Thus did the old man endeavour to arm British statesmanship for the diplomatic contests which he foresaw were inevitable; but his efforts bore little or no fruit. On the part of Great Britain, conciliatory motives continued to prevail; and within a few years, Thompson had the mortification of seeing even the Oregon territory (that is, all the fine country south of 49° north latitude which he himself had discovered) lost to the Empire. It is not surprising that he fumed at British diplomats in general, and in particular at "the stupidity of that blockhead Lord Ashburton." There is little more to record in the life of David Thompson. Presently, his eyesight failed, and he suffered the misery of a destitute old age. One by one his possessions fell into the hands of money-lenders. So poor did he become that he was forced to part with his precious instruments, and even to pawn his coat in order to buy a little food. A late entry of his diary reads, "This day borrowed 2/6 from a friend. Thank God for this relief." On the 10th of February, 1857, the long ordeal was ended and Thompson passed away in the eighty-seventh year of his age. He was buried in Mount Royal cemetery without even a stone to mark his grave. For a long while after the death of Thompson, it seemed as though the memory of his achievements had perished with him. But of recent years his fame, so nearly eclipsed, has shone with renewed brilliance, and it is now possible to estimate in some degree the greatness of his character and the magnitude of his work. In the sheer length of his journeys, few western explorers have equalled the record of Thompson, for he travelled in all not less than fifty thousand miles. Much of this was through country untrodden by the feet of white men; nearly all of it was in regions as yet unsurveyed. The unvarying exactitude with which Thompson mapped this vast area excited the surprise and admiration of members of the Canadian Geological Survey who with infinitely better equipment traced his progresses nearly a century later. There are certain districts which since his day have never been re-surveyed; some of his work therefore still appears on the published maps of Canada. Throughout his life Thompson was inspired by a restless impulse to push forward the exploration and mapping of the west until not a corner of it remained unknown. The greatest satisfaction of his career was undoubtedly the discovering of the Columbia valley. West of the Rockies, he was not merely a surveyor and explorer, but in a real sense an Empire builder, for he added a region of vast and varied resources to the territories of the Crown.