Between 1801 and 1812, North West Company fur trader, explorer, and cartographer David Thompson established two viable trade routes across the Rocky Mountains in Canada and systematically surveyed the entire 1,250-mile course of the Columbia River. In succeeding years he distilled his mathematical notations from dozens of journal notebooks into the first accurate maps of a vast portion of the northwest quadrant of North America. The writings in those same journals reveal a complex man who was headstrong, curious, and resourceful in ways that reflected both his London education and his fur trade apprenticeship on the Canadian Shield.

In The Mapmaker's Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau, Jack Nisbet utilizes fresh research to convey how Thompson experienced the full sweep of human and natural history etched across the Columbia drainage. He places Thompson's movements within the larger contexts of the European Enlightenment, the British fur trade economy, and American expansion as represented by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Nisbet courses through journal notebooks to assemble and comment on the explorer's bird and mammal lists, his surprisingly detailed Salish vocabulary, the barrel organ music he and his crew listened to, and the woodworking techniques they used to keep themselves under shelter or on the move.

Visual elements bring Thompson's written daybooks to life. Watercolor landscapes and tribal portraits drawn by the first artists to travel along his trade routes illuminate what the explorer actually saw. Tribal and fur trade artifacts reveal intimate details of two cultures at the moment of contact. The Mapmaker's Eye also depicts the surveying instruments that Thompson utilized, and displays the series of remarkable maps that grew out of his patient, persistent years of work. In addition, Nisbet taps into oral memories kept by the Kootenai and Salish bands who guided the agent and his party along their way.

Starting in 1825, David Douglas made the first systematic collections of flora and fauna across many parts of the greater Pacific Northwest. Colleagues in Great Britain then attached his name to more than 80 different species, including the region's iconic timber tree. A colorfully illustrated essay collection, David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work examines various aspects of Douglas' meteoric career, demonstrating connections between his work and the Pacific Northwest of today. From the Columbia River's perilous bar to luminous mountain wildflower blooms; from ever-changing technology frontiers to the quiet seasonal rhythms of tribal families gathering roots, Nisbet's compositions collapse time to shed light on the area's people and landscapes. Originally published in conjunction with a major museum exhibit, this is the first paperback edition.

Equal parts biography, natural history, and travelogue, Jack Nisbet tells the story of David Douglas, the 19th century Scottish naturalist and botanical explorer--perfect for amateur naturalists and armchair historians of the Pacific Northwest

The Collector tracks Douglas's fascinating history, from his humble birth in Scotland in 1799 to his botanical training under the famed William Jackson Hooker, and details his adventures in North America discovering exotic new plants for the English and European market. Douglas's discoveries include hundreds of western plants--most notably the Douglas Fir.

The book takes readers along on Douglas's journeys into a literal brave new world of then-obscure realms from Puget Sound to the Sandwich Islands.

In telling Douglas's story, Nisbet evokes a lost world of early exploration, pristine nature, ambition, and cultural and class conflict with surprisingly modern resonances. Bookmarks Magazine

An exhilarating biography that provides an entertaining portrait of the unfettered determination that drove one of the giants in the field of botanical exploration and infused the young nation he viewed with a keen and zealous spirit. Booklist

The awe-inspiring story of explorer David Thompson, whose expeditions helped shape western North America

In this true story of adventure, author Jack Nisbet re-creates the life and times of David Thompson--fur trader, explorer, surveyor, and mapmaker. From 1784 to 1812, Thompson explored western North America, and his field journals provide the earliest written accounts of the natural history and indigenous cultures of the what is now British Columbia, Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Thompson was the first person to chart the entire route of the Columbia river, and his wilderness expeditions have become the stuff of legend.

Jack Nisbet tracks the explorer across the content, interweaving his own observations with Thompson's historical writings. The result is a fascinating story of two men discovering the Northwest territory almost two hundred years apart.

How can you know a place? Historian and naturalist Jack Nisbet--author of Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America--looks to the relics of a region to connect the present moment to the distant past. In the vast Western territory defined by the Columbia River, Nisbet tracks the stories and meaning of relics such as a trilobite fossil that points to a tropical prehistoric ecology; the nearly extinct California condor, once the largest thing in the skies, described with amazement by Meriwether Lewis; the indelible stain of the smallpox pandemic that overcame the native peoples of the West; a rare and socially potent strain of indigenous wild tobacco that reveals the presence of vestigial Indian practices; and the remains of one Jaco Finlay, a mixed-blood trapper and scout who seems to have been everywhere in the region two hundred years ago. All of these relics are the visible bones that show how past is present in the Columbia River Country. Together the stories these bones tell lays out a wholly original, hybrid history that connects nature with human endeavor, geography with the passage of time--all contribute to the biography of a place. The arrow of time travels in one direction, and this is usually how history is told: beginning to end. But Jack Nisbet is up to something else: journeys across time through a place, knitting past to present and back again to assemble a portrait of the land that marked the culmination of Lewis & Clark's expedition, that saw the sad end of the Indian Wars with the flight of Chief Joseph, that has offered up fossil proof of mammoth species long extinct. In this western territory, the storied past is much in evidence.

When a mining claim on a crumbling cliff of burnt-rose quartzite lured naturalist Jack Nisbet to the northeastern corner of Washington State in 1970, he began a search for an understanding of that open country through stories about the people who lived there and the everyday events he shared with them. Together, these vivid, engaging, and subtly humorous stories evoke the essence of this place.

Watch the book trailer: https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lwlNisTUyk

From a master of regional and natural history comes a collection of essays that reveals how the Pacific Northwest shaped the people--and how the people shaped the land

Drawing on a range of personal research, author Jack Nisbet engages some of the iconic images in Northwest history: from fossil riches to ice age floods; from the Willamette Meteorite to the 1872 Earthquake; from up-and-down mining cycles to steady rounds of tribal food gathering. Although the scale of time and space in some of the pieces is immense, individual characters still manage to leave their marks; even though the force of modern civilization sometimes seems overwhelming, small places and their key components somehow persevere.

These are the genesis stories of a region. In Ancient Places, Jack Nisbet uncovers touchstones across the Pacific Northwest that reveal the symbiotic relationship of people and place in this corner of the world.

In the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Northwest, the lives and passions of an American physician and her Swedish naturalist husband helped shape a territory on the cusp of change--from the author of Sources of the River and The Collector.

Dr. Carrie Leiberg, a pioneer physician, fought hard for public health while nurturing both a troubled son and a fruit orchard. Her husband, John Leiberg, was a Swedish immigrant and self-taught naturalist who transformed himself from pickax Idaho prospector to special field agent for the US Forest Commission and warned Washington DC of ecological devastation of public lands. The Leiberg story opens a window into the human and natural landscape of a century past that reflects all the thorny issues of our present time.