Jack Nisbet served as a consultant to a David Thompson exhibit at Spokane's Northwest Museum of Art and Culture that opened on October 8, 2005 to present Thompson's journals, maps, and mountain sketches, field sketches by artists Paul Kane and Henry James Warre, surveying instruments from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as Plateau Indian and fur trade artifacts. As a Spokane history teacher, Nisbet has published two books on Thompson as well as Visible Bones about the prehistory of the area between the Cascades and the northern Rockies as defined by the Columbia River. It also investigates evidence of a smallpox pandemic that decimated Aboriginals and the 200-year-old remains of trapper and scout Jaco Finlay. Born in 1949, Nisbet was raised in North Carolina and moved to eastern Washington after graduating from Stanford University in 1971. His books have won numerous awards.

Author of:

Nisbet, Jack. Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America (Seattle: Sasquatch, 1994)

Nisbet, Jack. Visible Bones: Journeys Across Time in the Columbia River Country (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2003).

Nisbet, Jack. The Mapmaker's Eye: David Thompson on the Columbia Plateau (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 2005).

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work: An Illustrated Exploration across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest
The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest
The Mapmaker's Eye: Douglas Thompson on the Columbia Plateau


[BCBW 2005] "Forts and Fur"