Writer Wallace Stegner once claimed that exploration of the West by European-Americans began with Lewis and Clark and ended with Almon Thompson.
Though Lewis and Clark are household names, who was Almon Thompson?
A trained geologist, entomologist, and geographer, Thompson was also the brother-in-law of famed Major John Wesley Powell. During Powell’s second exploration of the Colorado River watershed from 1871 to 1874, Thompson found himself second in command, because Powell was away a good deal of that time.
He’s credited with modern discovery of Utah’s Escalante River and first charting of the Henry Mountains, the last major waterway and mountain range to be named in the Lower Forty-Eight.
Along with naming many features on the Colorado Plateau, and threading a maze of other rivers, canyons, and mountains, Thompson created the area’s first detailed maps.
Thompson went on to become a mapmaker for the U.S. Geological Survey on projects throughout the West, and was also one of the founders of the National Geographic Society.
But why has Almon Thompson been largely overlooked? Fellow expedition member Frederick Dellenbaugh wrote that while he was responsible for much of the success of Powell’s surveys, his contributions were seldom credited by Powell.
Rather than a publicity seeker, Thompson was—as one historian put it—simply “a man who liked to get things done.”
