For a country with a perpetual identity crisis, geography is the one great unifier. Politicians can pander to the regions and our non-stop election fervour feeds the sense of divisiveness, but as long as there are maps, there's still a Canada.

Which surely makes David Thompson (1770-1857) one of the country's great nation-builders: As a fur trader, writer and cartographer who methodically covered more than 90,000 kilometres of the western half of the continent by canoe, sled and foot, he played a pioneering role in shaping all this unbounded immensity.

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