David Thompson's quest for mammoths transcended the living and the fossil realm. He looked, in vain, in stream banks throughout the west for fossil bones and tusks and then was challenged by the possibility of meeting a living mammoth in a pass through the Rockies

A tusk, third molar and large bone of a mammoth from the Yukon Territory. Tusk is over 1.1 m across curvature. University of Alberta Collections. (Photo by BDEC (c).)

The scientific and systematic search for fossils in Canada started in 1797 when the celebrated geographer and cartographer David Thompson quit the Hudson's Bay Company to go to work for the North West Company. Among the explicit instructions he received from his new bosses was a most unusual one that had nothing to do with surveying or map making or with the fur trade. They requested that, "in the interests of science and history he was to look for the fossils of large animals, and any monuments". No written record exists that explains the rationale for this remarkable directive, but it might have been "in the interests of commerce", alluding to mammoth ivory which was already the object of a lucrative trade in Siberia.

For the next dozen years Thompson looked for fossils during his travels through the western interior but, "all my enquiries led to nothing. Over a great extent of these Plains not a vestige [of fossils] could be found, nor in the banks of the many Rivers I have examined".

If a search for the fossil remains of mammoths was a reasonable undertaking, then a search for living mammoths was, for that time, equally credible. Extinction was considered a radical notion and it was widely believed by naturalists that animals considered "extinct" would be found living in unexplored corners of the world -- including the North American west. Living mammoths were certainly on the mind of the Nor'Westers in 1811 when David Thompson led twelve men with eight dogsleds and four horses across the Athabasca Pass in the dead of winter to reach the Columbia River on his way to the Pacific. He and his men were startled to see a set of large tracks in the snow. Thompson thought that the track belonged to a large grizzly bear, but his hunters had a different idea, "Strange to say, here is a strong belief that haunt of the Mammoth is about this defile. I questioned several, none could positively say they had seen him, but their belief I found firm and not to be shaken".

It was not until the late 1840s, when David Thompson had long left for the east, that the first mammoth bones were discovered in western Canada. Robert Campbell, the Chief Factor for the HBC in the Yukon, discovered a complete elephant skeleton in frozen muck near Fort Selkirk at the confluence of the Yukon and Pelly rivers. A leg bone was sent to the British Museum. It was identified as Mammuthus primigenius, the wooly mammoth.

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