North Idaho through history’s eyes

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

In collaboration with The Bonner County History Museum, celebrated naturalist and writer Jack Nisbet will give a presentation on fur trader, surveyor and cartographer David Thompson at the Heartwood Center (615 Oak St., in Sandpoint) on Sunday, Sept. 15 at 4 p.m. The talk will cover Thompson’s journeys around North Idaho, as well as the human and natural history he documented.

“My mother and grandmother introduced me to natural history at a young age. I try to maintain that child-like sense of curiosity and adventure every day,” Nisbet told the Reader.

His work focuses on the “landscape and people of the Intermountain West.” For this presentation, he specifically honed in on historic field journals, letters, oral accounts and watercolors depicting local trails from the 1840s and ’50s. 

Attendees can enjoy a glass of wine as they explore the strange-yet-familiar landscape of the past, from flora and fauna to geological and climate studies.

“Since David Thompson was the first person to write about and map large swaths of this region, I keep returning to his journals as both a benchmark and as a window into the past, present and future of the place where we live,” said Nisbet.

“The fact that so many of Thompson’s fur trade crew remained in this area and married into tribal families means that there is a continuous stream of oral knowledge to compare with written accounts stretching from his time to ours,” he added. “Every ripple in this stream offers a chance to better understand how we fit into the larger world.”

Tickets are $15 for adults and $5 for youth, available at bonner-county-history-museum.square.site. For more information, visit jacknisbet.com and bonnercountyhistory.org.