[4] Birth records do not exist for that time period in Kansas and Thompson often gave misleading birthdates and places and the name of his father on official documents like passport applications.

Poet Esther M. Clark was his neighbor in those days and published an article in the local newspaper (Coffeyville Journal of May, 18, 1918), debunking Thompson's self-promoted background from Topeka.

[10] Thompson dabbled as a freelance photographer for the Topeka Daily Capital and made some notes and took some photos of the Kansas River flooding in 1903.

[12] By late 1911, he began working as a correspondent for The Washington Herald[13] and covered the 1912 Democratic Convention in Baltimore and the 1913 Colorado miners’ strike.

[14] When World War I broke out in Europe, Thompson was commissioned by the Montreal newspaper, Cartier Centenary, to film Canadian troops.

Thompson’s footage was released by the Chicago Tribune as a feature-length film, With the Russians at the Front, in August 1915.

He found being a photographer exciting work, and it appears he thoroughly enjoyed the deception he often used to film the scenes he wanted to capture.

[22] In late 1916 Leslie’s Weekly sent Thompson and journalist Florence MacLeod Harper to Petrograd to cover the Russian front.

Thompson and Harper had a unique opportunity to witness the disintegration of Russia into chaos from February until August 1917.

[25][26] Thompson and his wife returned to Russia in 1918-19 and photographed the activities of the American Red Cross during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.

[28] Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Thompson worked as a freelancer, selling topical films and travelogues in many places such as Mongolia, Borneo, China and the Philippines.

[29][30] Thompson and his wife, Dorothy, joined writer and adventurer Gertrude Emerson on a world journey in 1920.

He was living with his fourth wife, Jennie O. Johnstun, in the 1940s in Hollywood but it appears they were divorced at the time of Thompson's death.

War As It Really Is (1916)[20][21] The German Curse in Russia (1918)– reconstruction, 2017 Blood Stained Russia (a selection of pictures reproduced from the 1918 book) Pictures from Thompson's book The Crime of the Twentieth Century (1918) Movie Trailer "American Cinematographers in the Great War, 1914-1918" Cooper C. Graham, Use of the Internet in Tracing the Mysterious Donald C. Thompson (paper prepared for IAMHIST Conference, 2015) Weblog on the American Films and Cinematographers of World War I, 2013-2018 Van Dopperen, Ron, "Shooting the Siege of Antwerp", World War One Illustrated, (Spring 2024), 23-29 Donald C. Thompson at IMDb