Charles II on his “dear and entirely beloved Cousin, Prince Rupert,” and a group of associates incorporated as “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay.” With the charter the King gave a province named in honor of the cherished kinsman “Rupert’s Land.” The bounds of the province no man knew. The grant was described in the deed as embracing the lands and waters draining into Hudson Bay and Hudson Straits. That meant extension on the east nearly to the shores of Labrador; on the south to the northern watershed of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and the upper Missouri; on the west to the Rocky Mountain divide of the Saskatchewan River and the eastern divide of the Athabasca River, Great Slave Lake and Back’s River; and on the north to the line of the watershed of Hudson Straits. This immense territory was granted free from seignorial reservations; it was given to the Governor and Company to hold as “absolute lords and proprietors” in “free and common soccage.”

— Merk [2]

See also
James Knight, York Fort Journals,1717 [3]
Samuel Hearne, Journey to the Northern Ocean, 1772 [4]
George Simpson, Fur trade and empire, 1825 [5]
James McMillan, Portion of letter to William Connelly, 1825 [6]
Aborigines’ Protection Society, Canada West and the Hudson’s-Bay Company1856, [7]
Edward Ermatinger], York Factory Express Journal, 1828 [8]
Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada 1930 [9]
Ball, Georgina. “Monopoly system of wildlife management, ” 1985 [10]

From Merk’s introduction to Fur Trade and Empire:

Rupert’s Land under this charter was the proprietary colony of the Hudson’s Bay Company [1670–] and as such for two centuries it was held. But it was not held in peace. The gifts of the charter were challenged in England and abroad. France had claims to the territory as part of the province of New France; she had bestowed the region on one of her colonizing companies much before 167o and she was not disposed to give up her rights there without a struggle. This was one of the questions that was fought over in the long Anglo-French duel for mastery in the New World; and Rupert’s Land, or parts of it, changed hands repeatedly with the fortunes of war before its fate was finally determined in 1763 by the expulsion of France from the continent of North America.

But the removal of this foreign threat served only to stimulate domestic challenge to the charter. Almost from the beginning there had been question as to the charter’s validity on the ground that it emanated from royal authority without legislative ratification, and that it granted monopoly rights which, after the Statute of Monopolies of 1623, the crown could not legally bestow. It was argued also in later years that in 167o Rupert’s Land was not Charles Il’s to give, being then the soil of France, that England gained it first in 1763, when it came by conquest and unencumbered by Stuart gifts of monopoly. Supported by such arguments, free traders from England and Canada defied the exclusive privileges of the Hudson’s Bay Company and after 1763 did so with increasing determination and success.

Among the free traders who intruded on Rupert’s Land was a group which in 1787 united to form the North West Company of Montreal. This was a redoubtable organization, characterized on the one hand by the dash and aggressiveness of adventurers, and on the other by the stability and the foresight of men of money. Two classes of shareholders were in it: eastern partners, merchants of substance in Montreal and Quebec, who supplied the capital, and the so-called “wintering partners” who contributed the skill and experience which went into leadership in the field. Zeal on the part of employees was stimulated by holding out to promising young men brought into the service the prospect of promotion to the wintering-partner status. There were in the employ of the Company at one time not far from two thousand men clerks, voyageurs, laborers, interpreters, guides and various other functionaries of the trade. The Company had a route to the interior, less direct, to be sure, than the Hudson Bay passage but advantageous in other respects. This was the southern highway consisting of the broad St. Lawrence and the Ottawa to the Great Lakes, and the Rainy Lake passage thence to the waters of the Saskatchewan. At Montreal and at Fort William on the western shore of Lake Superior the Company had great warehouses assuring to interior posts regularity of supply. This was no mean antagonist for the great British chartered monopoly.

For fifteen years the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company clashed in the forests of Rupert’s Land. It was a bitter war in which each party wielded weapons of trade and of violence mercilessly in turn. Rival posts fought each other at close range; there was undercutting and overbidding; Indians were competitively plied with liquor; there was covert bargaining by each side with faithless employees of the other, and seizure and confiscation of each other’s supplies and furs. Such was the musketry of trade. From the arsenal of war were drawn raids, the levelling of each other’s trading posts, incitation of Indians and of half-breeds to violence, open fighting and secret stabbing and shooting in the shadows of the forest. Red River Colony, established in 18r under the aegis of the Hudson’s Bay Company, was in 1816 the scene of a pitched battle in which Governor Semple of the Hudson’s Bay Company Territories and twenty men fell before the fire of a party of half-breed retainers of the North West Company. Violence was succeeded after this “Battle of Seven Oaks” by a renewal of cut-throat competition and by litigation in the courts of Upper and Lower Canada.

The result of this war was complete disorganization of the northern fur trade. Prices paid to Indians for furs rose to levels which rendered profit out of the question. Ruin faced even the Indians who in competitive traffic were paid for furs in the currency of rum. Game was recklessly wasted. Furs reach prime condition only in the winter, but competition led to the trapping and hunting of pelts in all seasons, which meant not merely defective furs but extermination of the young with the full grown in the breeding season. Discipline among employees became lax; extravagance and waste crept into the conduct of the trade, a disease that spread even to the Oregon Country which lay outside the boundaries of Rupert’s Land and therefore beyond the immediate war zone. By 1820 the struggle had brought the two belligerents to the verge of bankruptcy and to the will to peace.

Peace came by way of a coalition agreement entered into in London in 1821. In the merger the Hudson’s Bay Company retained its identity; it took over the assets of the North West Company, evaluated like its own at €200,000, and to finance the consolidation doubled its outstanding stock. The charter and the ancient privileges of the Hudson’s Bay Company remained undisturbed. To the privileges a princely addition was made. The British government as a reward for the peace and as a means of preventing any future outbreak of war conferred upon the reorganized Company, under an act of Parliament of 1821, exclusive trading rights for twenty-one years in all that part of British North America lying between Rupert’s Land and the Rocky Mountains, and, in addition, the sole British trading rights in the whole of the Oregon Country. Thus the entire area which is now the Dominion of Canada excepting only the valley of the St. Lawrence and the maritime provinces was, after 1821, under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company, either as proprietor or as possessor of exclusive trading rights, and besides the Company held sole British rights of trade in all of what is now the Pacific Northwest of the United States. [1]

Thompson, a charity pupil at Grey Coat School, London, was apprenticed to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1784. He joined the North West Company [1779–1821]> as a surveyor in 1797. In 1811 he explored the length of Columbia River, making the first recorded crossing of the Continental Divide via the Athabasca Pass.

Thompson was a member of the British-American Boundary survey from 1815 to 1824. He died of poverty at Longuineil, Quebec, in 1857, age 87. He was never on any of the three Thompson Rivers.