10/10/2026
The woman who helped map Canada, and was left out of the story for 150 years
Most Canadians know the name David Thompson, the man who mapped a fifth of North America.
Far fewer know the woman who travelled beside him.
Her name was Charlotte Small.
She was born in 1785 at Île-à-la-Crosse, in what is now Saskatchewan, to a Cree mother and a Scottish fur trader. Her father left for Britain when she was a small child and never came back. She was raised by her mother among the Cree.
In 1799, aged just 13, she married Thompson. For the next 13 years she lived the fur trade life with him, moving between posts across what are now Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia.
She travelled by canoe, on horseback and on foot. Estimates of the distance range from 20,000 to more than 40,000 kilometres. By any count, that is farther than Lewis and Clark.
And she did much of it with small children.
In 1807 she crossed the Rocky Mountains through Howse Pass with three little ones, the youngest only about a year old. Thompson's journal describes men clinging to the horses' manes to cross a raging mountain river. Charlotte made those same crossings with the children.
She spoke Cree and English, and Thompson himself wrote that her language and her ties to the Cree gave him a great advantage in his work.
Then came the part that set them apart.
When fur traders retired, many simply abandoned their Indigenous wives and children. Thompson did not. In 1812 he brought Charlotte and the children east, and they married again in a Montreal church.
Life in the East was not kind. Two of their children died soon after the move. Thompson's businesses later failed, and the man who mapped half a continent pawned his instruments, and once even his coat, to survive. He went blind in his final years.
Through all of it, they stayed together. Nearly 58 years of marriage and 13 children.
David Thompson died in February 1857. Charlotte followed him less than three months later. They are buried together in Montreal's Mount Royal Cemetery, in a grave that sat unmarked for 70 years.
For generations, history remembered him and forgot her. No portrait of her exists. She left no diary.
It took until 2008 for Canada to name Charlotte Small a National Historic Person. Today a statue of her stands at Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, and another of the two of them at Invermere, B.C.
She represents thousands of Indigenous and Métis women whose knowledge, languages and survival skills made the exploration of this country possible, and whose names were never written down.
