Paul Kane's Journal of his Western Travels, 1846-1848 - History and ...

Volume XXI • Number 2 • 1989

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OURNAL

THE AMERICAN ART 

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'"AUI KANI .• IM/f PholoKmph. Collection, Mrs. Paul Kane III. /1w .'illirt tht' art;",t,:" wellrinl? is probably Blackfoot, collected on 

hi., IH46 IH411 tfip.

I 

rite this part of my jurnal over a biasing fire on the shore of Lake Winapeg whare 

I have campt for the night," records Paul Kane on June 11, 1846. The first 

professional artist to travel the northern fur-trade route from the Great Lakes to the 

Pacific Ocean, Kane endured almost unbelievable hardships, experienced 

extraordinary adventures, and witnessed astounding scenery. He also painted some 

remarkably telling portraits of the Native Americans he encountered and whose 

respect he earned. 

For two years, through snow and ice, rocks and rapids, searing heat and soaking 

rains, Paul Kane managed to keep ajournal. It survived, along with many of his 

sketches, in the artist's family and is now one of the treasures of the Stark Museum of 

Art, Orange, Texas. Those readers who know Kane through the book Wanderings of 

an Artist (1859) will find that his actual journal, which is being published here for the 

first time and in its original form, differs significantly from Wanderings in many 

respects. What appears in the following pages is entirely Kane's own story, a vivid 

eyewitness account, reproduced as exactly as possible to the way he wrote it, line for 

line, eccentric spellings and all. 

The artist tells his experiences with humanity, simplicity, and humor. Some 

passages, in their frighteningly real descriptions of the extreme cold, bring to mind 

thoughts of Jack London. Other sections remind one of Mark Twain. On July 14, 

1847, Kane writes: "left at 5 this morning for the river Nepersey and arrived at 12 a 

distance of30 m. no water all day. a good plase for a persion with the Hidrofoba this." 

On November 18, a day after having fallen through ice and nearly drowning in the 

strong current, the artist discovers that his dog has gnawed its cord and deserted him 

in the night. Kane remarks wryly, with a sentiment we all know well, '"missfortians 

never com single." 

Just as Paul Kane's journey took him back and forth over the boundary of what 

was to become the United States and Canada, so, too, has this special issue of THE 

AMERICAN ART JOURNAL crossed international borders. It was at the 1987 meeting of 

the American Studies Association, held in New York, the first joint conference with 

the Canadian Association for American Studies, that I met Ian MacLaren of 

Edmonton, Alberta, and learned of his fascinating work on Paul Kane, an artist of just 

as much interest to Americans as he is to Canadians. Once upon a time, before the 

great interior of the continent had been mapped and the dotted lines had been put 

down, Native Americans could pursue their lives relatively unencumbered by 

artificial boundaries. Now, at long last, such lines on a chart and the obstacles they 

have created are less and less of an impediment to those who study and publish the 

culture of North America. 

We are deeply grateful to Nelda C. Stark for kindly granting permission to 

publish Paul Kane's journal in its entirety and to the staff of the Stark Museum of Art 

for their extraordinary help and cooperation, so cheerfully given. 

J. T.

Volume XXI • Number 2 • 1989 

CONTENTS 

"I came to rite thare portraits": Paul Kane's Journal of his Western Travels, 1846-1848 

Byl.S.Macwren .................................... , ................ , ..... . ........ 6 

Journal of Paul Kane's Western Travels 

Transcribed by I.S. MacLaren ......................................................... 23 

Glossary of Common Words 

By I.S. MacLaren ................................................................... 63 

Guide to People and Places in Kane's J oumal 

By I.S. MaclAren ...... ... .......................................................... 66 

Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 88 

Acknowledg:rnents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .. 89 

Index ...................................................................................... 90 

ON TIlE FRONT COVER: 

Medicine Pipe-stem Dance (Black/oot) by Paul Kane (see page 59). 

ON THE BACK COVER: 

First Night on the Prairies by Paul Kane (see page 9).

Paul Kane. CLACKAMAINDIANS, WILl.AME"ITE VALLEY. February, 1847. Oil on paper, 1l1/2x9 J /a". CoLLection , Stark Museum of Art. 

Orange, Texas.

III CAME TO RITE THARE PORTRAITS": 

Paul Kane's Journal of his Western Travels, 1846-1848 

I. S. MacLaren 

PAU KAN (1810-1871), born in Ireland and reared 

in Toronto, lived an exotic life for two and a half 

years in the 18405. ike very few other people, he 

managed to ecure for himself passage with the Hud· 

son's Bay Company when that fur trade monopoly, 

the earliest transcontinental corporation in North 

America, was enjoying the height of its power. From 

the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean and back again 

Kane traveled - by canoe, horse, snowshoe and 

sled - with company brigades of Scottish-bom fur 

trade factors and voyageurs, both French Canadian 

and Native American. He passed through the tenitories 

of nearly eighty Indian tribes during the age 

when smallpox and tuberculosis were decimating their 

populations and before they were overrun by white 

settlement. Condition in the we tern wilderness made 

Kane's travels arduous indeed: from desperate heat in 

the lower Columbia River valley, where a dog he had 

with him virtually burned up, to frigid cold in the 

Canadian Rockies, where, traveling by snowshoe, his 

feet were cut by the large cakes of ice that would fonn 

every day in his moccasins. 

Somehow, among these travails, Kane ketched 

and painted. Indeed, by the time he returned to Toronto 

in October, 1848, his trunk carried more than 

500 sketches. Over the next two decades, he produced 

from them more than 100 canvases and secured a name 

for himself, not only as early Canada's foremo t painter 

of the West, but also as an authority - cited in 

works of ethnology, such as Prehistoric Man (1862), by 

Daniel Wilson - on the cultures' of those Indian tribes 

inhabiting both British North America's westernmost 

I. S. MACLAREN , Associate Professor in the Department of 

English at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. A1berta, 

Canada, is presently preparing a book on Paul Kane's journal 

and paintings. He has lectured and written widely on the 

literature and art of Arctic and Western exploration and 

travel, including several articles on Sir John Franklin. the 

British Arctic explorer who perished in search of a North 

West Passage in 1845. Formerly editor of the Western 

Canadianu Newsletter, Dr. MacLaren will be publishing an 

essay on the paintings and poetry of Sir George Back (1796- 

1878), an artist-officer on Sir John Franklin's first expedition, 

to be published in coUaboration with C. Stuart Houston 

by McGilJ-Queen's University Press in 1990. 

The American Art Journal/Volume XXI • Number 2 

reache and the newly de ignated Oregon Territory. 

The prose account of th travel i here published ~ r 

the first time. I 

A painter was an exotic figure to the alive 

American of the 18405 - powerful, magical, gifted, 

mysterious, sini ter. While the other members of the 

brigade went about their duties at an evening's camp 

or at a fur trade po t, Kane could follow wherever 

curio ity led: into a "medicine man's" (shaman's) 

lodge where he saw a power bundle, out to a • buffalo 

pound" , 2 or along the river bank lakeshore or ocean 

beach, inquiring into native lives, customs, worldly 

posse sion ,rumors of dark deed ,and tale of everyday 

events. He Ii tened and he pamted. In the word 

of hi own journal, words that he borrows from the 

Saulteaux' idiom 3 he wanted to rite thare portraits 

(the way they express them self ).' Soon Kane came 

to be known, and refers to himself as a' grate medison 

man, " capturing in two dimensions the pirit ofa 

person or place. Little wonder that this talent aligned 

him with this office of Indian life. Among Indians, the 

mysteries of a medicine man commanded respect, 

and sometimes fear. The practice of a Cowichan 

medicine man near Puget Sound seems in Kane' 

words perilous enough for the patient: 'he made a 

spring at the young woman and cetching her ide with 

his teath and shakeing her as I have en one dog 

shake an other he then let go and sade he had got it [the 

disease]." Doubtless Kane's methods differed somewhat, 

and catching the essence of his subject was not 

quite like catching his or her disease yet to judge 

from his remarkable Indian portraits, he too got what 

he set out to catch. Although some Indians wary of 

Kane's magical talents, feared that he would steal 

their power or cast a speU on them if they were painted 

some saw it as a chal1enge to be met bravely and agreed 

to sit. Others posed defiantly or refused to have their 

portraits made at aU. Stil1 others clearly felt no threat 

whatsoever and greeted the opportunity with alacrity, 

taking pleasure in being painted or sketched. 

Kane was an accomplished landscape painter as 

well: his depictions of one of the last great semi-annual 

buffalo hunts by the Metis (French Canadian and 

Native American peoples of mixed blood) on the plains 

7

ngman 

of North Dakota and outhem Manitoba capture the 

impre ive event in the wide-open prairie. ven 0, 

hi ' range of vi uaJ art does not entirely repre ent 

Kane s talent. The journaJ of hi trip pre ent an 

understated, droll chal~acter who had taken the measure 

of the world and could view it with both curio ity 

and equanimity in a tone of dry, laconic wit. With 

characteristic self-effacement, he writes that he is 

known by his French-speaking traveling companion 

a ' .. Bushway" 4; certainly he was the colorful type 

who attracts nicknames, and perhaps the type who 

can both play and take a joke. On the buffalo hunt, 

after forgetting to load his gun at the first opportunity 

for a kill, he wounds a bull on the second. but as he 

describes the events, he too pays a price, albeit not 

the price paid by the bull. Laying his gun on the 

pommel of his saddle, he takes up his sketchbook to 

draw the bull while its wounds have left it stunned, 

though still standing: -but then "the Bull made a furious 

charge on me[.] I let go gun [ ]cetch b[ 0 ]ok and 

aD, " managing to fire a few more rounds into him. 

These, he dryly puts it, 'stoped him[;] he tud long 

anph [enough] for me to take a [s]cetch and [then he] 

fe1e [fell]. " Such are the perils and rewards of painting 

en plein air. 

As the late Russen Harper, the eminent historian 

of Kane's art, has stated, Paul Kane was the son of 

Michael Kane, an English career soldier with the 

Royal Horse Artillery, and Frances Loach, a young 

woman whom he had apparently known in every sense 

during his posting in County Cork, Ireland. The Kanes 

emigrated from Ireland to York (which became Toronto 

in 1834), Upper Canada, in 1819 when Paul was 

eight or nine years old; there, Michael Kane set up 

shop as a. wine merchant. S And there Kane grew up. 

According to Maude Allan Cassells, the daughter of 

George William AJJan - who would become Kane's 

patron in the 1850s - Kane was sent at an early age 

to learn "carpentering" in the employ of a fumirure 

maker. Cassells conjectures that such work must have 

gained Kane entrance to the houses of the town, and 

thus, access to the few examples of European painting 

then in existence in the parlors of "muddy York."6 

What is clear is that Kane taught himself painting, 

showing more interest and aptitude in it than in such 

school subjects as composition. Years later. he wrote 

his western journal phonetically, dictated his letters, 

and had his wife write the fair copy of the manuscript 

of his book about those travels. 7 In 1847. Mary 

Richardson Walker, the wife of a missionary in Oregon, 

judged Kane '"a clever artist but an ungodly man, 

of not much learning. " 8 

Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of 

8 

North America from Canada to Vancouver' lland 

and Oregon through The Hudson's Bay Company's 

Territory and Back Again w as in trom ntal as th 

painting in preading the fame of Paul Kane throughout 

the Eogli h- peaking world, and to urope as 

well. Issued by the nglish publisher I 

Brown, Green ngmans & Robert in March 1859 

it was the first book on the ubject of all the lands 

northwest of the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean that 

was not written by an employee of the fur trade. For 

thi reason - the Hud on Bay Company was in the 

news that year because it still . oUght a renewal for i 

exclusive right to trade in those vast lands' - and for 

others, Kane's book old particularly well enjoying 

tran lations into French (Paris, 1861) German 

(Leipzig, 1862), and Danish (Copenhagen 1863 . 

The idea for the book, like the idea for the travel 

them elves probably came to Kane from George Catlin 

(1796- ]872), the celebrated American painter 

whom Kane met in England. 10 After fifteen years in 

York and nearby Coburg Kane went to the ruted 

States in 1836. For five years he worked as a portrait 

painter (first in Detroit where he probably met John 

Mix Stanley [1814-1872], who would become another 

renowned painter of Native Americans and of the 

Oregon Territory ll), and in Mobile, Alabama. Little is 

known of his life or artistic development in these 

years, but presumably he was earning enough to get 

by, for he sailed to Europe from ew Orleans in June 

1841. Following periods of study in Rome and aple 

Kane spent the winter of 1842-1843 in London. There 

he met Catlin and saw Catlin s art. The American s 

famous exhibition of Indian paintings, the product of 

six years (1830-1836) spent on the American plains 

and in the foothills of the Rockies, was on display in 

the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in early 1843. By that 

time, Catlin had also published hi best-selling OOok 

Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and 

Conditions of the North American Indians (1841) in 

London, and had reached the apogee of the fame that 

he would enjoy for such a short period during his 

lifetime. 

Not only did Catlin's paintings and book inspire 

Kane but so too it seems, did other aspects of the 

American's career. Besides trying to organize a westward 

trip as soon as he returned to North America in 

1843. Kane followed Catlin in his attempts to bring 

notice to his work. As Catlin. though oot successfully 

had urged his art on the American Congress so Kane 

endeavored, successfully to gain a commission: a 

dozen oil paintings to what was known as the Parliament 

of Canada in 1856,12 and one hundred to a newly 

found patron, George William Allan, of Toronto. 13 As 

MacLaren/ Kane

Paul Kane. FIRST NIGHT ON THE PRAIRIES. June 18, 1846. Oil on paper, 8'/ax /31/8". Collection, Stark Museum of Art, Orange, 

Texas. The man seated on the right is probably the artist. 

Catlin had exhibited abroad, 0 would Kane, although 

not in an individual exhibition: hi paintings were 

prominently featured in the Canadian display at the 

Exposition UniverseHe held in Paris in 1855. Andjust 

as Catlin had used his published account to attract 

interest in his art, so Kane, hitherto only a desultory 

journal writer, detennined on publishing a written 

record of his travels. That it took him more than a 

decade to publish the book is part of its intriguing 

history; moreover, Kane was far from having it ready 

in time for the exhibition at the Parisian fair. 

After that winter spent in London and meeting 

Catlin, Kane returned to Toronto. By the spring of 

1845, he had made his own arrangements for a trip 

west, and in fact managed an extensive tour of Georgian 

Bay in Lake Huron, Sault Sainte Marie, Lake 

Michigan, Green Bay, and the Fox River. The first 

two chapters of Wanderings of an Artist narrate the 

events of this trip. Kane carried out a plan to visit any 

locale where Native American tribes - Ojibwa, Ottawa, 

Menominee, Wyandot, and Potawatomi- 


were known to congregate during the summer 

months, and to paint the principal ·chiefs. His pattern 

for work, one that he maintained on his transcontinental 

trip, was established during this first summer, 

as Harper has shown: 

Sketching materials were light and compact. Some 

of his books for pencil and water colour studies are no 

more than ten inches across; a larger one, 10 by 14 inches, 

with marbled cover, contains Whatman paper watermarked 

1843. Reference sketches are in pencil; portraits 

and landscapes in water colour are fresh, direct drawings. 

For more important works he canied oiled paper 

(possibly prepared pages from the larger sketchbook) on 

which he sketched using oil paints .... Many of Kane's 

oil sketches were taken from life. Preliminary studies in 

water colour exist for others, and presumably he transcribed 

them into oil at the first available moment while 

the immediate mood was still upon him. 14 

His pattern for work had been set, but the same 

could not be said for his itinerary, haphazard as it was. 

The most important event of the 1845 trip was Kane's 

meeting with John Ballenden, the Hudson's Bay 

9

Paul Kane. FALLS ON THE UPPER PELOUSE RIVER. July 14,1847. Oil on paper, 8 1 /8x 131/8". Collection, Stark MuseumoJArt. 

Company factor posted at Sault Sainte Marie, the 

gateway to the hinterland. Not only was he impressed 

with Kane's paintings, but also he was aroused by 

Kane's report that Angus Bethune, a retired fur trader 

from the North West Company, which had undeI"gone 

a bitter merger with the Hudson's Bay Company in 

1821, had discouraged Kane from hoping to obtain 

any assistance whatsoever from the officials of the 

Hudson's Bay Company. On October 29 J 1845, at the 

end of Kane's sununer trip, Ballenden wrote to his 

superior, Sir George Simpson, the inland governor of 

the company, urging him to engage his services. The 

governor demurred, demanding to know, in the year 

when the Hudson's Bay Company was still urging the 

British government to press its claim to the Oregon 

Territory, whether Kane was a British subject, and 

waiting while men of higher standing, such as the 

British anny officer, J. H. Lefroy, sent him character 

references of Kane. Another painter was not entirely 

necessary: just that year, Henry James WaITe (18]9- 

1898) had traveled west under the auspices of the 

company. Under the guise of an English sportsman 

10 

and landscape enthusiast with artistic ability, Lieutenant 

Warre had the primary purpose of investigating 

the Oregon dispute on behalf of the Britisb government. 

He painted en route lS but his military espionage 

went for naught: on June 16, 1846, while Warre was 

still on the Pacific Coast, the Oregon Treaty was 

signed, thereby yielding to the United States lands to 

which, in Simpson's opinion the Hudson's Bay Company 

had primary claim, that is, all of present--day 

Washington and Oregon states, with the Snake River 

district thrown in. This tenitorial dispute had been 

occupying Simpson inordinately; matters of less moment 

had to await his attention. In the end, and only 

after Kane had proved to him that he could endure 

travel in the wilderness with a brigade of traders, 

Simpson relented. As Harper has explained: 

Sir George Simpson wrote Kane' s final letter of 

authorization only after reaching Rainy River in northern 

Ontario on May 31, 1846. Simpson and Kane bad been 

travelling west from Toronto at the same time, and Sir 

George had had an opportunity to gauge the artist' fierce 

detennination. Left behind at Mackinac when he missed 

MacLaren! Kane

Paul Kane. A WINTER SCENE IN THE ROCKIES. November 6, 1846. Waterco[or onpaper, 5/4 x 9". Collection, Stark Museum of Art. 

the steamboat, Kane had gone to fantastic lengths to 

overtake Simpson. He set a new and amazing local record 

for speed by setting off in a skiff with three boys, the 

eldest an eighteen-year-old stripling, and covering 90 

miles of lake and river in less than 24 hours. He had 

caught up with the amazed Sir George at Sault Ste. 

Marie. At Fort Frances [on Rainy Lake, at the Minnesota 

- Ontario border] Simpson wrote a circular letter to aU 

Hudson's Bay Company officers in "Ruperts Land and 

Elsewhere," directing that the artist be given free transportation 

of company boats and "hospitalities" at aU 

posts. Kane, a guest of the Hudson's Bay Company. 

could go without cost anywhere within the vast territories 

it controlled. 16 

That frantic nighttime traverse from Mackinac to the 

Sault begins the journal published here. Kane was off 

and running with the brigades of the Hudson's Bay 

Company. 

Two and a half years of wilderness travel brought 

Kane back to Toronto in October, 1848. He had accomplished 

the first stages of his Catlin-like project. 

Now carne the time to produce the studio oils and the 

book-length manuscript. Surviving correspondence 


shows that within a week of his return he had dictated 

and sent Simpson a letter about the possibilities of an 

illustrated publication. The governor answered with 

several suggestions. Whether he knew that Kane could 

write only phonetically is unclear, for he went ahead 

with recommendations of people whom Kane might 

contact and works that he might read. Perhaps Simpson 

assumed that Kane would use the services of a 

ghost-writer. Afterall, the practice was widespread in 

the travel writing of the period, 17 and Simpson, aquite 

literate man, had himself hired ghost-writers for his 

own recently published book, Narrative of a Journey 

round the World during the Years 1841 and 1842 

(1847). 18 One cannot, in any case, help but infer that 

Kane had the help of others: although it is true as 

Harper remarks, that Kane's "journal contains much 

of what is now in Wanderings of an Artist " 19 the 

tone, the style, the degree of sophistication of the 

narrator's persona, the chapter divisions - indeed 

everything but the facts - differ very much indeed. 

Even the structure diverges significantly from the 

II

PAUL KANE. c. 1859. Photograph. Collection, Mrs. Paul Kane Ill.

publication, for Kane kept two narratives: one a journal 

of travels, and the other a record, occasionally 

extensively annotated, of the Indians and landscapes 

that he painted. These are blended together in the 

published book. The discrepancy is so great as to give 

one very good reason to think that Kane had had help. 

It lay well within his own talents to transform his 

field sketches into oil paintings suitable for the art 

market of the day, but the same could not be said for 

his capacity to transform an unedited field journal into 

a marketable book manuscript. In a highly competitive 

British or American travel literature market, publishing 

houses had very acute senses of the timbre and 

tone, the shape and the style necessary to guarantee 

brisk sales of a work of travel writing. The book world 

understood just as clearly as the art world did what 

would and would not sell. What Kane brought back to 

Toronto with him was the spontaneous record of an 

enthusiastic eyewitness, but no publisher would have 

taken a chance on that alone. Experience had to be 

tempered through convention; after all, in the idioms 

of the day, Indians had to be savages, artists worthy of 

being guests of the Hudson's Bay Company had to be 

gentlemen (especially after 1841, when Simpson had 

been knighted), and landscapes, however sterile and 

wild, had to be made narratively comprehensible to 

the armchair traveler. 

In order to understand how much difference there 

is between the journal and the book, one can briefly 

review the various versions. The Stark Museum of 

Art possesses not only many of Paul Kane's drawings, 

watercolors, and oil sketches but also six notebooks. 

Four of these books are written in ink, but not 

in Kane's own hand. Whose hand they are in we may 

never know, for the handwriting styles - there are 

two - are both versions of copperplate, a standardized 

writing style taught to most clerks in the midnineteenth 

century. These four books bear the signs 

of a draft manuscript of the published book. They are 

not the final draft - that was burned during the blitzkrieg 

of London in the Second World War. They still 

lack the chapter divisions of the book and they do not 

exactly follow the order of events as Wanderings of an 

Artist sets them out. 

lt is possible that, like his letters, these draft manuscript 

books were dictated by Kane to some clerk, but 

their command of the language and its sophisticated 

grammatical structures suggest otherwise. What lies 

beyond speculation is the fact that none of these four 

books was written by Kane. We know this because 

they are not in his hand. Nor are they journals, for they 

contain some telltale sentences. For example, near the 

start of the first notebook, there is a sentence that states 


just what Wanderings of an Artist does about the White 

Dog reserve on the Winnipeg River. " We passed today 

a Catholic missionary station called 'Wabessemmung' 

(or White Dog), which, on my return" two years 

and a half afterwaros[,] I found deserted ... Obviously, 

no field journal, in which daily or even just weekly 

entries were made could include such a retrospective 

statement as this. 

Kane did not write Wanderings of an Artist - not 

unless his command of the language improved astr0- 

nomically in those eleven years between travel and the 

book' s publication. (Even in 1855, when the Canadian 

Journal published the first article concerning his trip, 

the prose had altered remarkably . 2~ Besides those four 

notebooks of manuscript drafts of the published book 

there are two, smaller notebooks at the Stark Museum, 

and these are written in his own distinctive hand 

matching the handwriting in which the numbering and 

naming of his field sketches are done, and extubiting 

the unorthodox and idiosyncratic spelling, which 

Maude Allan Cassells likened to that of " a little child, 

or an 18th century gentleman. " 21 Words such as ice, 

country, enough, and cold, to take just a few examples, 

are regularly spelled in the fieldjoumal as " ise .. 

"cuntrey," " anuf' or "anph," and ' coald," but 

sometimes they appear as we spell them today. TIle 

vocabulary of fur trade travel, such as company, 

canoe, rapid, and horse, are variously speHedas 

"cumpney," "canew" or "coneu" or " cono," 

"raped" and "hors," while references to his art 

include such words as " cetchis" (sketches) and ~ 

tions of his Indian subjects as "grate warers ' (great 

warriors). If not always spelled as we spell, his vocabulary 

is nevertheless much more extensive than the 

vocabulary would be of someone today who speed as 

he did. Words such as "iindievred" (endeavored), "msesenly" 

(incessantly), " proqured" (procured), 

"Hidrafoba" (hydrophobia), Upictureck" (picturesque), 

"temerata" (temerity), " aspide" (espied) 

,'compehention' , (comprehension) and ' mirredes" 

(myriads), are all in Kane's vocabulary. And so are 

many French words, since that would nonnally have 

been the lingua franca of a fur trade brigade. 22 As 

weU, his handwriting is characterized by a lazy formation 

of vowels, which sometimes renders the 0 , a" and 

u almost identically. 

One of these two books, the one whose contents 

appear here, is ajoumal; the other is a landscape and 

portrait log - again, the same sort of two-part project 

that Catlin had chosen. Both are breastpocketsized, 

although not identical. In them, Kane's own 

eyewitness report comes to light in an endearing style 

and a much less stilted tone. Cassells, who had evi- 

13

dently seen the e two books t thought better of their 

narrative sty Ie than of that in Wan,derings of an Artist: 

"Heays in his admirc:lble preface [to the publi hed 

book], 'The following pages are the notes of my journey, 

with little alteration from the original wording as 

I jotted them in pencil at the time.' With less than 'a 

little alteration' they might have gone with more of 

swing . . . .' '23 The stiff persona of the book is that 

expected by the British readership - a gentleman's. 

But Kane's own arises from one raised humbly enough 

in muddy York. 

After the reader finds his or her bearings, there 

remains to work out the sense of each sentence, in 

which punctuation appears infrequently and idiosyncratically. 

The mostly phonetic spelling requires some 

patience. But what gives Kane away as an unaccomplished 

writer is the single, run-on sentence for an 

entire day' s or week's entry. Thejoumal of fur trade 

factors, such contemporaries of Kane as Samuel Black 

and Peter Skene Ogden, for instance, exhibit a much 

more developed narrative style, as do those by British 

explorers such as the artist Robert Hood and American 

painters such as Frank Blackwell Mayer.~ None of 

them on the other hand, attended school in York, 

Up~r Canada - or should have attended but didn't, 

as was perhaps the case with Kane. 

The examination of the only two books in Kane's 

own hand offers other insights into Kane the traveler 

that distinguish him from his persona in Wanderings of 

an Artist. Among these is the glaring fact that the 

journal contains no pejorative references to Nativ~ 

Americans - in itself, this absence justifies the publication 

of the journal in its original fonn, since Kane t s 

Wanderings has recently been indicted as a racist, 

imperialist discourse. 2S Several such references appear 

in Wanderings, as published, partly because Kane's 

persona is quintessentially civilized, .and. ~~st, .therefore, 

see those who live beyond his Civilization as 

barbaric. Pejorative references to "savages," however 

regrettable one finds them today, were the stock-intrade 

of this Victorian persona. But these references 

caused problems from the outset of the book. 

On the one hand, the Paul Kane in the book vows 

to act as an objective reconter of the Native Americans 

and their territories; on the other, he tells a tale of 

adventure that yearns to retrieve his innocent boyhood 

past: 

14 

TIle subject was one in which I felt a deep interest in my 

boyhood. I had been accustomed to see hundreds of indians 

about my native village, then Little York, ~uddy and 

dirty, just struggling into existence, now the CIty of T:oronto, 

bursting forth in all its en~rgy and commercial 

trength. But the face of the red man IS now no longer seen. 

All traces of his footsteps are fast being obliterated from 

his once favourite haunts, and those who would see the 

aborigines of this country in their riginal tate, r seek t 

study their native manners and custom , must travel ~ar 

through the pathle fore t to find them. To me the wild 

wood were not altogether unknown, and the lndian but 

recalled old friends with whom [ had associated in my 

childhood . ... 1.6 

Apart from the fact that this prelusive passag~ in Wanderings 

of an Artist has no near counterpart m .any of 

the six notebooks - either the draft manuscnpts or 

the two field books - oddities within it are worth noting. 

Kane weD knew, for example, that the forest was 

anything but "pathless": the development of inland 

communication had reached an advanced state by 1859, 

and he had himself started a westward trip in 1849 by 

train. One wonders how Kane could have combined 

scientific study with romantic sentiment. On top of 

Kane's own boyhood fascination, someone has imposed 

a couple of layers of purpose for the travels: to 

offer a sort of amateur ethnologist's account, and to 

take a romanticized, nostalgic trip back into the world 

of the pure Noble Savage. So the personae~s up 

being both an involved character and a more distant 

chronicler of the narrative. Both what the genre of 

travel literature demanded and what Kane himself, 

however unrealistically, may have wanted jostle with 

each other at the outset of the book, and all the way 

through Wanderings of an Artist. David C. Hunt, of the 

Center for Western Studies at the Joslyn Art Museum, 

has said that, "for all the attempts to render an accurate 

view or produce a believable report, the majority of the 

artists on the western frontier envisioned and perpetuated 

what we think of today as a romance: one that 

may well have been, in a personal sense, real enough to 

most of them. "27 Kane's book certainly helped to perpetuate 

the romance; his journal does not. 

While some examples give the impression that 

Wanderings of an Artist adds to, if not improves on, the 

contents and style of the field notes, there are many 

instances in which the color of Kane's own writing 

outshines the polish of the persona's rhetoric in the 

book. After a buffalo hunting trip with the Metis on the 

plains west of Red River, Kane proceeded down that 

river from Fort Garry (today's Winnipeg) to Lake 

Winnipeg on July 1, 1846 (Wanderings gives a date one 

week later, July 8th [68]) - a river whose environs 

Kane found "beautifull" in his journal but "oot very 

beautiful" (49) in Wanderings - Sir George Simpson 

and Kane encountered a party ofSau1teaux. The book's 

narration of the event reads as follows: 

TIle Indians crowded round the boat on our arrival, inquiring 

what we wanted. Our interpreter told them that I had 

come to take their likenesses. One of them, a huge ugly~ 

looking fellow, entirely naked, stepped up telling me to 

MacLaren I Kane

take hi ,as he was just as the Great Spirit had made him. I 

declined, however, as ( wanted to ketch one of the female , 

but he refused, as he could n . t eire ' herself suitably for 

such an occasion, being in mourning for some friends she 

had Jost, and therefore only wearing her oldest and dirtiest 

clothes. 

After orne difficulty, I succeeded in getting a young 

girl to sit in the co tume of this tribe. although her mother 

was very much afraid it might shorten her life. But on my 

assuring her that it was more likely to prolong it, she 

seemed quite satisfied. (69) 

; ". ,. l. ... • .. { I 

This version's condescending tone perverts the purpose 

of the journal entry. The facts are identical but the 

record of them differs widely; 

they Indans crowded about 

the boat and wanted to 

know what we wanted 

I tould them that I 

came to rite thare po 

= rtraits (the way they 

express them selfs) a man 

stept up and tould me to 

take him he was as natur 

made him (he was nacad 

) I declined the honner 

I wanted take a young worn 

= 30 but she sade that she 

could not dress her self 

as she had lost sum 

of her frinds [ got a 

young Gerl to set in 

her Native costume 

her Mother wanted 

know if she would 

not com to sum hat 

=m by it her name was 

the constant scie 

Here the interpreter makes no appearance, so that 

Kane seems more immediately involved. "To rite !hare 

po I = rtraits" exemplifies the sort of idiomatic color 

that the book dilutes. This change seems significant 

because the phrase, Kane attests parenthetically, is not 

his but the Saulteaux'. The book also ignores Kane's 

wry humor, which the word "honner" conveys in the 

journal. The specificity of the occasion is lost in the 

book as weD, since the young woman's evocative name, 

The Constant Sky, is not given. 28 Her mother's conc,em 

is altered from "har I =m" in thejoumal to some 

fonn of death - a dark spell, perhaps - in the book. 

And in this respect, too, Kane's persona has been 

altered: in the original we are not told how he gains the 

mother's consent; in Wanderings o/an Artist, he 

seems to have won a debate bya rhetorical thrust and 

parry: , •... might shorten her life ... more likely to 

prolong it. " Finally, there are the more overt colorations 

of prejudice HI the book, which tum the Indian 

The Am:erican Art Journal/Volume XXI • Number 2 

Page from Paul Kane's journal,. written in pencil, for 0 portion oj 

theftrst week in July, 1846. Theftrst ten lines, in which he refers 10 

the

I 

1--- 

MAP TO ILLUSTRATE M'- KAN E '$ TRAVELS IN 1liE TERRITORY OF THE HUDSON '$ BAY COMPANY. Reproduced from Paul Kane , Wanderings of an 

Artist Among tile Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver' Island and Oregon through the Hudson's 8ayCompany's Tenitory alii 

Back Again (London, 1859). Kane's route, beginning in Toronto, is indicated by a heavy line. Collection, General Research Division, The Ne\ 

York Public Library, Astor, unox, and Tilden Foundations. 

that matter - the book carries this explanation further 

with adjectives that imply a judgment of the 

woman, ajudgment that the journal emphatically does 

not make: •• . . . ooIy wearing her oldest and diirtiest 

clothes. " All in all, the effects of these two narratives, 

and the persona of the Paul Kane that they convey. 

diverge significantly. 

Besides notable stylistic alterations, a comparison 

of the two versions points up how much of the 

book was composed after Kane's trip .. The journal, 

for example, contains no reference whatsoever to 

Kane's trip up the Willamette River valley (Oregon); 

nor does it mention Kane's hearing of the massacre of 

the missionary, Marcus Whitman, and his wife, Narcissa, 

and twelve other people. Thus, where thejournal 

is silent, Wanderings of an Artist contains a chapter 

(the twenty-first) that begins by advertising 

16 

"Dreadful Tidings - Horrible Tragedy" (222), and 

whi'ch proceeds to tell of Kane's hearing the news of 

the massacre at the Whitman mission (the Whitman 

Mission National Historic Site is near modem Walla 

Walla, Washington). The news, which reaches Kane 

in the book when he ~ts to Fort Colville (in the 

Columbia River valley near the modem border between 

Washington and British Columbia) on the way 

north in the late summer of 1847, distresses him deeply 

because the Whltmans had treated him very hospitably 

when he stayed with them for five days - July 

) 8th-22nd - earlier in the summer. The report of the 

killings is fully and dramatically drawn. The problem 

is that with the journal silent the ghost -writer has 

Kane learn of the massacre on "September 21st," or 

sixty-seven days before it started. 

Once alerted to this impossibility, the reader of 

Maclaren I Kane

- 

~--~~~~~~~~~~~~~4F~~~~ 

o 

Bd udt YiJ ... 

Wanderings of an Artist realize howeas' y th chapter 

imply pre ent a co ation - not a very careful 

one, obviously - of reports that would emerge weD 

before Kane's book was published eleven years Later, 

The inclusion of the material in its inaccurate form 

probably came to Kane's notice. It appearance may 

simply represent the publisher's decision to dramatize 

Indian violence; such a scene, because it would help 

sales of the publication, could not be passed up. 

As the accompanying map shows, Paul Kane 

took the following route to the Pacific Coast and back 

in the years 1846, 1847, and 1848. Leaving Toronto on 

May 9, ] 846, Kane went by coach and steamboat to 

Mackinac (in present-day Michigan between Lakes 

Huron and Michigan), There, as has been mentioned, 

he missed the connecting steamboat and had to row a 

The American Art Journal/Volume XXI • Numher2 

rented skiff to Sault Sainte Marie, where he took 

passage ona schooner across Lake Superior to Fort 

William (now Thunder Bay, Ontario), At this point, 

Kane joined the brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company, 

traveling on the regular westward route, up the 

Kaministikwia River to the height ofland between the 

Great Lakes and the Lake Winnipeg-Hudson Bay 

watersheds. Then the brigade followed the most difficult 

and demanding stretch of tiny rivers and rocky 

and swampy portages, down the Savanne, Maligne, 

and Namakan rivers ,(through modem Quetico 

Provincial Park) to Rainy Lake and Fort Frances; 

thence down Rainy River (the present-day border 

between Minnesota and Ontario) to Lake of the 

Woods. The water route then continued north out of 

this wondrous lake, down the Winnipeg River to Lake 

17

Paul Kane. ENCAMPMENT, WINNIPEG RIVER. June 10, 1846. Oilonpaper,8 '(sx /33/8". Collection, Stark Museum of Art. 

Winnipeg, and along it shores briefly to the Red 

River, up which they trekked to it confluence with 

the Assiniboine River at oTt Garry (now, as previously 

noted, the city of Winnipeg). Kane arrived on 

June 14th, when he had his first view of the prairies. 

He spent the rest of the month with a Meti buffalo 

hunting party to the southwest, in the vicinity of the 

Pembina River and Turtle Mountain (on the modem 

Manitoba-North Dakota border). It was on this trip 

that he wounded, then sketched, then killed, then 

sketched his buH. 

Arrivffig back at Red River in early luly, Kane 

embarked on a Hudson's Bay Company sloop at Lower 

Fort Garry, and sailed north. across Lake Winnipeg 

to Norway House, reaching it on July 12th. There he 

spent a month waiting for the Saskatchewan River 

brigade to return from Hudson Bay at York Factory, 

and take him with them back up the Saskatchewan and 

North Saskatchewan rivers, through the remarkable 

parkland of the northern prairies. 29 Part way, Kane 

18 

disembarked in order to continue by horseback, riding 

to Fort Edmonton on September 27th (not quite riding: 

Kane got to the river's shore acros from the fort, and 

nearly drowned trying to "ride" his horse across). 

After a ten-

PAUL KANE. c. 1865. Photograph. Collection, Mrs. Paul 

Kane III. He is wearing afrontier-style hide shirt and bison 

robe po'ssibly collected on his 1846-1848 trip. By the mid 

1860s, Kane was partially blind and no longer painting. 

westward watershed of the Continental Divide. For 

the first time since leaving Fort Edmonton, hisjoumal 

shows, he sharpened his pencil. 30 

The fastest recorded fur-trade express tripfrom 

the Pacific Ocean at the Columbia River to Hudson 

Bay at York Factory is sixty-seven days, a feat 

achieved by paddling a twenty-man canoe at the rate 

of no fewer than forty strokes a minute for fourteen to 

sixteen hours a day. Although Kane's group did not 

travel as fast, it seems a wonder that Kane saw anything 

or anyone long enough to make a sketch. The 

artist's group canoed and portaged the 1500 miles of 

the Columbia in only three weeks, arriving at Fort 

Vancouver (today's Vancouver, Washington), the 

Hudson's Bay Company's principal post on the Pacific 

Slope, 00 December 8, 1846. At least, it had been 

the principal post: with James Polk's victory in the 

1844 U oited States presidential election on a platform 

of expansionism - "Fifty fOUT forty, or fight! " - 

the company's claim to the lower Columbia River 

watershed had begun to lose its force; indeed. Gover- 


nor impson had already ordered the relocation of the 

company' Pacific hub toort Victoria, on Vancouver 

Island. 

The Oregon Treaty, which officially established 

the 49th parallel (not the Columbia River nor the 42nd 

parallel) as the international border on the Pacific Slope 

as on the prairies, had been signed only six months 

before Kane's arrival, on June 16, 1846. These were 

exciting times in the Oregon Territory: 3000 people had 

come west 00 the Oregon Trail in 1845. Kane found 

rumself at the right place just at the right time to capture 

the old life of the Indians and the new life of many 

settJers. 

Using Fort Vancouver as his base camp, as it 

were, Kane made trips up and down the inland and 

coastal routes during the first half of 1847. These includedextended 

trips, south up the Willamette River 

valley to Oregon City and Champoeg in January; and 

north up the Cowlitz River (painting eo route Mount 

St. Helens, a "burning mountain," as Kane calls it in 

his Jandscapeand portrait log, probably because it was 

19

still smoking after having erupted two years before) to 

the NisqualJy River, Puget Sound, Vancouver Island, 

and the opposite mainland, from March 25th to June 

20th. Of Kane's work during this trip, Russell Harper 

has written: 

Nearly a hundred sketches sUTVive from the three 

months during which Kane worked on the southern tip of 

Vancouver Island. along the adjoining coasts of British 

Columbia and in the state of Washington. These are of the 

greatest ethnological and historical interest, and some are 

among his finest artistic productions. 'Their subject-maner 

has no parallel in the work of any other 19th century artist 

in the same region. 3l 

On July 2nd, Kane made his last departure from 

Fort Vancouver, heading up the Columbia for the 

interior with the inland brigade. He stopped for some 

time in the vicinity of Walla Walla. At this point he 

spent five days with the Whitmans. He also sketched 

in the Palouse River valley (a tributary of the Snake 

River, in Washington) during extremely hot summer 

weather before returning to Walla Walla and making his 

way upriver by canoe and overland by horse (via the 

~rand Coulee) to Fort Colville (today's Colville, Washmgton). 

He left there on September 22nd with the last 

interior brigade of the season, and arrived at Boat 

Encampment on October 10th. After waiting three 

weeks for the arrival of the brigade coming from the 

other side of the mountains, K~e retraced the route of 

November, 1846, and reached Fort Edmonton on December 

5th. lbere, he enjoyed Christmas and some 

repose before taking two extensive trips with Fran~is 

Lucie, a Metis guide at Fort Edmonton: one of 200 

miles by cariole and dog team dowruiver to Fort Pitt 

(on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border) in January, 

1848; and another of 180 miles by horse southwest to 

Rocky Mountain House in April. Kane left Fort Edmonton 

for the last time on May 25th, and on October 

13, 1848, he arrived in Toronto by the route that he had 

traveled in the other direction in the spring and summer 

of 1846. 

Paul Kane's journal is published here in its original 

fonn with the pennission of its owner, the NeldaC. and 

H. J. Lutcher Stark Foundation, Stark Museum of Art, 

Orange, Texas. The journal itself is a leatherbound 

memorandum book, with a brass clasp at the bottom, a 

pencil sheath on the right-hand side, and 72 leaves. The 

front and back covers are lined with green plaid paper. 

The journal measures .55" thick x 3.7" wide Oeft to 

right, as the lines of text are written) x 5.9" high (top to 

bottom, as the text reads). 'The text appears on n9 

unnumbered pages, written unless otherwise indicated, 

in pencil. From twenty to thirty lines of text 

appear on each page. 

Square brackets in the printed text indicate additions 

to Kane's own words. egible words are designated 

by solid lines. With a few minor exceptions 

the lengths of lines foUow exactly Kane's own. The 

text dates from May 9, 1846, when Kane left Toronto, 

to September 13 1848 (although there is nothing 

entered for that date), when he was still northwest of 

Lake Superior, a month from Toronto by canoe, 

steamboat, and coach. 

Kane's round-trip journey allows for the possibility 

that any of the sketches was made on one of at 

least two occasions. Thus the dates assigned in the 

captions depend on the best available evidence: 

Kane's journal, his landscape and portrait log other 

contemporary sources. Harper's study, the titles of 

the pictures themselves. and, where reasonable. 

Wanderings of an Artisl. Because in some cases the 

journal does not mention all the people and places be 

painted, or simply because the journal has lacunae for 

some portions of his itinerary, dates in some of the 

captions must rely on these other sources. All of the 

paintings done on can~as were executed following his 

return. to Toronto in October, 1848, and by 1856, when 

he fulfilled commitments to George W. Allan and 

what was then the Parliament of Canada. 

To help the reader understand Kane' s phonetic, 

variant spellin~s and to identify the many characters 

and places the artist encountered. two references 

have been provided: a Glossary of Common Words 

and a Guide to People and Places in Kane s Journal 

containing detailed biographical, geographical, and 

historical information. 

1. The transcription and publication of Paul Kane' 5 journal which is 

has 

in the coUection. of the Stark Museum of M Orange T~xas , 

bee~ made posSIble through the kind permission of Nelda C. Starlc., 

Chauman, Nelda C. and H.J. Lutcher Stark Foundation who 

provided convenient and mOSl hospitable access to the ~t· 

Anna Jean Caffey, Registrar oCthe Stark Museum of Art ~ and ~ 

Bowler, also of the Stark Musewo. 

2. Bison is the COlTect term, but buffalo, because Kane uses the 

word exclusively, will be kept here. 

3. Saulteaux is a name given to the westernmost part of the Chip-- 

20 

pewa/Ojibwa nation from the falls of Sault Sainte Marie both 

shores of Lake Superior and weU into the northern interior,' as far 

west as the Turtle Mountains in what is now North Dakota and as 

far north as the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg. 

4. The nickname is a conundrum. Judging by the fact that Kane 

speUs t.he name Francois as "Frans way ," Bushway is likely the 

phonetiC fonn of a French word such as boucher or bouchee. 'There 

IS no French word bouchois. TIle possibilities for translation stem 

from two words: boucher and bucher. 1be latter is a verb meaning 

to work or to study with fury and ardor. Perhaps the name then 

MacLaren! Kane

derive from Kane' famou nighttime traverse of Lake Huron from 

Mackinac to Sault Sainte Marie (see later) or from the fact that he 

was frequently seen with pencil or brush in band. But bucMr also 

~ refer to tumbering a bucMron beina a logger or lumbetjack. 

Olven ~t the episode of me journal In which the name appears 

deals With the ceremony of cutting a lobstick. pine in honor of Kane 

there i a po ible connection to thi meaning. BoucMr a verb 

mean either to plug up 

if Kane were talkative, thi meaning 

could apply ironically. A a. noun, it means butcher. In this Latter 

sense, the name might derive from Kane's infamous exploits as a 

hunter, me shooting of the bull at the buffalo hunt providing one 

example that suggests that hunting was not his forte. Bouchie, the 

past participle of boucher, means a mouthful or a morsel and 

perhaps this would refer to Kane's short stature. In any c::se, it 

would seem that the name descn'bes one or another rather strong 

feature of Kane's personality. For another theory on the origin of 

Kane's nickname, see note 5. 

5. Paul. Kane' s Frontier including Wanderings of an. Artist among 

the Indians of North America, ed., and with a biOi. introd. and a 

catalogue raisonne by J. Russen Harper, published for the Amon 

Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, and the National Gallery of 

Canada, Ottawa (Austin, Texas, and London, 1971), p. I I. I wi h to 

acknowledge my indebtedness to the late Professor Harper for hi 

tine work, many details of which helped to furnish the present 

introduction. lbat my view of Kane' journal diverge from Harper's 

is more the consequence of a literary and art hi torian's 

different perspectives, than any fundamental disagreement. 

Another interpretation of Kane's nickname Bushway may weD 

be the one offered by Harper (p. 129) which aligns the word with the 

French bourgeois. 

6. Maude Allan Cassens, "Paul Kane, ,. typescript dated March, 

1932, Department of Ethnology, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 

p.2. 

7. Harper, p. 7. 

S. Ibid., p. 23. 

9. For a discussion of the bearing of this chronological factor on the 

making of Kane's book, as weD as a full discussion of the bibliographical 

aspects of it, see MacLaren, "Notes Toward a Reconsideration 

of Paul Kane's An and Prose," CaNJdwn Lit~rature, nos. 

113-114 (Summer I FaD, 1987), pp. 179- 205. 

10. Harper, p. 13 . 

II. Ibid., p. II. 

12. Ibid., Appendjx 6, p. 322. 

13. Ibid., Appendix 5, pp. 320-321. 

14. Ibid., p. J5. 

15. See Henry James Warre, Overland to Oregon in 1845; Impressions 

of a Journey Across North Amen'ca by H. J . Warre, ed. and 

introd. Madeleine Major-Fregeau (Ottawa, 1976); Sketches in 

North America and th~ Oregon Territory, by Captain H . Wa"e. 

A .D.C. to the lale Commander oj the Forces (London, 1848); 

Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory, by Captain 

H . Wa"e, A.D.C. to the late Commander of the Forces, introd. 

by Archibald Hannah Jr. (Barre, Massachusetts, 1970). 

16. Harper, p. 17. 

17. See MacLaren, "Creating Travel Literature," Papers oj the 

Bibliographical Society of Canada , vol. 27 (1988), forthcoming. 

IS. The book appeared in an American edition, titled Overla1Ul 

Round the World during the Years J841 a.1UI 1842 (Philadelphia, 

1847). 

19. Harper, p. 39, n. 4. 

20. Paul Kane, "Incidents of Travel on the North-West coast, 

Vancouver's Island, Oregon, etc.: The Chinook Indians," Canadian 

Journal, vol. III (1854-1855), pp. m-T79. 


21. Cas U , p. 16. 

22.0nOctober6 1847, Kane write of the bripdebrealtingcamp 

at a "boan" (bon: good) • our' (hour), they paddJ up the 

Columbia River to i Dorthernmo t point, which Kane refe to 

both .'Boat incumpment" (Boat encampm nl) and •• umpm nt 

de Barge." 

23. ell , p. 16. 

24. See amuel Black, A Journol of a Vuyag~from Rocky Mountain 

Portage in Peace River to the Sources of Finlays Branch and 

North We.!t Ward in summu 1824. ed. E . E. Rich and A. M . 

Johnson, introd. R. M. Patterson, Publications of the Hudson' 

Bay Record Society, vol. x.viii (London, 1955); Pel~r SUM Ogden's 

Snau Country Journals /824- 25 and 1825- 26, ed' E. E. 

Rich and A. M. John on, introd. Bun Brown Barker, Publications 

of the Hudson' Bay Record Society, vol. xili(Lon on, 1950); To 

the Arctic ITy Canoe 1819-1821: The Journal and Painting.! of 

Robert Hood, MidJhipman with FranJdin , ed. C. stuart Houston 

(Montreal and London, 1974); and With Pen and Pencil on the 

Frontier in 1851: The Diary and Sketches of Frank Blackwell 

Mayer, ed .• with an lotrod. and nole Bertha L. Heilbron, fwd. 

Thomas O 'Sullivan (St. Paul, Minnesota, 1986). 

25. Heather Dawkins, 'Paul Kane and the Eye of Power. Racim 

in Canadian Art History." Vanguard, vol. 15, no. 4 (September, 

1986), p. 27. 

26. Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of 

North Americafrom CanadtJ to Vancouver's Island and Oregon 

through The Hudson's Bay Company's Territory and Back Again 

(1859), rev. ed., ed. John W. Garvio, introd.l..awrence W. Burpee 

(Toronto, 1925); facs. rpt., introd. J. G. MacGregor (Edmonton., 

1968), p. I xii. All references to Wa1Ulerings of an Anist will 

depend upon the facsimile reprint of the revised edition and appear 

in parentheses in the text. 

27. DavidC. Hunt, Legacy of the W~st(Omaha.ebraska , 1982), 

p.S. 

28. This woman i not named in Wanderings in the description of 

Kane's meeting her in July. 1846. Her name first appears in the boo 

on July 26, 1848. This problem is discussed in the 'Guide to 

the People and P!aces in Kane's Journal; see entry for "the 

constant sae. " 

There appear to be two sketches of The Constant Sky, one a 

watercolor and one an oil on paper, and two paintings, both oil on 

canvas. Only three are mentioned by Harper (238) because the 

St.ark Museum acquired its oil painting only after Harper's study 

appeared. Further complicarions arise because the olk>n-paper 

sketch ~ to have disappeared. although Harper evidently saw 

it. Curiously. he gives its provenance as the coUection of Paul Kane 

IV, the only such listing in his entire catalogue raj nne. However, 

Mrs. Paul Kane m, the oldest living member of the Kane family. and 

her daughter assure me that Harper never met Paul Kane IV, who 

died in 1954, and who, furthermore? owned no paintings or sketches 

by Kane. Harper does not mean Paul Kane ill, who was no longer 

living When Paul KtmL's Frontier (1971) was published. Harper 

identifies any paintings in the possession of the Ka& fumi)y at that 

time as "coOn Mrs. Paul Kane m." Thus, where the sketch was 

when Harper saw i4 and whaI has become of it. remain a mystery. 

29. This trip occurred by York boat, rather than canoe, since 

Governor Simpson had introduced the use of these large, unromantic 

- because they were rowed rather than paddled - but 

safe and efficient cargo carriers wherever stream and lake conditions 

pennitted. TIle Alhabasca and Columbia rivers also allowed 

for travel by York boat. 

30. A mountain and a glacier along this route, the Athabasca Pass, 

were named for Kane in 1921 by A. O. Wheeler, Founder of the 

Alpine Club of Canada. 

31. Harper, p. 22. 

21

Paul Kane. PIN PORTAGE. May, 1846. Oil on paper, 8 1 /3 x /3'/4". Collection, Stark Museum oj An.

Journal of Paul Kane's Western Travels, 1846-1848 

Transcribed by 1. S. MacLaren 

May th 9. th 184[6] 

I left Toronto in companey with 

Sir George Simson for the Saut 

de st Marey but on the Sterne Boat 

depart[ ure J 

from Macanac I was left where 

by paying three men $20 I in truct 

ed them to start in a small boat 

for the sault (90 miles) and ariv[ed] 

in 21 oures to the astoni hment 

of Sir Gorge and my freend 

They bregade of cono 

that I expected here had 

left for Fort Willam 0 

thare was no olternative 

left but to take the sche 

wner belonging to they 

fl. B. Co,. ... We left the Sault 

on the 2U"Lpast Isle 

royl on the nd snow 

and ice on the rocks 

as we past. Came apun 

hevey thunder stonn with 

many shouts of rain - was 

obliged to take ----- 

vessel - - - ---- 

fort Willam ---- 

again the--·--- 

pased up the evening before 

I arived but Mr. MC;Kinzey 

the jentalman in charge of 

the stayshion was cind anuf 

to let me have 4 men and 

a Conew to over take they 

bigade, at 6 oleock in the evening of the 

same day I overtook 

them about 35 miels from 

Fort Willum a gentelman 

by the name of lane was in 

Carge of 3 eonews with 9 men 

in eatch, left our incampment 

at 4 next morning got to the 

Mounten falJs made a portage 

over the mounten then ma= 

=de a nother about a half a mile 

further called they lost mens 

portage from 3 men in eros 

= ing it haveing lost thare way 

Next came the pin po~e 

so called from they rocks 

being verry sharp and cut 

they mens feete [ made a 

cetchis of bouth of these. We 

Made in all, this day about 

6 portages the current 

being so strong that they 

men when not makeing 

a portage had to pole they 

conews up a strong current 

Mayth 26 

made the little dog 

portage and the big dog poartage 

the latter ofwhitch i verry beautifull 

Made a cetch altho it raned all 

day this pourtage is 2 Miles long 

campt on the other ide, while 

incumpt here one of the men found 

a beautifuU rabit scin blanket on 

a grave he rapped it rount him 

and walked out of the wood 

Mr Lane ingured whare he got it 

he tould in the woods hard by Mr Lamade 

hime take it back. and asked 

if he wanted us to be murdre 

by they the lodien I herelerant 

that it was a common thing to lev 

sutch things on thare graves the 

leve guns sum times but if thare 

is a bad Indin in thare visinata they 

brake sum part of it so that i 

[Near the bottom of the page, the foUowiog 

nine lines are written upside down.) 

I cum verrey nere shareing 

the same fate for I went up 

to the rapeds for to take a cetch 

when dun, I iindievred too find the 

way back mised the poartage. 

after 2 oures vane atempt to retrase 

my steps I fi.ired my gun and herd 

an ansering shot from the camp 

whitch gided my steps back 

unfit for prsent use the say that the 

grate spiret will mend it for 

the deseced wen he gets to the 

hunting ground's of the nech world 

27 of May 

Sir G. Simson past us to day on 

on his way to the inerour 

the men throe a way thare 

poales to Day with a loud shout 

as they ware of no further 

use and took to thare paddles 

starting on a rase for a bout 

15 miles 

Dog lake. little dog river 

made a portage over a hie 

Mounten in to a small Jake 

(pourtage 4 M.) cot up with 

Sur G. Simson, got an invitation 

to take supper with him at 

the next pourtage but could 

not cetch up with him. 

Herd loud shouting in the 

woods inquired the cous the 

men had surounded a bare 

the bare gave battle by 

standing on hi hind legs and 

narling they started and run havei 

=ngnogune 

28th May 

Made one pourtage of3 M. 

they Men caring they conew 

throe the wood up to thare 

ne ein water 

29th 

past thru the Lake of they I 

Island beuutifull seanary 

30th 

Cetch of the brigade toping 

for bakfast at rench R. 

rapid . 

31th 

River Malane made a ceteh 

I t of Iune 

Island rapids on falls made 

a cetch mood of fishing of the 

Soto Indans squay drest 

in a rabit king sed to be 

a canable not uncoman 

in this tribe hansum in the 

fase thare was a cace of a 

Father and Doter who cilld 

and eate 6 persons of his one 

famelay 

2nd of Iune 

Raney Lake for 3 daye it 

rained insesenly campt 2 night 

on one aeount of the inclemencey 

of the wether 

4th Erived at fourt Frances found 

a letter from Sur G. Simson and a 

sirqular.lift at 9 next moning 

painted 2 cheefs. Had all they lndans 

in the naberhood to see the grate 

medison man 

5th of June 

went down river Le Plue rnned all 

day campt at 4 P.M. 

61lL they treese on ealch side of they 

river are eate up with caterpilears not 

a leafe remaning on they treese looks 

like winter coodnot find a place to 

Breakfast for them they shore covered 

with them for 150 m. bout sturgon at 

an incamptment of Indanes enterad 

Lake of they Woods 

71h.we past thrue this lake to day 

made the Rat portage and enerd 

Winepeg River eat a pike whitch 

had a fish half the sise of rum 

in his mouth 

8th and 9th past thru sum beaut 

ifuU rappeds took a cetch of 

rapid de gock and flays quantuy 


23

miskitas and black flies verrey bad 

did not steep all night for them 

had to get on a rook they caterpill 

er's was so numeras 

10 we made 10 poL roun they 

conews over 3 or 4 beautiful 

cas caides 

II th Fare wind hoisted sale and cum 

down curent at the rate of 

7 or 8 miles an ower arived 

at Fort AJaxander. I here herd 

of a campt ofIndianes who 

had a grate Medeson feist 

a few miles from the foact 

Mr. Setter the Jentalman of the fort 

proqured me an Indan guide who 

conducted me throe they woods sw 

=anning with moskitas sow that I 

had to ware a vale made on pur 

=pus for sutch acassions. when I ar 

=ived grat swarems ofIndanes came 

out to see me. One of they cheefes felt 

of my pantloones and said that I 

must be a grate cheefe the 

ware so fine (Mole sking) I en 

tered thare medison Iodg wh 

are they ware beating the 

drum and singing they had 

somthing covered up in the 

middle of the lodg whitch 

I could not make out I 

sune found that I was an 

intruder so I left I saw here 

an Indan grave with a calp 

on a long pole at the bed of 

it. Got 61ndnes to take me to 

the Red River sette1ment left 

with a fare wind 

12th I rite this part of my jum 

= al over a biasing fire on the 

shore of Lake Winapeg whare 

I have campt for the night 

and my 6 painted warers 

sleeping in front of my with 

their hidieous Cases shineing in 

the fire lite 

IJ!h.Stone Fort Red River I here 

met Sur George Simson again 

I found minney of they H.B.C. 

gentalmen here to atend a coun 

=sal wbitch is held once a year 

Mounday 15 th I left in comp 

= aney with Mr. a mishanery 

for Fort Garey 20. mi. 

up the river we had a plesant 

ride thru a deliteful cuntrey 

thickley inhabetad Red River has 

about 1000 white inbabitence and about 

2000 half brees as how are called 

here it has ajudg and a court House 

last yeare thare was an Indan tried and 

hung for Shewting a soto and a Sew 

(ndan at one shot the ball pased 

throe the Sew Who it was intended for 

and enterad a Soto it is a delitefull 

situation the prareys surounding 

24 

it i beautifull 

18~ to day I left for the planes 

to witness they Buffalo hunt by 

they half breedes of Red River 

they had started 3 days before 

me. I prequered a Hors and cart to 

carey my paints and provitions 

and a good saddle Have for my 

self to ride it was with. sum 

bubble that I could get a 

man to acompaney me 

for they Sews and they half 

breades (12 in numbr 

for to make pese. while !hare 

one of the haJf breed was brout 

in ded, cilled by they Sewes 

this exasperated they yong men 

and they called for the deth 

of they cheefs then in the 

camp, they ware over ruled by the 

better part of they men 

and escorted sum distance from 

the camp and tould to take 

care fr the future 2 days after 

they perseved thare lookout men 

running back and forward 

passing thare Horses they knew 

by this sine that tbare 

was an enamey in advance. A 100 of 

they best mounted riders started 

and got in to a hollo here ari 

=riev they then sent one man 

alone to the top of the bank 

as a decoy they Indanes saw 

him and thought him alone 

they rushed apon him when 

they halfbreedes showed they 

selfs and fired they Sewes ware 

taken by surprise and run. thare 

was 8 cilled, nun of they half 

breeds hurt. when thare is Buffalo 

they look out men take up hands 

full of durt and throw it up 

in the are. My first nite in a pr 

=arey made a scetch the prarey 

all covered with a small rose 

19 drank nothing but watter 

from mud holes full of anamaJ cuJa 

of varus sises 

20th Arived at Pambena Mounten 

had a beautifull vue of the pr 

=arie P. River I bere found 

they camp of they hunters 

whom gave me a verey cardul 

reseption they ware cutting 

!hare poles for to dry thare 

mete on when I came up They are 

devided in to too parteyes consisting 

of 250 eatch with thare wives 

and children in all thare is 

about 1500 carts drawn by 

oxan or Horses to carey the 

mete home when dried eatc 

cart will carry 1000 pound 

it tak.es 10 Buffalo to lode a 

cart they make thare one law 

and regulations abide by them 

thare is an emance concorse of dogs 

a cumpaney them and at nite they 

make moast headus noys I be 

came aquainted with a Mr. Hallet 

who was one of thare hed men 

Thare is about 2 half breeds 

in all thare are a distinct 

class of themselfs they 

live at Red River, spke 

the Indan language 

and Jive by hunting 

gowing out into the 

planes twise a year 

to hunt they Buffalo 

they H .B. Co tak.e part 

of thare dride meete and 

all they fat after it 

is rendered they use 

scin lodges to live in 

made from they buffalo hide 

the 21th. 

we Iayd by all 

this day as it was Sunday 

22 

1bey camp broke up 

this morning made a 

cetch of it, with they 

manner of cetching 

a refracktey horse 

23d 

Viseted the dry da= 

=nce Mounten the In 

=dans before they gou 

out on a ware excu 

=rtion they dance here 

for 3 days and nights 

with out eating or 

drinking aU that can 

stand it go out with 

they partey all that 

can not remane 

with they campt 

Saw a beautifull 

Antelope here 

24th 

Made a cetch of they 

carts in motion got 

a bed of the partey 

when an Indan called 

out that thare was 

buffalo to the rite 

of me I asended a sm 

=all hill when I saw 

a band of about 40 

cows and they hunters 

in full chase they 

ware they first Bu 

=ffalow I had ever 

seene I was not long 

in turning my horses 

hed in the derection 

of thy chase 

after running about 

3 miles I came nere up 

to a cow my hors 

became afrade after 

Kane! Journal

R. June, 1846. Oil on paper, 8 x /3 J /8". Collection, Stark Museum of Art. 

beating for about 2 

Miles more I came 

close enufffor a sh= 

ot when I found I 

had no ball I fired 

shot but without 

afect Thare was about 

25 cilled whitch ep 

= lide they camp with 

fresh mete eatch 

one getting a share 

2Sh 

this morning I tuck 

good care that I had 

pJentey off ball left 

with Mr HUet and 

they hunters aU 

started a hed of they 

Carts hereing that 

thare was Buffalo 

not far off saw they 

Buffalo about 7 Ms 

a hed but when we 

eame up with in a 

short distance w fo 

= und that they ware 

on the other side of 

a lake (lake de Roch) 

so I did not get a 

chance to run them 

sum of they hunters 

got a eros and cilled 

~~t60. 

This morning, we 

aspide an amence 

herd of BuUs about 

10 M. of [otT] they are kn 

own from they cows 

by thare standing 

by themselfs whareafs 

they cows stand all 

to gether Mr Hallet 

and myself went a 

hed untill we got 

witltin a half a mile 

of them. I wanted to run 

them but he tould me 

that thare was a law 

in they campt that no 

one or partey of men 

could run a herd 

with out they hole pa= 

= rtey was presant. So 

we wated till they 

aJJcame up to they 

amount of a 120 

then comenced th prep 

erations for the hunt 

We ware behind a small 

rise of ground so that 

they bffalo could not 

see us. every Man now 

comenced loading his gun 

examing the pimeing 

titening the gerth of his 

saddle all was anima= 

= tion and life after everi 

thing was agusted we 

started on a wak for 

about 200 yards whin 

they buffalo saw us for 

the first time we now 

put our Horses to the 

gallop and in 20 minutes 

ware in the midts of 

them thare ware at 

least 4000 all Bulls 

and now comenced the 

sloter the buUs flying 

in eve ray dere,ction 

It is a wonder that 

thare is not more ac 

ide nee happen then 

thare is. In the mene 

time my horse 

had started at a good run 

when a buffalo came 

over a smaU note 

The American Art Journal/Volume XXI • Number 2 25

Paul Kane. METIS CAMP AND HUNTERS. June 20. 1846. Watercolor on paper, 5 1 /4 x 8J/4/1. Collection, Royal Ontario Museum, 

Toronto. Ontario, Canada. 

-. - -:--- 

n~'::I' ~.!IIA~ 

Paul Kane. METIS CHASING A BUFFALO HERD. June 26, 1846. Waterco[oronpaper, jl!8X8 7 /s". Collection. Stark Museum of Art.

Paul Kane. WOUNDED BUFFALO 

BULL. June 26, 1846. Watercolor on 

paper, 4 J/8 X 53/8". Collection, Stark 

Museum of An. 

within 25 yard of me 

My Ho perseved him 

and stan d to one ide 

and pluged into a Badg r 

hole (smalle holes made 

by they badger the plane 

are covenerad with them 

) and fell throwing me ab= 

out 10 yards I got up while 

a man went in pursute 

of my Horse I found that 

I was not hurt nor my 

gun broke, found a man 

thrown in the same way 

laying sensless not far 

from me. Mounted agane 

and started in pursute 

came up with a BuU and 

shot him started in pur 

sute of , another fired 

and wounded him he 

stopedand turned round 

cocking his tale I thOUght 

this a good time to take 

cetch so laid my gun 

down on the pummal 

of the Saddle. tuck out 

my cetch Book and 

just as I was commence 

ing the Bull made a 

furious charge on me 

I let go gun cetch book 

and all I retumad, fired 

and wounded him in the 

side whitch toped him 

he tud long anph for 

me to take a cetch 

and ~ Ie . on my retren 

to the camp I feU in 

with a man driven a 

large buD I asked 

him why he did not 

shute him he sade he 

could when he got 

close to the camp it 

would save the trub 

ble of bringing a cart 

for the mete, he shot 

him within 200 yards 

of the camp and drove 

him 7 mile's I returend 

with the tung of a 

Buffalo the custum 

of they half breeds 

the Meven put wading 

in thare guns when 

runing they carry thare 

balls in thare mouth 

it was suposad that 

thare was 500 ciDad 

at this run. 

last spring thare was 

a Bull ran in to the 

camp and housed himslefe 

in a tent after fritening 

aU they wiman and 

children the shot 

him from the operu 

= ng at th top 

thi evening I wus verry 

tired and sare from my day 

exersion 

27th. 

My man got ick 

ran another large band 

bulls they Wiman 

cut and dride the mete 

2S1h.My Man got so 

sick that he could not 

travel I wished to return 

I tride to get a man 

to re turen but they 

ware to frade of falling 

in with the Sews thare 

old enameys after being 

sick for about 8 days 

he thought he mite 

set in the cart while 

I went a hed to indu e 

his Horse to follow 

29 Q 

We started for the 

setelment 15 or 20 of 

hinters escorted us 

a few miles on our 

rod back, we part.ed 

after takeing a smoke 

with them a common 

custum among them 

when leveing a frind 

I left them with reget 


27

Paul Kane. TWO PORTRAIT 

STUDIES: AN 

ASS) IBOINE 

AND A SAUL TEAUX GIRL. 

July 5, 1846. Watercolor on 

paper, 5 1 /4 .x 7 1 /4". Collection, 

Royal Ontario Museum. 

The Sau/teaux woman, 

shown on the right, is probably 

The Constant Sky. 

We fund a grate want 

of water on our return 

as the sesan had been 

dry campt put up my 

tent and hoppeled they 

Horses and cooked my one 

supper all a lone as my 

man was to cick to asist 

Met a grate quantutee of 

wolfs and stray dogs 

30th 

Camped at pambani 

after a hard days ride 

31 th 

found it hard to 

cetch they horses saw 

a large Wolf tride to 

get a shot to wild 

Nere sundown we got 

into a large swamp 

about 14 miles acros when 

in the middle my man 

told me he could go no 

further as he was 

to sick could get no 

~urther put up my tent 

and eat my supper of 

dride Buffalo meete 

lade down in the swamp 

muscitose in millions 

could not sleepe ext 

morning I had to wade 

up to my middle in 

water to cetch they 

Horses 

).s1of July 

My man thought 

that he could drive 

the horse alone. after helping 

him acros a 

river whare they horses 

had to nerely swim 

called stincun river 

I left him and started 

alone for Red River 

I got along vrrey well 

until I got to swamp an lake 

whitch I atemted to cross 

I sune found my horse 

up to his neck. I tride 

to return but all in 

vane I could get nother 

back nor fowrward I 

now got off and sank 

up to the neck in mud 

and water, got on dry land 

and with a long line rna 

= neged to drag the horse 

a shore. Mounted and tried 

to cross in another plase 

but with the same res 

= u1t I got off and wacked 

abed and draged him 

after me got on dry ground 

and found that I was in 

the midst of a large 

swamp J got on and tried 

to fors my Hors thru 

he sank up to his belley 

and would go no further 

I got offagane and led 

him about 6 mile up to 

th middJe in watar 

10 t my way and after 

a grate dele of trubble 

I got out on the Asne= 

= boin river and foUow 

= ed tHe corse of the curre 

= nt untill I arived at 

fort Garey wet and tired 

I here receved word from 

the Govemer that thare 

would be 2 Slop leve 

the lowr fort far 

Norway House bid good 

by to my cind host Mr. 

Cristey and left for the lowr 

Fort I left the settelment 

in companey with Mr. 

Simson a brother in law of 

the Governur slept at 

the reverant Mr. Smthe 

ers. said 2 day's at the mouth 

of the Red River wating 

for a fore wind wnt in 

the small boat up the 

{1be next six lines are written 

upside down.] 

My man arived the same 

day but from the fateges 

of the gurney mad the 

sickness he had before 

he died his name was 

Frances de gurlay 

Kane I Journal

Paul Kane. CAW-KEE-KA-KEESH-E-KO, THE CONSTANT SKY. July 5, 1846. [Late J~J856.J Oil on canvas, 25 x 30". Collection. 


River to an Indan camp 

they Indans crowded about 

the boat and wanted to 

know what we wanted 

I tould them that I 

came to rite thare po 

= rtraits (the way they 

express them selfs) a man 

stept up and touJd me to 

take him he was as natur 

made him (he was nacad 

) I declined the honner 

I wanted take a young worn 

=an but she sade that she 

could not dress her self 

as she had lost sum 

of her frinds I got a 

young Gerl to set in 

her Native costume 

her Mother wanted 

know if she would 

not com to sum bar 

=m by it her name was 

the constant scie 

an Indan here offer= 

=ed to give us a fare 

wind for 3 dayes for 

a pound of toback.eo 

Slept at an Indan 

loQg thunder and litening 

61Jl.of July. 

left the mou 

=t of the river stopt 

at an island pelacans 

in amence numbe I 

the Iindans say that 

it is the birds that 

make the thunder 

past throe play 

geene lake filled with 

beutifuJ islands 

l11h.of July 

Norway 

House nade sum sketches 

of sum musk-e-gaw 

Indans thare is a mish 

= on of the wesliens here 

Mr Mason in charge 

I found Mr. Ross the 

gentalman in charge 


29

u vrry ciod and good 

mlUl I rcmaned here 

untill ML Rowand 

ccune fTom Y rk 

ctary on hi way to 

Edtnont n 

J41Aof Agu t 

welft 

with 6 bouts 19 of they 

men bound for the 

Rockey Mounten in 

charge of a Mr Lane 

hevey stonn in Play 

Geene Lak.e drove a 

ore on a barron 

rock wet all day 

and night no fire 

16th. 

Lake Winapeg put 

ashore in a squalJ nere 

fiUing they boat had 

tounJode 

18th.Agu t 

arivd at the 

grand Rapid here the 

boats had to be taken 

out and haDed across 

land for a Mile thare 

was 90 peces of90 pounds 

eatch per boat we 

ware 3 days here 

on the 22Q we pased 

throe seder Lake 

entered the Saskatchaw 

==an agane throe a wamp 

low land up to the 

paw 

25th August 

the Paw has 

a circh of ingland mi 

= shon thare M Hunter 

is the Minester I found 

him verry cind he gave 

us sum good bred from 

whete of his one gowing 

he cilled a small pig 

whitch we fested 

on for on day I vseted 

the lodg of Medeson 

Man here and saw 

the contince ofms 

Medeson bag he did 

not like to let me 

see it first but 

hereing that I was 

a grate Medeson 

Man he consented 

though his wife pr 

otested a genst it 

it was the skin of 

an otter hansomle 

omimented it was 

fiJled with a little of 

avery thing sutch 

as bouns shells bits 

of MineraJes red er 

30 

th and menny other 

things to depe for 

my compehention. 

28th 

Past the mouth of 

Cumberland river for 

3 dys thy men had to 

hole the boats up the cu 

=rent with a line. Found 

the boans ora grate men 

=ny Buffalo which had 

bene drownd in the 

ise last spring while 

crossing the river saw 

a large buck Muse had 

a shot at him but mist 

found an Indan camp 

got sum povisions fro 

= m them, dined on dried 

Buffalo mete Tung Bever 

tale and Pemacon and 

Muse Mete 

71h.of September 

Carlton here the 

Cuntrey changis in to planes 

this is a grate ptase for 

buffalo remaned her untiD 

the boats came up I made 

sketches of the fort and 

2 Crey Indand one of them 

a grate warer he had 

ben wounded three times 

by they Black feet got a 

hunter to acoumpanay 

us and sarted on Horse back 

for Edmonton we ware aco 

=mpaned by apartey of 

hunters (from the Fort) 

for 2 dys 

12 of September 

I viseted a Buffalo pound 

the manner of cilling they 

Buffalo in a pound is 

as foUows one man gOllS 

out in till he seese a 

a Band of ButIaIos he starts 

a hed of them in the derec 

=tion of the pound they Buffalo 

trys to cross a hed of him whitch 

is all ways the case with them 

now the pound is made like 

a try angie with one side 

opene bilt witch logs and 

brush wood it has a gate 

or dore whitch is shut when 

they get in on eatch side 

of the opening to the pound 

is sticks put up whitch is 

called ded men the branch 

of fur about 4th of a mi1e 

thare is men behind these 

frs to friten them with 

skings and hauUowing 

and when they get in the 

Straat thakn with arrows 

thare was a pound here 

that was made of they 

boun fthe Buffal 

saw a chase by one of 

th Indane after a woulf 

he rod after a band of 

them urn 8 to 10 cot up 

to one but th woulf would dodg 

him he at last turned 

him toward our partey 

and after menuvereng for 

sum time he drew an 

arrow and put it rite 

through him 

13.tn. 

one of the hunters cilled 

a cabrey to day saw 4 Buffalo 

14th 

had a fine chas after 

a band of cabrey they cum 

up to you to see what 

you are but if they get 

the wind of you they are 

off like litening made urn 

sketches 

IS1h saw a grate band 

of Cree Indans made a sketch 

J,,,,ut> 

of Muck-e-too and Caw-ke-kis 

suw-k-way the first is pouder 

the second is the man that 

allways speekes the last 

of these dilliveres his ordere 

in a low tone in his bert 

the other gets on a Horse 

and communicates the same 

to the camp in general 

The Powder is a grate waurer 

and hors theefe whitch is the 

too grate qualification 

forachiefe 

16th - 

Saw a band of Asneboins 

on the opisit side of the river 

an they communicated with a 

band on this side by sines 

that thare was sum one 

coming they ded not 

now but it mite be the 

enamey 8 of tbare young 

men sarted in advance 

for to reconniter they 

came up to us and con 

ducked us to thare cam 

= p I made sum 

sketches of this band 

we got sum horses here 

17th. 

got a frite our hunter 

woke us up in the nite 

and tould us that the 

horses ware sow len 

we started in persute 

but found that they 

had ben fitened by they 

wolfs 

18th.· 

Culled cabree 

grate numbers here 

Kane! Journal

Paul Kane. KEE- A- KEE- KA-SA-Coo-WA Y. MAN WHO GIVES THE WAR-WHOOP. September 15, 1846. f Late 1848-1856.}Oil on canvas, 30 

x 25". Collection. Royal Ontario Museum.

t' 

Paul Kane. FORT EDMONTON. September27. 1846. Waterc%ronpaper, 5 3 /sx9". CoUection, Stark Museum of Art. 

19th. and 2()1h. 

ort Pitt a han am 

little fort mad a ketch 

of ~ Chip a wayan name 

23-'1 

left Fort Pitt got into 

a band of buffalo whitch 

we traveled thru for 3 

days they ware so nu 

:::: meras that they impe 

:;ded our progress when 

when we wanted fresh 

mete we shot a fat 

cow and tuck the best 

part sutch as the tung 

and back fat or hump 

we eate nothing but 

mete from Fort Pitt 

to Edmonton made a 

sketch of the Buffalo 

feeding in a yaney 

called long grass 

saw the boans ofa 

parley of Creese that 

died of the small pox 

saw the horns of sum 

32 

deere of a large . e 

on ofowrorse got 

ick I ft him hot 

2 wolfs and a red deer 

when we arived n re 

Edmonton we ware 

met by a partey of 

gentelman from the 

Fort who gave u 

theire fresh horses 

and gawuped to the 

river and plunged 

in and swam a cross 

while here they hunters of 

the fort went out and 

in 5 days returned with 

the mete of 30 Buffalo 

27th. we arived at Edmonton 

and left it on the 6t1l. Od 

we had 65 loded horses 

and made but slow pr 

=ogress thru the wood 

thare was a hevey gale 

of wind a few days bef 

=ore we started whitch 

covered the cuntrey with 

fallen timber cilled geese 

in grate abundance had 

no salt, menny bever 

dams in the portage 

10th. Arived at Frot Asneboin 

II th got our boat pit 

cht and left on the 

15th we arived at 

a breakfasting plas 

and it was prepose 

that the 40 other 

packs that was to 

cross the mounten 

should be sent back 

as it was a could m 

ommg and snowing 

thare was acounsul held 

by Mr. lane as being in 

charge and Mr Colin. 

Fracher 5 to gow back 

with the pack 

and 12th gow on this 

arrangement was made 

with out consul= 

ting me as I was 

nothing but a pasenger 


l" . 

Paul Kane. THE COMMllTEE'S PUNCH BOWL, ROCKY MOUNTAINS. November II, 1846. Watereoloron paper, 5 J/4x9". Collection, Royal 

Ontario Museum . 

It was so could that the 

water frose on they pol 

=es they men thad to w 

=ade in the water sum 

times up to thare mid= 

= die one sliped off a log 

over his hed and was 

nerley dround his clo 

= se frose stiff I asked 

him if he was not 

could his ansur was 

that his coat was 

but he was not 

16th. the wather is so 

coald that we do not 

think we shaU cross 

the mountin this 

winter the river ie 

Athabasca is aver 

= ry rapped river 

owr line broke twise 

to Knight cuming 

upa rapid 

17th and 18th .. 

fine wether Mr. frasher 

wanst to get a canew 

and take 3 of owr best 

men for to take himslf 

and his pachs and leve 

us without the menes 

of geting up Mr Lane 

was vrry nere axseding 

to it had it not ben 

for me. we gow verry 

slow 

19th Mr Frasher got a canew 

and went a hed with 4 men 

1 of his one 1 he hired and 

2 frpm the boat 

20111. and 21st 

fine wether and gowing 

well 

22d . 

Delitefu wether thy 

Men singing bad for 

beakfast moose nose 

and bever tail saw 

tree cut by a beyer 

7 feet in curcumfr.mce 

found 3 Barr in cash left 

by Mr. Frashurand hispa= 

= rty one old one and 2 cubs 

23'1 

Stillfin w ther Mr. fras 

her on day a hed 

24th. this Morning the 

Men had to wade up 

to thare middle in wa 

= ter getting up th.e rapped 

de More ise on the till 

watur one the min 

was floged for seleing a 

common a curence 

25.th.Fine. 261h.and 27lh.the 

same 

28thpastoald mans riv 

==er had to make 2 porages 

291h.had a vue of the 

Rocke Mountens from 

a high hill Montrose wou 

oded a Muse on the shore 

it swam a cross the river 

I croused in the boat and 

finished him 

JOlh.ofOc had a fine vew 

of the Mountens from the 

boat for the first time 


33

Paul Kane. TO-MA-QUIN A ASCADE 

CHIEF 1 COLUMBIA RIVER.. December 6, 

/846. Watercolor on paper, 7 x 5 11 • Collection, 


they men gave a loud 

cheere on seeing them and 

men nearly nocked up with 

could and wet 

31.st. 

Fine wether but coald mad 

a sketch of the river and Mount 

in in the distance 

I.st. November. jaspers lake 

got to Jake Athabasca put 

3 men out on the shore for 

to liten the boat wind 

strong could not take them 

in agane had to camp on 

34 

the opisite side of the lake 

~Ft coald with snow 

could not row the boat 

wind a perfect gale the 

guide and montmus gon 

to gaspers for horsses 

to take us on. made a 

sketch of the lake with 

Meayets Rock in the dist 

ence it derives its name 

from a man by the 

name of Mea yet haveing 

smoaked a pipe while 

itting on top with hi 

feete hanging over the 

side 

3d Snowed in the night 

the guide returened 

with hors es road to 

gaspers with the gu 

= ide snowd hard crossed 

the River twise 

Mr. Lane in the boat 

arived at Gaspers the 

men with the loded 

horses the same night 

4 th Mr Lane arived in 


~.~:;" ~ "- Z'-'.,~ ~_ 

. ~er.e ... " ,h~~ .. A~,~~ 

Paul Kane. INTERIOR Of A CEREMONIAL LODGE, COLUMBIA RIVER. November. 1846. ,oil on paper, 9'/2 x II'/l'. Collection, Stark 

Museum of Art. 

the boat eat Mounten 

heepe 

5th tarted with 13loade 

Horses at 12 a.m. and campt 

at 400 in a small prarey 

m~de a sketch of this 

6Ulafter 3 - 4 our arived at 

Ie Rocks prarey campd 

here 

7 th. made a good day 

Sth.Saw mounten goats 

could not get a shot at 

them 

9th camped at the grand 

bature the snow had 

got so depe that we 

expected to tak~ t now 

shews on the 6th. the guide 

and montrous had started a 

hed and if the snow was 

to depe they ware to send 

men from boat-incampment 

to asist in takeing our 

bagage across the treese 

ware loaded with snow 

hever then I had aver 

seepe it in anney cuntrey 

lOlb..stuck fast in 2 feete 

and S inches of snow they 

Men went to work to 

make now- ew ever 

one mad fr him If 

sum ware rude affairs 

ours hor ses went back to 

jaspers and they had to 

carry hevey loads Sutch 

as a bag of pimacen 

(90 pound) and thare 

OWJl bagage 

IIUl 

We made owr first 

day on snow shews and 

made an arley incampm 

= ent I beat the track for 

half the day left evere 

The American Art Journal/Volume XXI- Number 2 

35

Paul Kane. MOUNT HOOD FROM FORT VANCOUVER. December. J846-June. 1847. Oil on paper, 8 x 13 )Is". Collection. Stark Museum 

of Art. 

thing that we could pare 

behind 0 n t to load 

the men to mutch 

12 Cometee punch boaJ 

the hed waters of the 

Athabasca and Culumba 

13 the grond coat or big 

hill whitch we found 

a good days work to 

go down we met the 

guide and 8 men who 

came across from boat 

incumpment to 

assist us a cross 

14m. 17- 25 

this rooming the first 

thing we had to do was 

to wade a River of a= 

= bout 70 yards the mor 

= ning verry coald our 

leggens siff with ise 

this day in all we 

cro:;sed 17 Rivers 

151ll. 

After leveing a good w 

arm fire I crossed the 

depest River that we 

met with on owr jur 

= ney 25 ,before bedcfa 

- st takein off owr sn 

36 

= ow- hew tocro sand 

puting them on again 

30 in all t day 

the last part the wor 

= st haven to cros a swa 

= mp of3 Miles up to owr 

neese in ise and water 

when we arived at 

boat-incumpment 

they men wore so 

glad to see us that they 

sang and danced and 

cut up all manner 

of cape res ware 

gowing to leve for 

Vancouver in 2 dayes had 

we not arived they 

haveing remaned for 

39 days they expected 

that we ware lost or 

turned back we had 

nothing to eale but 

dryed meat and not 

mutch of that the gra 

= test depth of snow 

in the mountens was 

5 or6 fete 

16 tJl 

got the conews decicy 

and imbarked I found 

theenerey the 

mo t beautifull that 

I have aver eene 

in aney cuntrey 

past the 

dall de more 

an rapped of deth. 

thare was 2 men cilled and 

eatein here from starvation thare 

cenew haveing ben lost and thare 

parvishions run out one cilled 2 

of his companions and the forth 

one ascaped our guides father 

was one of the Olen clUed 

about 8 years a go thare was 14 

persons drouned here by the 

upseting of a canew 

was 2 dayes and nights in 

they lakes snowed hard 

all night verrey cold in 

the canew:; arived at colveD 

onthe20Ul. 

n jj· 

after carreying owr canews 

across land for 2 Miles to 

avoud the Cettle falls we 

imbarced 

24th. 

the grand rapped we 

lost one of our canews 

Kane / journal

'. 

""' .~\ 

./. --.. -. 

Paul Kane. OREGON CITY SEEN ROM THEOPPOSIT SHORE BESIDE WATERFALL. January, 1847. Pencil on paper, j//2x9". Collection, 


here and verry nereley 

they lives of all that 

was on board she struck 

on a rock and turned on 

her side they men gumped 

on the upper side and 

hung on to the gunnel 

with thare hands and 

thare neese presing agenst 

the side ceeping her sleekly 

untiD the other canew came 

to thar asistance 

they haveing to throw the 

rope of the canew from a 

ledg of rocks to them 

after getting an other canou 

from CoUvil which detaind 

us a day we left for Ock 

= anagan whare we got a 

hors and cilled it they men 

eate so mutch that they 

ware sick next day 

after leving here we had no 

wood untill we pased 

walla walIa arived at va= 

ncouvr on the gth.Dece 

=mber 

This winter so coald in oragan that 

300. and 17. Horses diead at Colvil out 

of 320. Jeaveing onley 3 alive 

homed cattle not so grate preporsh 

= ion of deths, The Indians suffered gra 

=teley sum of the chiefs oned as mutch 

as UXX> to 1500 horses 

Axedunce on the Columba River 

Drownd at the Rapped St. Marton 2. 

DalI de More -------- 2. 

Le grose point - 

II. 

Rapped de prate-----, 5. 

La Shute ~--- - 1. 

Little daUs --- 26. 

Grand dalIs ---------- 15. 

Cascaid's ---- 4. 

Pourtage new ----- ---.l. 

68 

I left vancouver 00 the 251h.of 

Ma[rch 1847] 

with 2 men in a canew bound for victor 

= ia at 4 P. M. and camped at the mouth 

of the willhamed 5 mil. 

26th made a sketch of Mount st· 

Hellans fro 

= m the entrans to chalefews Lake and 

campt 3 P. M. at Coffin Rock 4 mils 

above the mouth of the Coulitz R. 

27th.Raney, smallcanew, nerely up= 

=set crossing the River met sum 1m 

=agrents bound for oesqualey campt 

8 m. from the mouth of the 

Coulitz the pines here vrry 

large 

30Jh Marchlanded 

at the companeys 

farm thare is a catholick 

mishonhere 

5 the AupriJ. 

left for nesqualey rane 

all day campt nere an 

Indain vilage Indains 

vi{Ty sivel= 

6th.:pased the mountan 

up to our horse's beUeys in 

mud the Horses so pare 

that we had to dismount 

and lede them. campt 

in the parey de bute or 

hill parey* 

7th. I NasqWllY 

Arived at asquuly 


37

Paul Kane. MOUNT ST. HELENS. March 26. 1847. {Late 1848-1856.} Oil on canvas. 18 x 29". Collection . Royal Ontario Museum. 

whare we found a canew and 

6 men wateing for us this 

is a large fann with 6.000 

shepe and 2.000 homed cat 

=tle superended by Dr. Tolmey 

made a sketch of the Nesqualy 

Chief 

8 left Nesqualy with 6 Indans 

and after paddeling all night 

arived at Fort Victoria on 

the 9 at 2 a Clock P.M. 

Victoria is on vancouvairs 

Island and 60. miles from the 

mouth of the straits and 

90 from Nesqualy got 5 

Indans here and a canew to 

viset the diffarent tribes 

liveing in the Strates first 

[At the bottom of this page, written 

upside down, is the following, 

presumably correlated to the asterisk.] 

* A prayre full of small hills Capt 

Wilk's party examened sum of 

38 

them and found nothin but 

tone in th m 

day made a travers 10 mi . 

blowing fre h campt at 

an Indan Cawa Chin vilage I here 

witne sed a strange site it 

was 2 medison men extracting the 

disese from a young womoan that 

was sick the woman was seported 

by a her mother the oaldest medison 

= man was gowing throe minspu 

= lations when I entered. He had 

a dish of water before him 

which after axtracting the disese 

he plased in the water after about 

an ours singing he gave up from 

fetege the young man throe off 

his blanc it and plased himself 

before the dish and made rome 

for me that I mite see the 

hole of the peronnance he 

then comenced jestulating in a most 

srange manner singing all the 

time while the rest cipt time 

by beating stick on a hoUow 

ub lance uch as a wooden 

di h after excerciseing himseflf 

untill the pesperiation ran down 

his boddy he made a spring 

at the young woman and 

cetching her side with his teath 

and shakeing her as I have seen 

one dog shake an other he 

then let go and sade he had 

got it. he blew into his hand 

and plased them in the water 

howlding it down for feere 

it mite jump out he then 

cot the disese with boath hands 

howlding it betwene the thumb and 

fingger of eatch hand and 

held it up for me to see it 

looked like a pese of grissal then 

one of the Indans sharpenad 

a knife and cut it in too 

a pese in eatch hand 

he thrue first I pece and then 

the other in the fire. 

I rettIrenad to vancouver on the 


Paul Kane. NISQUALLY, A VILLAGE ON PUGET SOU ND. April 7, 1847. Watercoioronpaper,5 J /8x 9'/4H. Collection, StarkMuseumo/Art. 

111h.of jun . after a pasage of 

9 day from Victoria. 

1.s1· of Jul y 1847. 11 ft VaIlCO 

= uver on my way home in compa 

= nia with Mr. Louis and 9 boats 

Mr Donald Manson of Knew Caladonia 

second in eomand. we campt 

at the Mill the first night 

Smiles. 

2d camped at the prarie de tay 

28 Mile whare the men got 

thare regal of rum cept me a 

wake all night. I left vanco 

= uver with re gret they gave 

us a salute of7 guns from 

the brig Mary Dare and 7 

more from the foart 

3d went 3 miles and campt 

at the foot of thecascaids. 

4lli.and 5th, Made the portage of the 

Cascades by the men carrying 

the gods, and draging the boats 

a cross the rocks 4.50 peees of 

85 pound eatch and 9 boats. we 

left here in the aftemon and 

camped 7 miles while here 

2 Sandwitch Islanders deserded 

thare was a boat unloded and 

ent back to the cascaid to 

intersept them the boat ret 

urened without them next mo 

= ming the ChiefTom .. a-quin 

came to our cap with them 

he had 3 Indians in the canew 

with him eatch with thare 

nifes in thare hands while 

padde&ing he tould that the 

arived at hi campt at nig 

= ht he asembeled a large partey 

of indians and suroun 

= ded them they Is landers tho 

= ught they ware to be cilJed 

and gave themselfs up I asked 

him if he was not afIered of 

them he sade that it was 

onley the white chiefs that 

he was atrered of we' gave 

him 4 bankets and 4 shurts. 

These men get thare out 

= fit to the value of 10. 

they left thure bagage 

in each at the Cascaids 

61h Arived at a low marchey plase 

andcampt 

71h passed the Methedist mishon of 

Mr Wacker andaJ and comen 

= ced the poartage of the Dall 

they boat ware c.aniad by 

the Indian 30 to a boat. 

and receved .5 ball and pouder for 

eatch boat. at this plase the cuntry 

comences to be barran and devested 

of wood grnte quantites of salmon 

~cothere 

SID. Arived at the Shutes we found 

amence quantaties ofIndian 

here theycanied our boats ac 

= ross we had to by wood from 

them to cooke with this is the 

plase whare the man with the 

tin box was shot (Astoria) 

911l.Ieft the Shoots with a 

srong fare wind they boats 

ran up the rappeds under 

sale oure boat had the water 

curling over her bows and 

would have filled her if we 

had not taken in sale c.ampt 

whare the Indians are sed to be 

grate theves. 

IO.th. We cilled a grate menny rattle 

Snakes 


39

Paul Kane. SAW-SE-A, A COWICHAN CHIEF, STRAIT OF GEORGIA. ApriL 9, 1847. {Late /848-/856.J Oil on canvas, 25 x 20". 

olleclion. Royal Ontario Museum.

111h. very hot sum of they Indians 

followed us a long distance I borro 

= wed a horse of one of them and 

rod the along the river. 

12 arived at wau a walla 

a small mud fort in the most 

barran cuntry I evar saw 

131h. was furnished with horses 

by Mr. Mcbane and left for the interour 

went 

throe a barran sandy cuntry 

with out a drop of water in 

it untill wy arived at the River 

Tucba whare we found Father 

jochet who had left waUa walla 

the night before on his way 

to his mishon of the Cour de 

lane we campt here 

JAth.left at 5 this morning for the 

river Nepersey and arived at 12 

a distance of 30 m. no water 

all day. a good plase for a 

persion with the Hidrafoba 

this. found sum Indians who 

carried owr bagage a cross the 

river in a canew and swam 

our horses, the chief of this 

plase tould me that thare was 

a fall up the paluse River 

and he would gide me to it 

after haveing got about 8 or to 

miles up the bed of the river 

over rocks and bruch 

all moast inacsesable he st 

=oped at a foard and would 

go no further unless I would 

gave him a blanket he 

though he had me in his 

and could not find the way 

I plunged unto the river 

and tould my man to fo 

= llow I had not go mor 

=e the a mile when he 

came after and gided us 

to the plase through 

one of the moast strang 

=e looking plases I have 

aver seen we campt here 

for the night 

ll. we left our incampment 

for the upper faU in the 

after noon we had to get out 

by a Coulay or vaUy clime 

ing over rocks ledeing 

our horses after asending 

about 500 feet we ganed 

the top on gowing 6 m we 

arived at the uper fall 

whare we campt of the night 

16th remaned here aU day 

17111 arived at the Neper 

=seyon our way back 

sorrey to leve such a 

picteresk cuntrey saw 

a large band of fine horses 

which belonged to Chief 

that was ded his frinds did not use them 

l&1tl Started for nor Whitmans 

did not know the rode inteanstey 

hot went 30 miles with out 

water and rested for an our 

at the Tushay left her and wnt 

20 m. saw a grove of bushes thou 

ght to find water and found the 

Streeme dry disapointed rode to and 

arived at Dr. W. on the waUa walla 

20th.· I left for waUa waUa I 

remaned here for a few days and 

returned to Dr W. on my returen 

the Dr wished me to take a 

dog of Mr. McBanes down with. 

me I left after beackfast the 

dog following me the day was 

dredfull hot on gowing a bout 

8 m. I found the dog was so 

warm that he could not go 

I put him on the hors but 

that would not do and let 

him down again when the pure 

brute laide down and died 

absalutely burned to deth 

in the hot sand. A gentaIman 

tould me that he saw a rattl 

=e snake burned to a sinder 

in trying to pass from one 

small bush to an other in not more 

then to yards nere waUa waUa. 

29. th lift walla waUa for 

Collvil by the way of the Grand 

Colay on hors back pased the 

Nepersey swiming the horses 

and camped 20 m from w. w. 

my man says that he dus not 

know the rode. 

30th Went 30 m. and caped. 

lost my pistules the man want back for it 

31st. Crosed part way of the first 

grate bend found my hors bad 

live on dried salmon camped at 

a smaIl streme 35 m. afferied 

to go further not find water 

I . .st.Suffared for want of water 

breackfasted at a brackish 

lake filled with pealacuns 

and ducks, water greene with 

thare dung, came to a verry 

sault lake comenceed drink 

ing before I was a ware of 

it. loose sand in grate 

mountains hard for the hor 

=ses campt 45 in at a small 

PQnd had to strane the wter 

2Q I woke up this morning and 

found sumthing coald and cammey 

agenst my leg thru the blanket 

off and found a reptile of the 

lisarde sphus but mutch 

larger whow had ben my com 

=pmniuon durring the night 

lost the way among perpund.iklar 

rocks which seemed imposible 

to pass we led down our horses 

throe a guile and up thee other 

side with grate difacoltay 

the hors with the lode fell 

down the rocks which I tho 

= ught would have cilled him 

it would had he ben other 

then an indian horse, after 

pasing here I made for su 

= m high banks of rock have 

= ing know rock, I rode a hed 

to see wat this plase was 

I could not get nere for 

the high walls of basalt 

on my return I could not 

find my man for 2 ours he 

was verry mutch frite 

=ned whin I cume up I found 

sum water whare I had my 

brakefast in an old Indian 

camp I tuck thare trate 

from here not knowing 

whare I was gowing. I fwl 

= oed it untill I truck the 

Columba as I thought but 

what was my surprise 

when I found it to be wi 

=thout water I then Knew it 

to be the Grand Coliee 

I wnt throe it for to m 

and came in aU 35. m I found 

this plase to be the formor 

arm of the Columba its botturn 

is aboute 600 feet above the 

levill of the Columba and 

is walled in with 

perpendicaler Baseltect 

rocks every 5 or 6 miles I found 

a coald spring of water, quite ref 

= reching after what I had suffer 

=ed for want of it. this morning 

my man set fire to the parle wh 

ich we breckfased in which 

came vrry nere burning owr 

horses. had we not got it under 

we ware at the time waUed 

in by high rocks and onley 

one narrow pass to get out 

3d August 

we left the Coulay this afterno 

=one and came once more on 

the banks of the Columba 

saw 2 Indians floating down 

the river on a small raft 

we haled them as they ware 

the first we had seene for 

4 days thy came om shore 

and we enquired the rode to 

Colvill which they gave us to 

understand was 10 days by 

the shore we dismessed them 

with a pese of toboco each 

campt on the river. 

4th. continiude along the shore 

untill we came to sum perpan 

dickelar rock which jutted out 

into the river we atemted to as 

The American Art lournal/ Volume XXI • Number 2 

41

Paul Kane. RETURN OF A WAR PARTY. April. 1847. {Late 1848-1856.} Oil on canvas. 18 x 29". Collection. Royal Ontario Museum. 

= end by a bed of luse rocks 

that extended for about 500 

up wards the rock moun 

-tan bing 1400feete 

that we had to climb when 

about 300. feet I stoped and sente the 

man a hed to see if he could find 

an opening to get out at the top 

while he was gon the Horse that 

he led came up the hill of his one 

acorde and put his sholder under 

the lode that the pack horse 

was with defacoltia standing under 

to assist him know dought we 

had to return about 10 m. and as 

= ended to the top throe a wilde 

and pictureck cuntree after a long 

sircut we made the Columbia again 

opiset to the mouth of a small 

river whare thare was sum Indi 

= ans camped who advised us to 

cross over and gow on that side 

as it was the shortest we tuck 

thare advise. they swam our ho 

rses a cross and camped the Indians 

gave us frish Salmon and berrys 

42 

lost my salt fish not good with 

out salt Indans cinde verry 

.ith left with an Indian as guide 

all day nothing but mountains 

to gow up and down made a 

long day and camped nere the Co 

= lumbia 

6!!!- started areley to arive at col 

= vill before night. Came to a high 

hill overlooking the Columbia and 

sat down to injoy the prospect 

the wind blew frish thought 

I felt the hill muve gumed up 

thinking that the hole hill 1000 fee 

would be tembeled into the river 

below but on examening I found 

that nature had adepted the treese 

to the soyl and gave to each tree 

longer and more rutes then this 

would have required in a deper 

soyl there fore when treese ware 

muved by the wind the whole 

erth was muved by the long rutes 

I arived below the Cettle falls in 

the evening and swam my Horses 

a cross the river glad to see Mr. Louis 

once more. I remaned here untill the 

9th of September when I viseded 

Mr. Walkers and Ealls mishon (60 m.) 

whare I was moast cindeley 

receved I viseted the spocan 

in compey with Mr. Walker 

returned to Colvil on the 16.th.and 

left here for the mountan on 

the 22 ~ of September in charge of 

2 boats to mete the express from 

the other side of the mountains 

Weansday the 22d of September L P. M. 

fine wether camped above Days 

J ncampment 

23 Pased the littee Dalls, the men had to 

Climb over high rocks with the rope to 

pull 

the boat up the rapped 

24lli.Shot the largest wolf I ever saw 

trying to swim a cross the river 

scined him 

25th.Rane and a sail wind entered the 

Lakes 2 P.M. 

261h hevey rane in the night heavy mist 

for 

the last 3 mornings 

Kane/ Journal

Paul Kane. MEDICINE MAN WITH MASK FROM STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA. April. 1847. Oil on paper, 7 3 /4 x jl/2". 

Collection. Stark Museum of Art.

." 

Paul Kane. OLD COX, A SANDWICH 

ISLANDER OF THE HUDSON'S BAY 

COMPANY. 1847. Watercolor on 

paper, 5 x 7". Collection, RoyalOntario 

Museum. 

tf}/~ Cu'l" , 

10.-1 .eo.. .. t. ... 4 .;.J. {--.4.OA./ 

',%.. h'I-;J f ....

Paul Kane. PEO-PEO-MOX-MOX, THE YELLOW SERPENT, A WALLA WALLA CHIEF. Juiy 12,1847. /Late 1~/856.J Oil on canvas, 30 

x 20". Collection, Royal Ontario Museum.

Paul Kane. LOWER FALLS ON THE PELOUSE RlVER.July 14,1847. Watercolor on paper, 5 J/2x9 J/4". Collection, Stark Museum oJ Art. 

rane, the river rose 12 or 15 inshes 

in the night, Strange to see after a 

rane in the valley of the river that 

it has ben snowing on top of the surou 

ding Mountains 

~ Fine morning started a boan our sa 

= w Carabou got a fine vue of the rocke 

Mountains pased the daU de More. this 

raped derives its name from 3 men 

an eraquay (the Father of the guide that 

I crossed the Mountains with) and 2 

French men Pellaw, the other, doant 

know 

they ware gowing down with the Expr 

=ess and had arived at mouth of the river 

S ~ Martin they had to lowr thare boa 

= t down with a roap, the boat got 

a shere and ran outside of a rock 

the Men not strong anuph to holl 

her back they let go the roap the 

boat went down the rapped and 

was dashed to peses they men loosing 

thare provishions blankets and ever 

- y thing. they had, they had know alter 

46 

= native but prosede on foot they 

could not go along the shore for the 

rocks that progect into the river 

at intervills so the tuck to the ba 

=ck cuntrey over high mountains 

after proseding for 2 or 3 days witho 

= ut anney thing to eate, one of the m 

=en got affrade and deserted 

nothing ben her 

= d of him after, the Eraquay and Pallaw 

proseded on untill the arived at the 

da1l de More, whare they layed down 

to Sleap in the night the Eraqua got 

up and nocked the brains out of the 

others, next morning went to work 

in true Indian stile to cut the bodd 

= y up into thin slises and dry it 

after making his mete up into a pac 

= k he proseded on his jumey after 

proseding for several days he arived 

at a part of the river not so ra 

= ped whare he made a raft of dri 

= ft wood and bound it together 

with willows he plased his mete 

on this and put a pese of burch 

bark on top which he sat apon 

he pased threw the river and nerley 

thrugh the second lake wen he mit 

a canew and 3 Indians from the Spok 

= an Fort whough ware sent to asist 

them with prvisions, they asked wha 

=re his companions ware he infonned 

them of thare axedent and said that 

1 had deserted him and the 

other had died of starvation he embar 

= ked in the Canew in shoveing ofIfrom 

the raft one of the Indians said that 

the pese of bark on the raft would 

do for him to knele apon and went 

to take it, whin the Eraqua shoved the 

raft away apering rather confused this 

gave rise to sespishion the Indian 

paddeled up to the raft and tuck 

the bark when he saw the dried mete 

they enquired whare he got it he 

said he had cilled a Carrubue swiming 

a cross the river the Indians apered 

satesfied but on axemening the 

Kane I J oumal

Paul Kane. A RIVER VIEW NEAR FORT WALLA WALLA. July, /847. Watercolor on paper, 5 1 /2 x 9 1 //'. Collection, Royal Ontario 

Museum. 

Jt 

Paul Kane. THE WHITMAN MISSION AT WAIILATPU. July /8-22, 1847. Pencil on paper, 5 1 /2 x 9 1 //'. Collection, Royal Ontario 

Museum.

Paul Kane. MISSION STATION OF WALKER AND EELLS, SPOKANE RIVER. September 9, /847. Watercolor on paper, 5 3 /s x 9 3 /8". 

Collection, Stark Museum of Art. 

mete they found a part of the foot 

of a man one of the Indians put the mete 

in his sack they traveled on for 3 days 

and Knights without camping on 

the 39 they ware so exosted that 

they put a shore to sleap one was 

I~ft to cepe watch but he went 

to slepe to, the Eroqua in the night 

got up and tuck the sack that 

had the mete in and thrugh it in 

the river with all it contained in 

the morning the sack was mo whare 

to be found, they proseded on to the 

spocan Fort whare they gave the 

Eraqua up to Mr MC.Mullin who 

was in charge the, Eraqua was sent off 

know dought to sum more distant 

poast 

we gumed the boats this afternoon 

In the fall of 1838. an axedint acurad 

whare 11 persons 

ware dround here 

71h.A stite rane all day 

8th.· fine and clear saw carrabue bre 

= ckfasted at the Rappe S t Maran 

9th.. went but a short distanse to day 

having to cut our way through the 

timber that had fallen 

48 

across the banks of the. River 

I ()1li Saw the tracks human feet 

in the sand and was astonished 

as know Indians live here or 

seldom cum to this part arived 

at Coumpmont de Barge at 2 

P.M. whare we comenced makeing 

our in campment 

IIth.nothing ofimportence 

12th. they men cut a lobstick 

of a Ill. feet and I was requested 

to put my name on it as 

it was intended forme, our 

little partey then turned out 

and fired 3 rounds and gave 

3 cheers in oner of thure 

Bu~hway as I was called 

~ nothing 

J.@ rain all day 

.L5l!! fine no game 

J.6.!!!. sum of the largest 

flakes of snow I ever saw 

expect to cross on snow sews 

on my arival here I found 

my oald friend Cappow Blaug 

=h the Shew shwopp Chief he had 

a grate quantate of dried mea 

=t I got sum and bever tails 

17th. hard frost found a 

conew in cach came down 

the river they men though 

it was the bregade coming 

..l.8M! hard frost 

~snow 

20th. 2 men and 2 Indians 

leve for the point de boan 

to cut a road for the inc 

=umans 

21 st... for sum time the tops 

of the mountains have ben 

covered with clouds know 

ch~ce to cketch them 

22a a month from Col vii 

and know brigade 

230 fine and coald 

24th. Prew, Sanschcay and 

Lefrombeys agree to start 

with me tomorrow a cro 

= s~ the Mountains on foot 

2511l. the men hav declin 

=ed to start for want of 

Mockisens 

2.6..th coald ise made 2 inshes 

in the night. they men have 

tried every expedant to bring 

the brigade sutch as making 

a cross and derecting the arm 

Kane / Journal

, I < 

Paul Kane. ASK-A-WEELISH (CHIEF OF THE LAKES) AND SEEPAYS (CHIEF OF THE WATERS). September. /847. Watercolor on 

paper. 5 1 /4 x 8 7 /8". Collection. Stark Museum of Art. 

Paul Kane. PAINTED FACES OF CHUALPA YS WOMEN DANCERS, FORT COLVILE. September. /847. Watercolor on paper. 5 '/2 x 9'/8". 

Collection. Stark Museum of Art.

Paul Kane. THE LITTLE DALLES. October 2, 1847. Watercolor on paper, 5 '/2 X 9 1 /2". Collection, Stark Museum of Art. 

in the way they are expected 

another sign if the Mune 

pases c10as to such a star 

thy bregade will be here 

tomonnow and acording to 

the distance so they gudge 

of time they may arive 

21th. set 6 martin traps and 

one steel found in cash. 

28th. the long expected brigade 

have arivd at last Mr. Mc Kin 

= zey and the the guide with infonna 

= tion that Mr. Low and his pa 

= rtey will be here tomorrow 

22!!!: Mr Low arived safe 9 days 

in crossing 

30th. Mr Low left for vancouver 

with 4 boats. I am preparing to 

leve to morow with 4 half breed 

= es for the east side of the moun 

= tains 

31.st A fine day started at II ocl 

in the morning after packing IS, 

horses out of 56 which Mr Low 

brought a cross the mountains 

camped in the Grand bature know 

snow, dredfull road in the points 

() 

of woods from somenny sorses [horses] 

gon over it sutch a 

short time before 

1.st of Novmber 

pased throe the Point de boan 

about 10 m. my hors got into 

mud hole whare thare was 

nuthing seene but his 

hed by the asistans of one of 

the men I got him out 

a live. what with they 

horses sticking in the mud 

packs falling off, they men 

hollowing in Cree and swaring 

in french (thare is know oaths 

in the Indian languiges) I nev 

=er pased sutch a day camped 

at the bottum of the Grand Coat 

2nd was up one our before day 

asended the Grand Coat the 

snow getting deper as we as 

=ended one hors fell down a 

pressapis of 25 or 30 feet with 

a hevvy load and never hurt 

him selph or disaranged the 

load on his back, pased the 

Punch Bowl (rather coald 

Punch at present) though 

sun is shining vrry bright 

My bard is one mass of ise 

Camped at the Campmaw de 

fusee after dark had to come 

here for foode for the horses 

snow being to depe for them 

higher up. from the top of 

Grand Coat Genta1mans 

wife straid a way from 

a partey she was crosing 

with and was never herd 

of after though everry exertion 

was made the trased her 

steps to the river whare 

it is seposed she lost her 

way and tried to cross, feU 

in and was dround 

3d last knigh was the coal 

=dest I ever camped out, 

tried to wach myselph 

the water frose in one 

mas on my hare and beard 

though I was standing c10as 

to a large fire, pased the 

Grand Bature the snow 

decreesing as we desended 

camped at the Campmaw 

de Renall. 


Ti.#.7/FKrR7&4 .lit 

Paul Kane. BOAT ENCAMPMENT. October /0, /847. Watercolor on paper, 5 1 /4x8 3 /i'. Collection, Stark Museum of Art. 

It is strange to see the water 

running boath ways from the Punch 

Bowl 

@It is strange that I have 

not taken a mele in day light 

sence I left boat incampment 

we have to travl boah late 

and arley for feere of being 

set fast by the snow as 

it sumtimes falls to the 

depth of25 feet, we went ove 

= r a strang loking cuntrey 

to day it loks as if sum dre 

=dful huracain had nocked all 

the treese down throughing 

them in every direction thro 

=ugh the fallen timber thare 

is a younger grough that it 

makes it all moast imposa 

= ble to get throught it 

camped at the Grand Traver 

= s whare thare is 3 men to 

asist us a cross with a boat 

we expect to cross on the horses 

i!!! Crossed the Grand Travrs 

in a hevey snow stonn this 

morning and found the wter 

just pasable for the horses 

pased Ie Rocks prarie and 

camped at the same plase 

I had cam~d at a year a 

=go the 5th.. of November, 1846. 

6th. this morning the wind 

is blowing intensley coald 

had to pass along the shore 

of a lake the wind blowing 

the drift snow in our 

fases pasing the fulllinth 

of lake (6 or 8 m.) we had 

to all walk to ceape our 

= selfs warm my beard got 

so matted together with ise 

that I could not open 

my mouth and with difacel 

= ta breath through my no 

=se stoped at the lodge of 

one of my men and got th 

=aughed out arived atjas 

=pers House 4 P.M. 

jaspers sitteuwated at the east 

side of the Mountains though it 

is soarended by them and is sub 

= ject to high winds it is cep 

=t as a hors poast thare are 

but few Indians here what are 

here are Shew-shops the mou 

= ntain shepe ware verry nu 

= meress while I was here I ha 

= ve seene from the house no 

less then 5 bands of them 

at a time they men of the 

plase ware bringing them 

inn every day I made a sketch 

of a rams hed intended for 

the Govemer. I wated here for 

they men to make a sled and 

snow sews they had to gow a 

days march for the wuoad to 

mak them otT (burch) and 

the river to freese harder. 

Mr Frasher lent me a dod sled 

and with 3 of the companeys we 

started on the. 

~ofNovember. 

went but about 12 m. and cam 

= ped at a hunters lodgs the fam 

= aley of himself wife an oald woman 

and 5 children the hunters wife 

made a good bed of mountain cheap 

skins which was the best I have 

had for menney months the hun 

= ter returned late in the evening 


51

cd7.l1·· . ... •: 

~t.: .' . ~ . ". -" l '( i '3 " 

"':'- • .. ~ r- .i:" ; I I "" .. I . , 

Paul Kane. SELF-PORTRAIT. November /, /847. Oil on paper, 8,/8 X 6 5 /8". Collection, Stark Museum of Art.

-;.:i(? / 

13. 60::: 

, 

.n f Jt/ ,;~ ~ ~.tuI.u. ~-' L e " 

raw 'L 4." L 17/.1 r _,.... 

-_~ ___"--____..........________________ 

Paul Kane. JASPER HOUSE. November 6, 1847. Waterco[oronpaper, jl/4X8 7 /s". Collection, Stark Museum of Art. 

haveing cilled 4 cheape we made 

a hartey supper n the coars 

of the night he entertained us 

with sories of his various hunts 

he saw to day 34 cheap the cun 

=trie abounds in cheap from 

the wether haveing ben so 

coald it has drove them 

from the interiour 

16th. I hav not slept so 

comfortabl for a long time as 

I did last night pased through 

jaspers Lake (12 m) the wind 

blew a perfect gale fortunut 

=eley in our faver with a per 

=fect cloud of drift snow it 

sent the sled along witho 

= ut the asistans of the dogs 

on leveing the lake we had 

to put on our snowshews 

caI\lped below the Lake 3 m. 

17U( 

started in good spiretes 

which ware sune to be dam 

=ped we found the ise verry 

bad one of the men had to 

push the sled along with a 

stick to help they dogs in 

the after none haveing got on 

to a bad pese of ise I went 

through the strenth of the 

cUl·ant caning me nerley 

under the ise whare I must 

have drowned I got my men 

to camp fore my cloas ware 

frosen stiff on the instant 

~ 

missfortians never com 

single we found this morning 

that the dog that Mr. Fraser 

lent me had deserted and 

gon back though we had 

tied them everry night he 

had nawed the coard in 

too in the night this may co 

= as me to leve my trunk 

behind pased the Grand 

raped at the bottum of 

which was emence mass 

=es of ise called Burdenaws 

in sum parts of the river 

this formed sutch barlors 

that it seemed at first 

imposable to pass we 

ware oblged to carry long 

stick and feele every step 

we tuck never putting our 

foot down without firs 

feeleing whether it was solid 

or not, one of the men went out of 

sight through one of these 

unconsoladted masses of ise 

we have had a hard way of it 

my feete verry sore 

19th. this morning had to 

go through the woods to av 

=oud the water that overfto 

=ad the ise the bruch and fall 

=en timber was so thick tha 

= t we had to cut a road 

for they dogs and was about 

a half a day gowing a half 

a mile we again got on to 

the burdanaws this day has 

beep one of perfect misria 

20lb. last night was so coald 

that I could not slepe and 

this morning I had mal de ra 

= cket so bad that at times 

I thought I should faint 

mall de rackett is common 

among those that are not 

acustumed to walking on 

snow shews you get it in 


53

Paul Kane. CUN-NE-WA-BUM, ONE THAT LOOKS AT THE STARS. December, 1847. [Late /848-1856.] Oil on board, 24 x 19". 

Collection. Royal Ontario Museum. Although not mentioned in the journal. Cun-ne-wa-bum. a half-breed Cree woman. 

supposedly danced with Paul Kane at the Christmas /847 ball at Fort Edmonton (Wanderings of an Artist [/39]).

Woman's dress, Plains Cree, c. 184Os. EJkhide 

decorated with porcupine quiJ[work, trade 

cloth, beadwork, and fringing. Northern 

Plains, Fort Edmonton area. This dress was 

worn by Cun-ne-wa-bum in her portrait (see 

opposite page) and is one o/the many Native 

American objects collected by Paul Kane. Collection, 

Manitoba Museum o/Man & Nature, 

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. 

the instep and feeles vrry 

mutch as if the boans ware 

brock and the brcken ends 

ware grateing together at 

evry step, in the night the 

river got darned up below 

which caused the ise to be 

throughed up in such emense 

mases that I thought that 

it would cum into our in 

= campment it was acompen 

= ed with a tremendious noys 

21 st Snow all day 

22d. came to Bateseis River 

half way which we had to 

go a long ways up to cross 

it being open water at the 

mouth provishions getting 

scarse could not feede the 

dogs my guide tells me 

that they will live a month 

without eateing. 

230 found the snow verry 

de~ 

24lh. went thrugh the woods 

to avoid the open water and 

had to let our sled down 

a stepe bank with a rope 

and threw they dogs after 

it op to the ise 

25th. camped arleiar then 

ushial could not pass ov 

=er the luse ise nor asend 

the stepe bank 

~ wore snow shews to 

cross the brken ise our 

dogs went and ware nere 

caried under sled and all 

the guide fortunatley had 

a hoald of a coard behind 

which saved them from 

gowing down in cutting po 

=ints found the snow verrey 

depe 

The American Art Journal/VoLume XXI • Number 2 

55

Paul Kane. FRAN~OIS LUCIE, A CREE HALF-BREED GUIDE.. January, /848. Oil on paper, J07/8 x 81/4". Collection, Stark Museum 

of Art.

Paul Kane. WINTER TRAVELLING IN DOG SLEDS (A WEDDING PARTY LEAVING FORT EDMONTON). January 8, /848. [Late 1848-1856. J 

Oil on canvas, /9 x 29". Collection, Royal Ontario Museum. 

21th fell through the ise 

to day and traveled alI day 

in my frosen cloths dare 

not stand still for feere 

of free sing anchious to get 

on would not stop to dry 

my selph 

zs.th nothing to eate find 

my feete sore from beeing 

cut with the ise that a cu 

= mulait in my mockisen's 

often found a cake of ise 

the sise of my foot inside 

my stocking 

arived at Fort Asneboin 

made a hartey mele on wh 

= ite fish which Mrs. Broza got 

readdey for us the fish here are 

the best I aver eate I remaned 

here for 2 days to recrute and 

left on horsback for Edmonton 

I have never seene the rabets 

so numares in aney other part 

of the cuntrey we found the track 

depe with snowalIthough. 

sleds had past a few days 

before. arived at Edmunton on the 

forth day, whare I was reseved by 

Mr. Haritt with the gratest 

cindness Edmunton is a large Fort 

witch has about 50 men it supuli 

=es to other Forts about a 1000 

bags of pimecon. they cilled this winter 

700 

Buffalo for thare one cunsum 

tion which are cept in ise alI 

summar. they have know a mill 

and grow grate quanteties of grane 

of every description. 

I spent a pleasant winter here gow 

=ing out hunting buffalo acasanley 

the last time with Fransway Lucie 

when we had to crawle for about 200 

yeards in the open plane if the buf 

=falo should tum at such a time it 

would spoil our hunting for a 

while, one of our men made the 

Calf nere to a large bull and cow 

the cow started for the man 

but the bull understood the 

trick and tried to stop her 

by runing betwene her and the 

man at last the cow doged him 

and came c10as anuph the man 

fired and cilled her, the bull came 

up at the same instant and 

tried to rase her up nor could 

we friten him a way we had to 

cill him to get the cow 

I left Edmonton on the 8 of jan [1848] 

bound for Fort Pitt our party consisted of 

Mr. J. Rown 

and his better half whough he 

had aspoused 2 days before 

and 6 men on leveing Edmonton we 

had 46 dogs, we ware acompened 


57

for the first day by a Mr. Prude 

nee (uncia to the bride) and 

Fmnsis Loucie on sleds 

Traveled all day on the river saw 

6 large bands of buffalo cilled 

a fat cow for supper for OUT 

- selfs and dogs we brought nothing 

with us to eate had to 

trust to the gun for a dinner 

not even a pinch of salt 

this family thinking It would be quite 

unvoygure like 

to travel with aney thing like 

cumfort, we campt arley 

as we had no breackfast on leve 

= ing the Fort. 

9Ul. left 3 ours before day and after 

cilling 2 Buffalo breckasted snow 

all day blew verry coald, we left 

the river and pased over 

a wide and open prarie whare 

the wind had fool forse campd 

in a clump of pines wich we 

wore tould would be our last 

good incmpment cilled 2 Buffalo 

more 

1OUl. verry coald before day in 

the caniall know woods to 

protect you, had to walk all 

day to prevent from freesing 

snow depe know rode our 

guide found know diffacoltey in finding 

his way over this trackless desa 

= art the drift snow alImost 

blinding cilled 3 Buffalo in 

all to day without leveing our strate 

course camped in an oald 

Blackfoot camp that had ben 

fortefide in case of an atack 

.lllh. Made an arley start the, 

wether clere and coald, saw but 

few Buffalo met 2 men on thare 

to Edmonton from Carlton cilled 

but one Buffalo camped among 

popelar's had to slepe on dry 

willos 

l2!!! got on the river again 

had not anuph mete for all hands 

sum of the men went on ah 

= ed while we remained for bra 

= kefast when we came up to 

them sum 2 ours after we found 

them over a good fire with 

a fat cow alongside of them 

the tit bits of which they ware 

disc using, cilled 3 cows in all 

carI)ped on the bank of the river 

.lJ.!!!. Started at half past one 

followed the track of the Buffalo 

along the river our Carialles ware 

often upset in the depe Buffalos tra 

= ck, we cilled 3 bufalo on the bank 

of the river whare we stoped for 

brakefasted thare ware 2 year oald ca 

= Ifs that I rernanied within a 100 

yeards of our fire all the time 

we ware at backfast, the 

8 

dogs are all cept tied, left the 

river went through a cucseshion 

on hill and vally untill dark 

when we arived at an Indian 

camp of about 40 lodge's we 

went to the Chiefs lodge (the 

Broken arm) who reseved vrry 

Cindley after supper the Chief 

presented me with a hansum 

stone pipe, the lodg was sune 

filled with Indians to here the 

nuse among the rest of our vis 

= eters was the suninlaw of the 

Chief. and acording to the Indin 

Custum tuck his sete with his ba 

= ck to his father and motherin 

= law never adressing them but 

throe a third parley, but when 

they have cilled an enamey 

with white hare they have the 

prevealoge of adressing them the 

con ware a dress trimed with 

human hare I remarked that 

one of his legins was spoted 

and the other plane and was 

tould that he had ben wou 

== nded in the spoted leg the 

spots ware to indecate blood 

.M.!h Started late prosedieng 

through an undulating cuntrey 

untill we arived at an other 

incamprnent of 30 lodes our 

dogs driveing through the 

lodges with about 200 Indian 

dogs after them barking and 

howling upseting the sleds and 

braking the carions it was a half 

owr before we could disingage our 

dogs and sleds from among the lodg 

= es !hare is a buffalo pond here 

arived at Fort Pitt in the evening 

cilled 2 Bufalo to day. Cilling betwene 

Edmonton and Fort Pitt 17, at this 

Fort Buffalo have ben cilled in 

=sude the Foort gates, this winter. they 

ware never known so numares 

before I remaned here for 20 days 

returened by the same convonce 

in 6 days. my next trip was 

to the Mountain Hous, 

On the 22d of May Mr. Low 

Mr. de Merse bisup of vancuvers Island 

Paul Froshur and 

the 2 boys I left with Colin Frasher 

arived. 

Th. May the 25th. left Edmonton 

with 23 boats saw grate quant 

= iteys of ded Bufalo along the 

beach last winter the snow was 

so depe that thousands died 

of stavation I have counted 

in site at one time no less 

thep 18 drifted all night 

26Ul. 

saw Buffalo swiming a cross 

gowing to south as the do evry 

spring and returen in the fall 

to the woods 

27th Arived at Fort Pitt rema 

= ned 2 days and left on the 

M. 29lb..amence quantities ofwo 

= lfs eating the carkies of the ded 

Buffaloshotseverals~g 

a cross the river 

2d of june 

saw a large partey of Indian 

which proved to be a ware 

parley of Blackfeete, Bood 

Indians, Sursees, Grovants, 

Paganes, to the amount of 

500. we had a Cree in one 

of the boats, who lucky for 

him hid himself under one 

of the boat covers before 

they came up. we put asho 

= re Mr Harett and myselph 

went up to them they colected 

all thare arms and lade them 

down before Mr. H. and tould 

him that they ware in serch 

of the Creese or Asne boins 

that the ware as numeris as 

the grass in the planes that 

they ware part of 1200. tents 

that ware then piching on 

towards Edmonton. they ware 

all well mounted and anne 

= d after giveing about 25 or 

30 pound of toboca among 

them the imbarcked, but we 

had to put ashore for ano 

=ther partey that fonoed us 

for about 20 Miles 

3d snowed all day could not 

prpsede 

4Ul. Arived at Carlton whare 

Mr. de Merce tuck horses for 

Red river a distance of 16 days 

the Indians here all tuck to 

the woods on hereing of the 

Blackfeete 

M 5th.. of june left Carlton saw no 

m

Paul Kane. MEDICINE PIPE-STEM DANCE (BLACKFOOT). June, 1848. Oil on paper, 93/4 x 12 1/4". Collection, Stark Museum of Art.

Paul Kane. BRIGADE OF BOATS. July 26, /848.[ Late /~/856.J Oil on canvas. /8 x 29". Collection. Royal Ontario Museum. 

House whare I found 

Sur G. Simson and his Counsal 

transacting thare aneul bisne 

= ss I remaned here untill the 

M. 24th.. of july and left with 

Mr McKinsey with 5 boats 

caqlped 5 m. below the Fort 

25m: 

Breckfasted at the little island 

pased the spder Islands (these nand 

are enfested with spiders) and 

camped at point de Tramble or 

papeler point 

26th.. left with a strong brese 

which freshined into a perfect 

gale the Genta1man in charge 

made sines to the guide (whose 

boat I was in) to put in for 

the shore, the Majer could 

stand the battel of Coruna 

(whare he was wounded) but 

the swells of Lake Winapeg 

60 

completely upsitt, him, but 

the guide did knot seeme to 

understand the signal and 

cept on his strate coarce 

through a moast tremendous 

swell sum of our Indians 

ware seesick, put in to Bar 

=eings river staid all the rest 

of the day wind bound 

27th. lite wind brackfasted at 

sturgun river and camped 

at rabbet point pigons 

pleJ)ty cilled 2 skunks here 

28.t1l. Wind bound untill 2 

o c Camped at the dogs hed. 

the Indians which our crew 

consisted of. made ajonggalrer 

or medison lodge which con 

sistest of8 or 10 poles ben 

drove in the ground in a sercal about 

10 feete high, the sircal is about 

3 feete in surcumfarance and covered 

over with skins a 

the mediseon man gets in 

=side with a rattle and come 

= nces his incantation to the 

Grate Spirit you are aloude 

to ask aney questhion you think 

fit on paing a small pese of 

tobaca the mane obgect is to 

get a fare wind, after singing 

and shakeing the lodg for abo 

ut 2 ours he anounced that 

he saw 5 boats with thare 

sale set which was greted with 

a grunt by those out side I 

asked whare the caneus of Sur J 

Richerdson ware of a time he tould 

me that he saw them at a san 

=dy point we had pased 2 days 

before sum enquired for thare 

fameleys, sum he saw eateing 

Sturgon, sum at one thing and 

sum at another. The Mager 

is a ferm belever in thare mo 

=diseon, he tould me that a can 

Kane/ Journal

=adain had th temerata to peep 

LInder the sking of the lodg 

but he got such a frite that 

he never got farlie over it 

next morning we had a fare win 

= d which they attribeted to thare 

coqgering. 

29m. started with a fare wind 

and breckfasted at Lune nar 

= rows camped at buffalo hed 

3D.!!! Breckfasted at the point 

mitassandarivedatFort 

Alexander at 10. Dc this plase pro 

cured 250. bushels of rise 

from the Indians this year 

they pay one third of a pint of 

rum for a bushal rise can 

=not be got without rum 

this Fort is at the mouth of the 

river 

3d August left here with 4 boats and 

30 men 27 of which ware Indians 

2 Canadans and I Orkey man made 

a portage the raped 8 feete 12. Dc, litened 

the boats and 

halled them up with the line. made 

a portage at fall of the Pransin 

Horses or silver fall 20 feete high and 

camped here. 

we had a small fleete a caneus 

fawlloing us with the Indians 

wifes and childran. 2 of our 

men asked pennishion to take 

wfes at the Fort ware brought 

alQng 

4tn. of August made the second portage 

of the Silver falls the werning and childr 

=an that are following us will eate us up 

the 20 feete in the fonnare falls include 

this, made a portage of the white mud 

10 feete high, made another at the 

little rock (7 feete) and camped at the 

uP.I>er end of it. 

5lfi. Agust left at 4 Dc and arived at 

Grand 

Bonet this portage is a mile a cross we 

ware 

obliged to stop here all day to bring the 

boats and peses a cross, the wather 

intensley 

hot and miscitoys in mirredes 

61li. pased the first and second Bonet this 

morning, got frest sturgon from sum 

Indians 

here for brackfast, pased the Lake de 

Bonet 

whare sum of the Indians left for thare 

rise ground. Camped in the River Naloin 

miscitais so bad could not slepe. the orkn 

=ie man looks as if he had the small 

;&>;~sed 3 of the 6 portages comanley 

called 4. Camped at the Grand Guile 

=te one of the above is called the wodin 

Horse, one of our men deserted from 

us to day the Chiefs sun at Rat Por 

=tage Cashe-Cubit or the long Tuth) 

deserted this name has other interpra 

=tation it menes the Tuth of a Glutten 

camp 

=_~d at upper end. 

8m. made the other 2 this mor 

=ning, one of the 2 women that 

got maried at Fort Alexander 

had fits I gave her sum peper 

=ment and had her sister to 

rub her which brought her 

too. she had eat to mutch 

pased through an narrow arm 

of the river. pased the Grand 

raped and camped about 3 

miles above, we had 13 Coneus 

to camp with us. slept on sum 

flat rocks. 

9th. Breckfasted at the Barriere por 

=tage arived at the slave falls, 3 offeser 

=s Ca~ Moodey Mr. Brown and Mr. Con 

=suble from R. River pased us in a 

conew bound for Canada dined with 

them. Mrs. Me Kinsey and dugbter 

Camped 

here with us; Our Men refused to 

go on if they did not get liquer had 

to promus to give them sum at 

Rat Portage. 

1Olli. A thick fog this morning could not 

prosede untill6. Dc Breckfasted at the 

Roches Brules whare Mrs. McKinsey 

left us for 

Rat Portage. pased the aux Chene and 

the 

Point of Woods and camped about 4 

miles above 

11th. Made arley start and breckfasted 

at Chute a Jocka the provisions getting 

the 

scarce Caneus are leveing the Winapeg 

on eatch side 

for a long distance down the river is all 

small lakes whare the Indians gether 

thare 

Wild Rise they expect that it will 

fale this year from the water haveing 

fallen more then ushul we camped 

at below the Grand de Equear. 

* 12th. Breckfasted at the Grand de 

Equsar and Encamped at the White 

Mud. heavy ranee 

* 13th. Carred the boats and cargo 

a cross and Breckfasted at the Yallo 

Mud and dined at the Grand Decharge 

incamped at the fushery we 

had to muve our incampment 

on a count of the amence num 

berof Ants. 

MlImbarked at 3 and arived 

at Rat portage at II O.c 

the princapale fude of the Indians here 

is wild rise and fish stirgun and 

white fish in summar, in winter 

rabbets. 

16th. left Rat portage at2 P.M 

in a small conew with M McKinsey 

to catch the boats that proseded me 

to the portage. here we left River Win 

=apeg and entred the Lake of the Woods 

camped 

on~ island 

17m. pased through a grate quunteys 

[The following nine lines appear upside 

down at the bottom of this page. 

Presumably the asterisk here 

corresponds with that appearing at the 

entry for the 12th (August). ] 

* Pased to day a Catholick Mishion. 

Wabes-a 

-mong the White Dog astubleshed by 

Mr. Belcour. and abandoned last year 

this is the onley spot of land fit for 

Cultavation between Fort Alaxander 

and Rat portage and this not more 

then a half mile square the Cuntrey 

is all barren and rockey. Indians 

cannot live by Cultavition there 

of islands not one in 50 but is 

rockie and barran. saw 2 small 

Islands with about 5 akers of Com 

growing on them camped on an 

Island above the little portage 

18UL Hed wind ware visited 

by a large partey of Indians. had to 

remane 

till 4 P.M. camped about 6 Miles. 

1¢I:l Wind bound untill5 P.M. made a 

mufe of a few miles. thare is an Island 

Called garden Island sum distance west 

of our 

Crack farm the Indians cultuvating corn 

and potatos on it. it is about 6 miles 

long and 4 brode. 

20111. 

made an arlie start with a fare 

wind which carried us into the mouth 

of the River Ie Pluie. we found sum Ind 

ians here the had a grate quantatei of 

the stone and sand berries. the latter 

large as acherrie and blue black. Cam 

= ped 4 miles up the River, and found 

[The following five lines appear upside 

down at the bottom of this page. 

Presumably the asterisk here 

corresponds to that appearing at the 

entry for the 13th (August). ] 

* IJth. we reseved the Cheif of Rat po 

= tage on board while his 2 wifes 

paddeled a caneu alongside he 

felt rather proud of sitting with 2 

white Chiefs we tuck him to Rat portage 

the moscitois in mireuds. 

21 s.t I never saw such water 

dogs as our men. they never 

embarked when traking riv 

= ers but plungd in and swam 

a cross draging the boat after them 


61

Paul Kane. PETER JACOBS. WESLEY 

AN INDIAN MISSIONARY. September 

/0. 1848. Watercolor on paper, 

5 X 4 5 /8". Collection. Stark Museum 

olArt. 

J ,,' 

with one exeption a small Canadian 

who woud not risk it and iff 

it was not for 2 squas that 

was in a Caneu behind they wo 

=uld have left him. 

22d 

roused at 7. OCI this morning 

just as we imbarked it came on 

to rane and had to go ashore 

again started at 6. o. the river is 

is fit for cultavation though 

rather swampey 

23d left our incamtment at 

I. O.clock the men hailing the 

boat up with a line wadeing 

up to thare middle and sum 

times swiming till 5 0 Clock 

P.M. onley one our out of that 

for breckfast. thare is no other 

men in the worled that could 

stand it after ariving at Fort 

62 

Franses (named after Ladey 

Simsons sister Mrs. Findels 

= son) the men carried the 

pcks to the store, and then 

thure 3 months voige was 

over. The Indiens catch 

grate quantiteys of surgon here 

in the month of june. they 

have reseved 18 packs of stur 

=jon sounds in one year 90 pou 

=nd per pack, 12lh sounds to the 

pound thare will be 20.450 sou 

nds in the 18 pack. and as thare 

is but one sound taken from 

a stuJjon thare will be 20. 

=450 stUljon cot here in 

the month of june. thare 

is about 250 lnans turade at 

this Fort they grow whete and 

potatos the land is good. thare 

is a methedest misemery here 

a Mr Jacubes a half 

brede. the Indians live on Rabbets in 

the winter should the fale they would 

starve. a man has set 100. snares 

and went next morning and 

tak~n 86 Rabbets. 

11 tb.. of Sept left in the Express 

Caneu with Mr. McTavish at 6. in 

morning and got through Lack Ie 

Plue by 5. P.M. made 2 portages 

before dark. Camped at the uper 

end of the second. 

~ Started at 3. Coald and fogey. 

first night of frost. brackfasted 

at the grand Shute. made 4 po 

=rtages in all and camped at 9 

P.M. the men 18 ours paddeling 

to day. at the grand rapped got 

sum white fish of sum Indians 

who ware fishing here. 

ll. 


Glossary of Common Words 

By 1.5. MacLaren 

acasanley 

occasionally 

acassions 

occasions 

acurad 

occurred 

afJered / afJeried afraid 

agusted 

adjusted 

akers 

acres 

aloude 

allowed 

Ambaraws 

for the Fr. emiJarras, "obstacle"; literally, 

"islands fonned by driftwood" 

amence 

immense 

anamaIcuia 

animalcula 

ancbious 

anxious 

aneul 

annual 

anph 

enough 

apiscoplion 

Episcopalian 

are 

air 

areley / arley 

early 

asend 

ascend 

Mpide 

espied 

aublesbed 

established 

avoud 

avoid 

axedent 

accident 

hair 

bear 

bakf_ 

breakfast 

bard 

beard 

bare 

bear 

bariors 

barriers 

b2;a1/BMeltect basalt/basaltic 

bature 

for the Fr. batture, "gravel islands in 

midstream of a river" 

ben 

being 

bigade 

brigade, the corrunon name given to an 

outfit of Hudson's Bay Company 

canoes traveling together 

bing 

being 

boab 

both 

boan 

for the Fr. bon, "good" 

i:Joam/bouns 

bones 

bout 

bought; boat 

booth 

both 

bregade 

see bigade 

brock 

broke / broken 

brode 

broad 

brucb 

brush, brushwood 

burdanaws/Burdenaws unclear why this ice took this name; 

perhaps for the Fr. bourdon; avoir les 

bourdones, "to have the blues, to be 

irritated' '; this certainly is the effect of 

this ice on Kane - this word in Wanderings 

of an Artist (245) is spelled 

bourdigneaux. 

cabree / cabrey for the Fr. cabri, "kid"; probably 

whitetailed deer, since Wanderings of 

an Artist calls them' 'prairie antelopes 

... the smallest of the deer tribe" (85) 

cace 

each/in each/in ~h 

case 

for the Fr. cache; en cache, "a store, 

a deposit, " as in the storing of food so 

as to save the trouble of carrying it 

cag 

keg 

calp 

scalp 

cammey clammy (?) 

canable 

cannibal 

caperes 

capers 

cantul 

cordial 

carge 

charge 

caring 

carrying 

carkies 

carcass 

carriaII 

cariole 

c.h, in 

Seecacb 

ceape 

keep 

ceeping 

keeping 

cepe 

keep 

cept 

kept 

cetch 

catch 

cetch / cetcbis 

sketch / sketches 

cheap / cbeape 

sheep 

cick 

sick 

clIIad/ dUd 

killed 

cind / cinde/ cindeley kind / kindly 

apt 

kept 

circb 

church 

cketch 

sketch 

cIoM 

clothes; close 

marcel coarse 

course 

coard 

cord 

coas 

cause 

comanIey 

commonly 

compebention 

comprehension 

comumtion 

consumption 

con 

son 

conducked 

conducted 

mneu/conew 

canoe 

congering 

conjuring 

CODO 

canoe 

mntince 

contents 

convonce 

conveyance 

cood 

could 

cot 

caught 

coos 

cause 

croused 

crossed 

cuc:seshion 

succession 

culled 

killed 

curence, a 

occurrence 

damped 

dampened 

decicy 

de-iced 

defamltia 

difficulty 

deseced 

deceased 

difacelta/ difacoltay difficulty 

dod 

dog 

dodg/doged 

dodge/dodged 

Doter 

daughter 

dought 

doubt 

dugbter /duter daughter 

eat/eate 

ate/eaten 

emance 

immense 

enenl/enterad entered 

Erived 

arrived 


63

farlle fairly lose loose; lose 

fe~t feast mases masses 

fele fell Medesoo/1IIl!dBJn medicine 

fested feasted DIede/meit/mete meat 

fetege fatigue miek/mih miles 

flays flies minoey many 

Hoged flogged lIIimp1lh tions meaning unknown 

foart fort lIIiI"euIk/mirredes myriads 

fogey foggy lIIisritais/m&.itoys / 

fool forse full force ~ mosquitoes 

fore fair mBed missed 

fourt fort misenery /misbaner'y missionary 

gawuped gallopped misria misery 

gods goods moad mode 

gou/gow go 1DCJIIidtoB/~ mosquitoes 

gowing growing mufe move 

grat/grate great Mune moon 

grough growth musdtGse mosquitoes 

gudge judge Muse moose 

guDe gully nacad naked 

gumed gummed, as in repairing the leak in a necb next 

baric canoe with pine gum DeeSe knees 

gumed jumped nere/nerley near/nearly 

gunes guns nese knees 

balfbrees half breeds, people of mixed blood; niles knives 

here, usually Indian/French, and in- DOle knoll 

dian/Scottish, Indian/English; known notber neither 

today as Metis BOys noise 

hailed hauled n~/JIIIIIleI"eSi/ 

haIIooiDg hollering nU1De1'8 nwnerous 

bamam handsome nUD none 

bam;omle handsomely 011 one 

baamm handsome one own 

hare hair our/oures hour/hours 

haney hearty owr hour 

baullowing hollering owr our 

headus hideous paing paying 

bever heavier pairie prairie 

hidieous hideous pare poor 

llidrafoba hydrophobia parie - prairie 

hie high parviUoos provisions 

bole whole pealanms pelicans 

bole/holt haul pemaooo pemmican 

boppeled hobbled pese peace 

iindievred endeavored pese/peses piece / pieces 

lmagrents immigrants picbing pitching, as in setting up a tent, 

imbarced embarked camping 

incumans meaning uncertain, probably the in- pidureck picturesque 

coming brigade is intended pimacen/pimemn pemmican 

incumpment/ incumpt encampment/encamped pimeing priming 

inerour interior p&uIes pistols 

ingured inquired piten5k picturesque 

insesenJy incessantly pIuged plunged 

inteamtey intensely poaIes poles 

ise ice poartage portage, carrying place 

jooggaIrer meaning uncertain; perhaps for the Fr. por portages 

jonglerie, "jugglery," as if a shaman's potage/poutage see poartage 

lodge were a place of tricks, magic; pnyre prairie 

Wanderings of an Artist: ..... Our prequered procured 

Indians constructed a jonglerie, or prevealoge privilege 

medicine lodge ..." (311) proged project 

know now proqured procured 

layd by laid by, rested ptMe place 

lerant learned pure poor 

levill level quantate/quanteys/ 

Hnth length quantuuy /quantuy quantity I quantities 

lodes lodges raped/rapped rapid 

64 Glossary

apped wrapped spbus species (?) 

refradrtey refractory squay/squ. squaws 

me rice stud stood 

roan ran/run sturgon sturgeon 

rod rode supereoded superintended 

rook rock surgoo sturgeon 

roun ran temerata/temerate temerity 

rates roots tbare their 

sade said tbaugbed thawed 

said stayed the they; than 

sale sail they the 

sue sore tbrew/thme through 

schewner schooner tbrue/tbru threw 

sdn/scing skin tbrugb through 

seined skinned tbure their 

seanary scenery tby the 

sedr cedar trale trail 

seIeing stealing tuck took 

senerey scenery turade trade 

sercd circle UDvOygure un-voyageur 

StSpBbiOD suspicion varus various 

sews/Sews Sioux; see Guide to People and verey/verrey/ 

Places in Kane's Joumal verry/virry very 

sbiap sheep vBinata vicinity 

shute shoot; also, for the Fr. chute, "falls on voige voyage 

a river" vrrey/vrry very 

siff stiff wach wash 

sking skin wacked/wak walked I walk 

~ buffalo robes warer warrior 

Slops sloops wesliens Wesleyans 

sIoter slaughter wete wheat 

SDOW-seWS snowshoes whal'eafs whereas 

soareoded surrounded whete wheat 

sore, a ashore whough who 

soto Saulteaux Indians; see Guide to willos willows 

People and Places in Kane's Journal woW wool 

sound tenn meaning air bladder of a fish worled world 

sowlen stolen wy we 


Guide to People and Places in Kane's Journal 

I. s. MacLaren 

The entries are ordered alphabetically by the first spelling Kane 

uses. Any references to the book, Wanderings o!an Artist among 

the Indians of North America, are cited as WA ; the page references 

refer to the same edition cited in the author's essay. All 

references to the Hudson's Bay Company have been shortened to 

HBC. Finally, dates given for the establishment of forts refer to 

the first date when any fort existed at the location. After 1821, all 

forts listed were operated by the HBC. 

Alaxander / Alexander See Fort Alaxander / Fort Alexander. 

Asneboin, Frot See Frot Asneboin. 

Asneboin river The Assiniboine River flows into the Red 

River at the modem city of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Upper Fort 

Garry in Kane's day). It stretches 660 miles, flowing eastward 

across the prairies from southeastern Saskatchewan. 

Although a principal route onto the prairie, the Assiniboine 

did not fonn part of the transcontinental fur trade water route. 

Asneboins/ Asne boins The Assiniboine tribe, which received 

its name from an Ojibwa word for "boiling food by dropping 

heated rocks into containers of water, " had an original homeland 

around the Mississippi headwaters, but by the 1840s had 

long been settled northwestward, in the vicinity of Lake of 

the Woods and Lake Winnipeg. During the height of the fur 

trade, Assiniboine were noted for their pemmican production, 

and for their role as middlemen, trading European 

goods to the distant Plains tribes. In this way, their territory 

spread west, up the Saskatchewan, Assiniboine, Milk, and 

Missouri river Valleys . Their allies were the Cree, and their 

adversaries the Blackfoot, Gros Ventres, and Sioux (Dakota). 

Numbering as many as 10,000, they declined rapidly with the 

onset of European diseases such as smallpox. 

(Astoria), man with the tin box Kane here refers to Astorian 

John Reed, an Irish clerk in the Pacific Fur Company, which 

New York merchant John Jacob Astor founded in 1809. In 

1810 he sent two expeditions, one by ship and one overland 

by boat, to establish a fur trade post at the mouth of the 

Columbia River (at modem Astoria, Oregon). Kane errs in 

claiming that Reed was shot at the Chutes on the Columbia 

River. Chinook did attack Reed, on the portage at the Dalles; 

they did so because, according to Washington Irving, "the 

unlucky tin box" in which Reed was carrying dispatches 

from Fort Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, to 

Astor, in New York, "shining afar like the brilliant helmet of 

Euryalus, caught their eyes." On this occasion, Reed "received 

a blow on the head with a war club that laid him 

senseless [but not dead] on the ground. " The next year, in the 

summer of 1813, Reed was, in fact, slain by Indians. His 

death occurred at a dwelling he had built on the Snake River, 

upriver from its confluence with the Columbia. 

Athabasca, the river ie / Atbabaskia This is the southernmost 

headstream of the Mackenzie River and Arctic Ocean drain- 

66 

age system. Starting at the Columbia Icefield in Jasper National 

Park (on the British Columbia/ Alberta border), it 

flows northeast for 7(J) miles across the province of Alberta 

to Lake Athabasca. As a fur trade route, it provided access 

from the prairies to the Columbia River, via Athabasca Pass, 

on the extreme southwest boundary of the park. 

aux Chene See Point of Woods. 

Bareings river See Lake Winapeg. 

Barriere portage Kane portaged around the Barrier Falls on 

the Winnipeg River, 112 miles downstream from Lake of the 

Woods, on June 10, 1846, and August 9, 1848. The site today 

is mistakenly called Sturgeon Falls. 

Bateseis River Known in the fur trade period as the Baptiste 

River, today this tributary of the Athabasca River is called 

Berland River. Both names refer to an early trader, Baptiste 

Berland. The Berland enters the Athabasca from the north, 

about 130 miles downstream from where the Athabasca Pass 

trail brought the fur brigades to the Athabasca River. 

Belcour, Mr. George-Antoine Bellecourt (also Bellecours, 

Belcourt) ( 1803 -1874), a Roman Catholic priest and missionary 

from Lower Canada, started several missions in 1840, 

including the one at Wabassimong, on the Winnipeg River 

(today's White Dog, Ontario). The mission had failed by the 

time of Kane's return trip, principally because, like so many 

others, Bellecourt attempted to use agriculture and a policy of 

permanent residence to convert nomadic tribes to Christianity. 

big dog poartage This scenic portage led fur trade brigades 

from the Kaministikwia River to Big Dog or Great Dog Lake, 

and thence to the height of land between the Lake Superior 

and Lake Winnipeg (Hudson Bay) watersheds. The name 

derives from an Indian effigy of an oversized dog, which was 

located on the portage atop a 400-foot hill that overlooked the 

Kaministikwia River valley; hence Kane's description, 

"verry beautifull.' , 

Black feet / Blackfoot / Blackfeete Blackfoot are the smallest 

of the three tribes (Blood and Peigan are the others) of the 

Blackfoot Nation, and occupied hunting grounds north of the 

other two, in the Battle and Red Deer river valleys of modem 

central Alberta. Numbering between 2000 and 3000 in Kane's 

day, they were bison hunters and warriors, the principal 

enemies of the Cree and Assiniboine. 

boat-incampment/boat incumpment/Boat in campment/ 

Coumpmont de Barge Boat Encampment was established 

in 1811 by David Thompson, the North West Company 

explorer, fur trader, and cartographer. Located at the northernmost 

bend of the Columbia River (in modem British 

Columbia), it served for more than fifty years as the rendezvous 

for brigades coming up the Columbia from the Pacific 

by canoe. and those coming from the prairies through 

Guide

Athabasca Pass by horse. Kane was there twice, briefly in 

November, 1846, and for three weeks in October, 1847. 

Hood The Blood fonn part of the Blackfoot Nation, occupying 

hunting grounds that, in Kane's day, ranged from the Red 

Deer River valley in Alberta down to the Teton River valley 

in Montana (not Idaho). Like the Blackfoot, they were bison 

hunters, enemies of the Cree, Kootenay, Shoshoni, and Crow. 

the Broken ann This Cree chief, known also as Meskepatoon 

and as Crooked Ann, met Kane on January 13, 1848, near 

Fort Pitt. He was claimed by Robert Rundle as that Methodist 

missionary's first convert to Christianity. WA provides the 

additional detail that Broken Ann wrestled profoundly with 

the question of the value of converting (275). He was famous 

for the peace treaties he negotiated between the Blackfoot 

and the Cree; he died in 1869 while trying to arrange another. 

Kane did not paint him, but George Catlin did, at St. Louis in 

1832, when Broken Ann was traveling to Washington to 

meet President Andrew Jackson. 

Brown, Mr. See Consuble. 

Broza, Mrs. Unnamed in WA ("One of the women" [252]), 

this woman provided the starved Kane with a meal of whitefish 

when he reached Fort Assiniboine. No further identification 

of her is available, but given the preponderance of the 

name Brazeau among area fur traders, it seems reasonable to 

suggest that Kane's spelling here intends that name. 

buffalo hed See Lake Winapeg. 

Campmaw de fusee Literally "Gun Encampment," I'Encampment 

de Fusil is a small meadow situated ten miles 

down the Whirlpool River from Athabasca Pass. 

Campmaw de Kenan Kane probably means I 'Encampment 

d'Orignal, situated on the Whirlpool River between the 

height of Athabasca Pass and the Athabasca River. 

canadain/Canadans/Canadian Kane means Canadien, a 

French-speaking native of the colony known in the 1840s as 

Canada East (fonnerly, Lower Canada; today, the Province 

of Quebec). 

Cappow Blaugh Capote Blanc is the voyageurs' name for 

Assannitchay, chief of the Shuswap, whom Kane first met at 

Jasper House on November 5, 1846, and whom he saw again, 

at Boat Encampment, on October 10, 1847. In WA, he is 

further described as "a very simple, kindhearted old man, 

with whom I became very friendly" (106). 

Carlton Fort Carlton (est. 1810) was visited by Kane September 

7-11, 1846, and June 4, 1848. Principally a pemmican 

supply factory and depot between forts Garry and Edmonton, 

it stood on the North Saskatchewan River, about 120 miles 

west of its confluence with the South Saskatchewan. 

C~d's/CB:aids/C~des/C~ds The farthest downstream 

carrying place on the Columbia River, 150 miles inland 

from the Pacific Ocean, this falls is now controlled by Cascade 

locks and submerged by Bonneville Dam. 

Cashe-Cubit or the long Tutb Cash-a-cabut, a Saulteaux, 

son of the chief at Rat Ponage, had been hired as a member 

(engage) of the brigade with which Kane was traveling in 

August, 1848. Kane sketched him. 


Catholick Mishion Wabes-a-mong See Belcour, Mr. 

catholick mishon In 1838, Jesuit missionaries Fran~ois-Norbert 

Blanchet and Modeste Demers (see de Merse) began a 

mission on the Cowlitz River near the HBC fann. It served 

the Chinook and other Indians, and lasted until 1850. 

Cawa Chin Cowachin ("Land wanned by the Sun") is a name 

that did and continues to encompass the independent bands in 

the interior of southern Vancouver Island. They are linguistically 

related to the Coast Salish tribes. 

Caw-ke-kis suw-k-way Identified in WA as "Kee-a-kee-kasa-coo-way, 

or the 'Man who gives the War-whoop'" (86), 

this head Cree chief and pipe-bearer met Kane on September 

15, 1846, between forts Carlton and Pitt, and also during a 

trip to Fort Pitt in late January and early February, 1848, 

when the chief was "travelling through all [the] camps [of the 

Cree] to induce them to take up the tomahawk and follow him 

on a war excursion in the following spring" (280). Kane 

witnessed the opening of the pipe-stems and their ceremonial 

smoking, presided over by this chief. 

Cettle falls Kettle Falls, twenty-four feet high, is located on 

the Columbia River (in Washington, forty-one miles downriver 

from the British Columbia border). Its name may derive 

from a Salish tenn for a tightly woven basket, somewhat 

resembling a kettle, used for catching fish at the falls; alternatively, 

it may come from the French name for the falls, La 

chaudiere, also meaning "kettle," and used to descibe the 

falls' frothing waters, which the voyageurs likened to water 

boiling in a kettle. Here, the Chualpays (Colville) tribe maintained 

the largest salmon fishery on the Columbia. 

cbalefews Lake Given that Kane reached this lake before the 

mouth of the Cowlitz River, and took a sketch of Mount St. 

Helens from it, it is perhaps today's Hathaway Lake or 

Campbell Lake; both are near Ridgefield, Washington, south 

of the confluence of the Columbia and Lewis rivers. Kane's 

name for the lake has not survived and appears on no maps of 

the period. WA (136) has Kane making the sketch at the 

, 'Mouth of the Kattlepoutal River," his name for the Lewis 

River. 

Cheif of Rat potage Neither a further identification of this 

Saulteaux, nor Kane's sketch of him, appears to exist. 

Cheif of the Lakes Kane met Ask-a-weelish, a Kootenai 

(Can. sp. Kootenay), on the Columbia above Upper Arrow 

Lake, on October I, 1847. Neighbors of the Interior Salish, 

the Kootenai divided into upper and lower tribes. The Upper 

Kootenai were hunters and even crossed the Rocky Mountains 

for an annual bison hunt. The Lower Kootenai, whom 

Kane likely met here, were primarily fishermen, living on the 

waterways of the lower interior of modem British Columbia. 

Epidemics decimated the Kootenai during the early nineteenth 

century . 

Chip a wayan The Chipewyan are an Athapaskan, or Dene, 

tribe, whose name nevertheless derives from the Cree, meaning 

"pointed skins." In Kane's day, they occupied a vast 

area of the boreal forest, between the territories controlled by 

Cree to the south and Inuit to the north. 

Chute a Jocka See rapid de gock. 

67

Coffin Rock Various Coast Salish tribes used this place on the 

Columbia River, four miles upstream from its confluence 

with the Cowlitz River, to deposit their dead in canoes. 

Columba/Columbia See Culumba. 

coIveU/CoIIvll/Colvii/CoIviD/coIvill Fort Colville was visited 

by Kane November 20-23, 1846, and August 8 to September 

9 and September 16-22, 1847. Named for Andrew Colville, a 

London governor of the HBC, the fort was established upriver 

of Kettle Falls. From the beginning, it also had a large fann 

attached to it. 

Cometees punch boat/Punch Bowl Committee Punch Bowl 

is a small lake atop the Athabasca Pass in present Jasper 

National Park, on the British Columbia/ Alberta border. It 

straddles the height of land, feeding both Pacific Creek (and 

thus the Columbia River and Pacific Ocean) and the Whirlpool 

River (and thus the Athabasca River and Arctic Ocean). 

It was named in 1824 by George Simpson for the London 

board of the HBC. 

compaoeys fann Situated on the Cowlitz River near present-day 

Toledo, Washington, Cowlitz Fann was started in 1839, several 

years after John McLoughlin (see Sandwitch Islanders) encouraged 

several retiring voyageurs to settle and fann there. WA 

(140) reports that by the time of Kane's visit the fann was 

yielding large crops of wheat. 

the constant scie In early July, 1846, Kane sketched The 

Constant Sky, a Saulteaux woman, whom he met on the 

lower Red River while waiting two days for a favorable wind 

in order to cross Lake Winnipeg to Norway House. Kane's 

landscape and portrait log names her "Caw-ce-ca.ce checock 

a Soto the constant Skey. " The number for this entry in 

the log is 5, the same number that appears in Kane's hand in 

the sketch of a young Saulteaux woman and an Assiniboine 

man illustrated as Fig. 72 in Harper's work (194). Besides 

this sketch, there appear to be three other works by Kane that 

feature this woman (see author's essay, note 28). 

WA uses the name "The Constant Sky" only once, to 

identify a Saulteaux woman and child painted by Kane two 

years later, on July 26, 1848, during his return trip. Her 

Indian name is given phonetically in the book as "Caw-keeka-keesh-e-ko. 

,. Neither Kane's journal nor his landscape 

and portrait log mentions this encounter or any sketch or 

painting being done. Three possibilities suggest themselves 

concerning this confusion. One is that, although neither the 

journal nor landscape and portrait log mentions the second 

meeting, Kane perhaps met the same woman on two different 

occasions, twenty-four months apart, and in slightly different 

locations without realizing as much. 

The second possibility stems from the practice in WA of 

simply transposing events of Kane's outward journey to a point 

in the narrative where the events of the homeward journey are 

presented. Harper's identification of The Constant Sky in two 

paintings is based on these facts: one of the paintings bears her 

name and WA (310) names her. But there is no incontrovertible 

reason for assuming that Kane sketched her on two occasions, 

once in 1846 and once in 1848; rather, it may be that Kane's 

editor simply moved the anecdote to Chapter XXV to provide 

copy at a point where the narrative, like many travelers' 

narratives for the homewardbound leg of a joumey, had grown 

thin. The problem with this hypothesis, however, is that 

neither in his journal nor in his landscape and portrait log does 

Kane mention The Constant Sky's having a child. 

A third possibility seems likely; it is th~t WA invents a 

meeting in 1848 that never took place. Based on the available 

evidence - the watercolor that Harper identifies as being of 

The Constant Sky (283) does not include a child, and neither 

the journal nor the landscape and portrait log mentions a 

sketch with child or the occasion for it - one must wonder 

whether Kane, as he sometimes was known to have done in 

his studio paintings, embellished a work with a variety of 

artifacts bono wed from other studies he had done or collected 

on his travels. If he did so in the case of The Constant 

Sky by adding a cradleboard and papoose, the editor of WA 

could surely have drawn up a suitable passage for the book's 

manU$Cript, the book having succeeded, not preceded, 

Kane's completion of many of his paintings on canvas (the 

painting of The Constant Sky owned by the Royal Ontario 

Museum, was sent by Kane to his patron, George W. Allan, 

in 1856 [Harper (321)]; WA was published in 1859). This is 

the most sensational of the three possibilities, perhaps, but 

still is not one to be easily discounted. Certainly, the single 

paragraph in WA about the The Constant Sky is a self-contained, 

conventional piece of prose description bordering on 

being a purple passage in its own right. It is quoted in full here 

with the added observation that it must have been inserted in 

the manuscript late in the book's preparation since it does not 

occur in any fonn in the draft manuscript of the book owned 

by the Stark Museum of Art (11.85/2 [Cn: 

By way of passing the time, I took my gun and strolled 

up the river, accompanied by the guide, and fell in with a 

solitary Sotto woman and child sitting under a tree. She 

was quite alone, as her husband had gone up the river 

fishing in the morning. She did not appear to be at all 

alanned or confused at our approach, and freely entered 

into conversation with the guide, to whom she told her 

name, Caw-kee-ka-keesh-e-ko, "The Constant Sky." 

Tempted by the beauty of the scene, and she seeming to be 

in no wise unwilling, I sketched her likeness and the 

surrounding landscape .with considerable care. (310) 

On balance, given the editorial complexities of this book, this 

third possibility appears to offer the most plausible explanation 

of this question of Kane's meeting and painting The 

Constant Sky . 

CODSuble, Mr. Along with Moodey and Brown, this man, 

named Constable in WA (316), overtook Kane at the Slave 

Falls of the Winnipeg River, on August 9, 1848. Although 

none has been further identified, it would seem that they were 

soldiers in the 6th Royal Regiment of Foot, which had been 

sent to Red River in 1846 at the request of the HBC, both to 

help enforce its trade monopoly in the face of increasing 

competition from Americans, and to be on call in case of an 

outbreak of hostilities over the Oregon Boundary dispute. 

Because the dispute was settled in June of that year, the 

regiment was replaced in 1848. In August, 1848, Constable 

and his party would, therefore, have departed from the Red 

River Settlement and traveled east along the fur trade route. 

Corona, battelof La Coruiia, the northwestemmost port in 

Spain, served the British cavalry when it launched its inland 

offensive against Napoleon's forces in November, 1808. The 

campaign was an unmitigated disaster, culminating in the 

British retreat to Corunna (Eng. sp.) and a battle there, 

January 13-17, 1809, in which many British lives were lost 

due to the delayed arrival of ships to rescue the British from 

the advancing French. Of this battle, Napoleon said he had 

driven the easily defeated English into the sea. 

Guide

~ ~ ~ot:..a-.. ~ 

G~ _ \ 

71' 

Paul Kane. CREE INDIAN. September 8-1 1.1846. Oil on paper. 12 1 /4 X 9 3 //'. Collection. Stark Museum of Art. Kane made this 

sketch at Fort Carlton. not Fort Edmonton. as the later inscription indicates. Kane's landscape and portrait log identifies his 

subject as "the man that shot the wolfwith an arow."

Coulitz R. The Cowlitz River, a tributary of the Columbia, 

flows from north to south, joining it fifty-five miles from the 

Pacific Ocean. It fonned the inland route from the Columbia 

River to Puget Sound. The name, from a tribal name of 

Salishan derivation, means "power," or "catching the 

spirit. " 

Coupmont de Barge. See boat-incampment. 

Cour de lane The Coeur d' Alene Roman Catholic mission was 

founded in 1843 (see jochet, Father) on the Spokane River 

in what is now the Idaho panhandle. A fort of the same name 

was situated on the Coeur d' Alene River. The Skitswish tribe 

came to be known by this French tenn ("heart of an awl") 

because one of its chiefs used it to describe the size of a fur 

trader's heart. 

Crack farm See garden island. 

Crey ICree/Creese Descriptive of a wide range of hunting 

groups speaking the Algonquian language, Cree inhabit, as 

they did in Kane's day, most areas of present-day Quebec, 

Ontario, Manitoba (Swampy Cree), Saskatchewan (Woods 

Cree and Swampy Cree), and Alberta (Woods Cree and 

Plains Cree). Kane came into contact with all three divisions 

and their dialects. The Plains Cree adapted successfully from 

woodland trappers to warriors and bison hunters, but were 

ruined by smallpox and the destruction of the bison herds. 

Cmtey , Mr. Alexander Christie ( 1792 -1872) joined the 

HBC in 1809, rising to Chief Factor and administrator before 

traveling on furlough in 1848, the year of Kane's return trip, 

to Scotland, where he retired in 1853. He served as Governor 

of Assiniboia in 1833-1839 and 1844-1848. During his 

second term, the time of Kane's visit to Red River, he was 

attempting to keep American free-traders from cutting into 

the HBC's monopoly on the lower Red River. Governor Simpson's 

"Character Book" describes him as "one of our best 

characters, an honourable, correct, upright good hearted man 

as can be found in any Country" (180). 

Columba/Columba/Columbia Originally the Rio de San 

Rock, in 1792 the Columbia River was explored by the 

American Captain Robert Gray, who named it for his ship. 

Most of its 1225 miles and 2700-foot drop to sea level were 

first paddled in 1811, by David Thompson's North West 

Company brigade. Although Thompson discovered it as the 

only practicable fur trade route to the Pacific, he met the 

Astorians (see Astoria) at the river's mouth, who had anticipated 

his arrival by some six weeks. Today, thirteen power 

dams have altered the river from its character in the midnineteenth 

century . 

Cumberland Cumberland House (est. 1774) was visited by 

Kane June 10, 1848. The first inland trading post of the HBC, 

named for Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland (1619-1687), 

Cumberland House was situated on Cumberland Lake, a few 

miles north of the Saskatchewan River, just west of the 

modem Manitoba/ Saskatchewan border. 

Cwnberland river Rowing southeast out of Cumberland Lake, 

this river noticeably increases the size of the Saskatchewan 

River where it enters it from the north, west of the modem 

Saskatchewan I Manitoba border. The Cumberland fonned 

70 

part of the fur trade route to the north, up the Sturgeon-weir 

and Churchill River, eventually taking the brigades to the 

Athabasca and Mackenzie river districts. 

daD de more I rapped of deth /DaD de More On the upper 

Columbia River, above modem Revelstoke, British Columbia, 

the Dalle de Mort takes its name from the incident fully 

related by Kane. 

the DaDs Not to be confused with those on the upper Columbia 

River, The Dalles of the lower Columbia (at present-day The 

Dalles, Oregon) were eight miles of rapids named from the 

French word for "flagstones." The meaning transfers from 

the use of such stone to line gutters. To the voyageurs, many 

rapids on the fur trade routes resembled such gutters, and the 

river's rock walls the sides of those gutters. The principal 

falls and rapids below The Dalles were the Little Dalles, 

about one mile long, and the Cascades. The head of The 

Dalles was the Great Falls at Celilo; then followed, in upstream 

order, Hell Gate Rapids (Kane's La Shute [see La 

Shute/Shutes/Shoots]) and John Day Rapids. It is uncertain 

when Kane passed these features during his downriver 

trip in 1846, but it is known that on his return in 1847 he was 

at the Cascades July 3-5, at Hell Gate/Chutes July 8-9, and 

at John Day Rapids July 10 (when WA describes the technique 

of "tracking" boats up a rapids [184] ). 

David Thompson, who descended and ascended the Columbia 

in the summer of 1811 , offered the following succinct 

description of The Dalles: 

These Dalles were ... steep high walls of Basalt Rock, 

with sudden sharp breaks in them, which were at right 

angles to the direction of the wall of the River, these breaks 

formed rude bays, under each point was a violent eddy, and 

each bay a powerful, dangerous, whirpool; these walls of 

Rock contract the River from eight hundred to one thousand 

yards in width to sixty yards, or less: imagination can 

hardly fonn an idea of the working of this immense body of 

water under such a compression, raging and hissing, as if 

alive. 

Days Incampment A camp on the Columbia River, ten miles 

upriver from Fort Colville. 

de gurlay, Frances No further infonnation has surfaced about 

this Metis. WA refers to him only as Kane's "guide" (64). 

de Merse/de Merce, Mr. Modeste Demers (1809-1871) had 

gone west from Lower Canada as a Roman Catholic missionary 

to Red River in 1837. In 1838, he continued on to Oregon, 

working with both voyageurs and Indians. After extensive 

work in the interior of present-day Washington and British 

Columbia, he was appointed bishop of Vancouver Island in 

1'844. When he met Kane in 1848, Demers was on his way to 

France to raise funds and find missionaries suitable for work 

in a territory still with an almost entirely native population. 

de Shombo, Mr. George D'Eschambeau1t (1806- 1870) joined 

the HBC in 1819 and was the Chief Trader stationed atCwnberland 

House from 1847 to 1849. He did not distinguish himself in 

the service and never took command of an important post. In his 

"Character Book," Governor Simpson judged him "a well 

meaning, well disposed, heavy dull slovenly man, who is deficient 

in Education and can never be particularly useful. Under- 

Guide

stands a few Words of Cree . . . . Can have no pretensions to 

look forward to advancement" (204). 

Dog lake Along the fur trade route north of Lake Superior, this 

is the only lake of appreciable size on the eastern side of the 

height of land. See also big dog poartage. 

dogs bed 

See Lake Winapeg. 

dry dance Mounten lbis hill, in modem southwestern 

Manitoba, has not been identified, but, from the other locations 

named by Kane, it is clear that it is situated east of the 

Turtle Mountains and of the Pembina River. Both the journal 

and WA (53-54) provide full accounts of the name of this 

rise. 

Eales/EaUs The Reverend Cushing Eells, with the Reverend 

Elkanah Walker, established a Presbyterian mission to the 

Spokane Indians at Tshimakain in 1844; it was abandoned in 

1848, the year after Kane visited it and as a consequence of 

the Cayuse wars, the outbreak of which occurred with the 

murder of the Whitmans, colleagues of Eells and Walker. 

The first reference to the "Methedist mishon of Mr 

Wacker and Eales" is incorrect (and is not repeated in WA): 

the Methodist mission at The Dalles, which Kane remarks 

passing on July 7, 1847, was founded by the Reverend 

H. K. W. Perkins at Wascopam in April, 1838. By 1847, it 

was being run by the American Board of Commissioners for 

Foreign Missions. 

Edmonton/Edmunton Fort Edmonton (est. 1795; moved 1812) 

was visited by Kane September 27 to October 5, 1846, December 

5, 1847 to January 5, 1848, and for portions of March, 

April, and May, 1848. The northernmost post on the North 

Saskatchewan River, named by Chief Factor William Tomison 

for the baptismal place in England of his clerk, John Peter 

Pruden (see Prudence, Mr.), Fort Edmonton was built into an 

important post even though peace was precariously maintained 

among the various warring and starving tribes who traded, 

visited, and occasionally lived at it. Extremely well built and 

fortified, it was consequently referred to by its sobriquet, 

"Sanspareil. " 

eraquay /Eraquay/Eraqua/Eroqua Kane means Iroquois, 

the tenn designating the six tribes - Seneca, Cayuga, 

Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora - originally inhabiting 

only upper New York state. Having, for the most part, 

supported the Loyalists in the American Revolution, Iroquois 

tribes continued peaceful relations with the British when they 

migrated northward. The Kanawake reserve near Lachine 

(outside Montreal) supplied many workers for the HBe. 

fall of the Pransin Horses or silver fall On the lower Winnipeg 

River between Lac du Bormet and Lake Winnipeg, this fall 

(Eaux qui Remuent was its French name) of twenty feet was 

passed by Kane's brigades on June 10, 1846, and August 3, 

1848. Three hydroelectric dams have flooded this portion of 

the river. 

Fort Alaxander/Fort Alexander Fort Alexander (est. 1783) 

was visited by Kane June 11, 1846, and July 30 to August 3, 

1848. lbis post was located on the Winnipeg River, three 

miles from its mouth, on the east bank. 

Fort Asneboin See Frot Asneboin. 


Fort Frames See fourt Frances. 

Fort Garey Upper Fort Garry (est. 1835) was visited by Kane 

June 15-17 and July 2-4, 1846. Located at the forks of the 

Assiniboine and Red rivers, seventy miles north of the Manitoba/Minnesota 

and North Dakota border, this fort was 

erected on the site of Fort Rouge, established by Pierre de la 

Verendrye in 1738. It was named for Nicholas Garry, one of 

the London governors of the HBC. In 1876, its name was 

changed to Winnipeg. 

Fort victoria Fort Victoria (est. 1843) was visited by Kane 

April9toMay6, and May 14 to June 10,1847. This post was 

established as the HBC' s alternative hub on the Pacific Slope to 

Fort Vancouver, which, especially with the Great Migration 

along the Oregon Trail in 1843, appeared destined to become 

American territory. 1be new post was named for the British 

monarch who had come to the throne in 1837. 

Fort Willam/fort WiUam/Willwn Fort William (est. 1679) 

was visited by Kane May 24, 1846, and September 19, 1848. 

On the Kaministikwia River in Thunder Bay, Lake Superior, 

this fort was built in 1679, but was not known by the English 

name until the nineteenth century. Named for William Mc 

Gillivray, President of the North West Company, it became the 

Great Lakes' hub of Canadian fur trading in 1803, after border 

surveys determined that the former tenninus, Grand Portage, 

lay in American territory, and therefore, that Americans were 

entitled to levy duties on goods passing through it. In 1970, the 

name of Fort William was changed to Thunder Bay, Ontario. 

fourt Frances/Fort Franses Fort Frances (est. 1731) was 

visited by Kane June 4-5, 1846, and August 23 to September 

10, 1848. lbis post at Rainy Lake stood on the site where 

Pierre de la Verendrye (1685-1749) had established Fort St. 

Pierre in 1731. Kane errs in attributing the name to "Ladey 

Simsons sister Mrs. Findelson"; the fort was named for Lady 

Simpson herself in 1830, after she passed it during her honeymoon 

trip from Lachine (near Montreal) to York Factory. 

Fracher/frasher/~ber/F~bur/F'nRr, Colin WA states: 

"A Highlander of the name of Colin Frazer had joined our 

party. He was on his way to a small post [Jasper House] ... 

where he had resided for the last eleven years. He had been 

brought to the country by Sir George Simpson, in the capacity 

of his piper . ... He carried the pipes with him, dressed in his 

Highland costume: and when stopping at forts or wherever he 

found Indians, the bagpipes were put in requisition, much to 

the astonishment of the natives, who supposed him to be a 

relation of the Great Spirit, having, of course, never beheld so 

extraordinary a looking man: or such a musical instrument, 

which astonished them as much as the sound produced" (98-99). 

Frances, fourt/Franses, Fort See fourt Frances/Fort 

Frames. 

Franklin, Sur John Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), British 

Arctic explorer, had sailed on his third expedition in search of 

the North West Passage in 1845. By June, 1848, the British 

Admiralty decided to send out expeditions in search of Franklin's 

crew, from whom no word had beea received and of 

whom no sightings had been reported since 1845. (The remains 

of the 139-man crew were not found until 1859. The 

cause of their deaths is still being studied in the 1980s.) Of 

coincidental interest is Kane's hearing the news of Franklin's 

71

Ea 

MAP TO ILLUSTRATE 

in the 

TERR1TORY 

of me 

IHI lIT ill) § {()) W§ JIB AY (C «D lMLlr ~y 

~ 

Detail ojMAPTO ILLUSTRATE M~KANE'STRAVELS IN THE TERRITORY OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY shown in its 

entirety on pages 16 and 17.

silence at The Pas, near which Franklin spent part of the 

winter of 1819-1820 (in fact, at Cumberland House), during 

his first Arctic expedition, by York boat and canoe. 

frasher/Frasher /Frashur /Fraser, Colin See Fracher ... 

French R. rapids On the most complex section of the fur trade 

waterways, at the height of land between the Lake Superior 

and Lake Winnipeg watersheds, these rapids seemed to 

necessitate a portage on the route along Maligne River (see 

River MaIane) between Lac des Mille Lacs (Kane's Lake of 

they 1000 Islands) and Pickerel Lake, the latter in presentday 

Quetico Provincial Park, on the Ontario/Minnesota 

border. 

Froshur, Paul Joining the North West Company in 1819, Paul 

Fraser (1797 -1855) was made an HBC Chief Trader in 1844. 

When Kane met him in 1848, he had the charge of the district 

of Thompson River (west of the upper Columbia River and 

east of the Fraser River), and likely was en route to York 

Factory with the annual brigade of furs. Governor Simpson's 

"Character Book" entry for him is brief and indifferent 

(208). 

Frot Asneboin Fort Assiniboine (est. 1824 as Athabasca River 

House) was visited by Kane October 10, 1846, and November 

29 to December I, 1847. This post was located on the 

Athabasca River, at its nearest point (about 110 miles) to the 

North Saskatchewan River, at the confluence of the Athabasca 

and Freeman Creek. The trail from this post to Fort Edmonton 

fonned part of the principal transcontinental transportation 

route of the HBC. 

garden Island In American territory, Garden Island lies in 

Lake of the Woods between Big Island, Ontario (to the east), 

and Northwest Angle State Forest (to the west), the stretch of 

the lake's western shore that belongs to the state of Minnesota. 

Its name derives from its being farmed, probably by 

Saulteaux. 

Garey See Fort Garey. 

gMpers/G-..ers/';-pers/';-pers House Jasper House (est. 

1799; moved 1811) was visited by Kane November 3-4, 

1846, and November 6-14, 1847. Jasper Hawes was in charge 

of the North West Company post on Brule Lake (a 

widening of Athabasca River) in 1814. The site of the fort 

was always downriver (east) of the site of the modem town 

that retains his name, located in Jasper National Park, in 

western Alberta. The fort's purpose was always that of a 

station where boats were changed for horses by westbound 

brigades about to cross Athabasca Pass, and vice versa for 

brigades headed to Fort Edmonton. 

Gentalmans wife See Haritt/Harett/H., Mr. 

the Govemer See Simson, Sir George. 

grand bature [Columbia River] This was a regular gravel bar 

on the upper Columbia River, upriver of Upper and Lower 

Arrow lakes, near the present-day town of Revelstoke, 

British Columbia. 

grand bature / Grand Bature [Whirlpool River, east of Committee 

Punch Bowl] Grand Batture on the Whirlpool River 

(whose valley the east side of the Athabasca Pass trail fol- 


lowed) dominated the river at one point. Battures, the braided 

gravel bars that frequently appear on mountain-fed rivers, 

regularly divert this river as it descends from the height of 

land. 

Grand bature [Wood River, near Boat Encampment] Like the 

Whirlpool River to the east of the Athabasca Pass, the Wood 

River to the west was dominated by a series of braided gravel 

bars. 

Grand Bonet Like the fall of the Pransin Horses or silver fall, 

this portage on the lower Winnipeg River, and the first and 

second Bonet, are today submerged under the waters dammed 

by hydroelectric projects. 

Grand Coat See grond coat or big hill. 

Grand Colay/Grand Coliee/Coulay The Grand Coulee, 

northwest and downstream of Spokane, Washington, was a 

fonner route of the Columbia River, but ages before the fur 

trade era, the riverbed had fallen well below the floor of the 

coulee, leaving it dry. Occupied today by a lake, a reservoir 

behind Grand Coulee Dam (constr. 1942), in 1847 the coulee 

exposed 

to view the bases of the enormous rocky islands that now 

stud its bottom, some of them rising to the elevation of the 

surrounding country. 

This wonderful gully is about 150 miles long, and 

walled-in in many places with an unbroken length twenty 

miles long of perpendicular basalt 1000 feet high. The 

bottom of this valley is perfectly level, and covered with 

luxuriant grass, except where broken by the immense rocks 

above mentioned: there is not a single tree to be seen 

throughout its whole extent, and scarcely a bush; neither 

did we see any insects, reptiles, or animals. (WA [209]) 

Grand daDs 

Part of, see the DaDs. 

Grand Decharge The Grand Decharge was a portage of 300 

paces. It marked the first carrying place on the Winnipeg 

River for the downriver traveler, thirty-three miles north of 

Lake of the Woods on the upper section of the river. Here 

canoes were shot downstream or lined upstream, while their 

contents were portaged; hence, discharge is a more accurate 

name than portage for the work necessarily performed. 

This carrying place was the first of five in a five-mile 

stretch of river. The others' traditional names are: Terre 

Jaune, Charette, Terre Blanche, and La Cave. Kane refers to 

the first of these as Yallo Mud (where there is yellow rock). 

The second he does not mention; the third he calls White Mud 

(where white clay protrudes); and the fourth Grand de Equear 

or Grand de Equsar. These last names seem to refer to Grand 

Equierre, the name of a fur trade post no longer in use in 

Kane's day. This post, however, was located downriver, not 

upriver, of Lac du Bonnet. 

Grand de Equear / Grand de Equsar See Grand Decharge. 

Grand GuUete This was not a common name for any of the 

portages, rapids, or falls on the Winnipeg River, but, given 

its location in Kane's journal, seems to be one of the seven 

portages on the Blanche River (see River Naloin), a whitewater 

channel of the Winnipeg River, full of what Kane 

called "beautiful cas caides" on June 10, 1846, eight miles 

below Grand Rapid and above Lac du Bonnet. Seven Sisters 

73

Dam has transfonned this stretch of the river. 

Grand raped [Athabasca River] 

See rapped de More. 

Grand raped [Winnipeg River] Only a three-foot drop, this 

rapid on the Winnipeg River possessed the attraction that it 

could be run down or lined up, rather than portaged. It lay 

between Barrier Falls and Blanche River (see River NaIoin). 

grand Rapid/grand raped [Saskarchew,an River] This, was a 

famous grand rapids among many with the saIne name on the 

fur trade routes. Hooded by a bead pond today. it was threeand-a-half 

miles long, and brought Cedar Lake and the waters 

of the Saskatchewan River tumbling into the northwestern 

comer of Lake Winnipeg. Kane passed it on August 18. 1846, 

and June 17. 1848. There is a town, Grand Rapids, Manitoba. 

grand rapped [Columbia River] Seven miles below Kettle Falls 

on the Columbia River. this rapid was nonnally run, although 

Kane's brigade stove a canoe in it on November 24, 1846~ as a 

consequence, Kane. who had elected to walk around it in order 

to sketch it, witnessed a resourceful rescue of its passengers, 

including Mr. and Mrs. Lane, by one of the boats that had 

already descended it successfully. In Kane's day, this was 

marked on maps as lbompson Rapids, in honor of David 

Thompson, me North West. Company explorer who descended 

the Columbia River in 1811. It is now known as Rickey 

Rapids. 

grand rapped [of September 12, 1848] 

[or] faJ.h. 

grand Shute See Island rapicb on [or] falls. 

See IsIaud rapich on 

Grand Travers/Grand Travrs Grand Traver.ie marked the 

place where, coming out of the Athabasca Pass trail , eastbound 

brigades had to ford the Athab~ River. WA drama.ti:zes the 

ttaverse made by Kane's brigade on November 5, 1847: .• . .. 

my pack, oontaining sketches and curiosities, &c., had to be 

carried on the shouiders of the men ricling across. to keep them 

out of the water" (240). 

grond coat or big bill/ Grand Coat Grand COte was the fur 

trade name for the steep western slope of the Athabasca Pass, 

which followed Pacific Creek down to Wood and Canoe rivers 

before reaching Boat Encampment. More like climbing than 

hiking at some points, Grand COte brought brigades in one 

day's travel from the height of the pass down to an elevation 

equal to that of Jasper House on the eastern slope. 

grose paint, Le See Le grose point. 

GrovantsGros Ventre (llidasta) occupiedpmiries mainly below 

the 49th parallel. During the nomadic period, they were members 

of the Blackfoot Confederacy, although not of the more 

limited Blackfoot Nation. Their linguistic affiliation is Dakotan 

(Siouan); their history is that of bison hunters; and their 

ttaditionalenemies were Cree and. Saulreaux. 

H., Mr. See HarlttlHarett/H., Mr. 

HaUet/lDIet, Mr. William Hallet (1810-1870) was a noted 

bison hunter and trader in the Red River Setd.ement. He was 

the son of Henry Hallet (1772?-1844), an Englishman who 

served in the fur trade until 1822. As late as 1861. theNor'Wes- 

74 

ler noted that dle faU bison hunt from the settlement had been 

Jed by William Hallet. Probably, Hallet's role in the spring hunt 

was less imJX)rtant. so that he had leisure to take Kane under his 

wing, acquainting him not only with procedures for bison 

hunting but also with Metis culrural practices. While Kane's 

journal suggests that, on June 26, 1846, Hallet had gained 

Kane a head start for that day's hunt, WA elevates Kane's 

purpose: ,. A half-breed, of the name of Hallett, who was 

exceedinglyanentive to me, woke me in the morning, to 

accompany him in advance of the party, that I might have the 

opportunity of examining the buffalo whllst feeding, before the 

conunencement of the hunt" (57). 

An "English" Metis, Hallet opposed Louis Riel's leadership 

of the Red River Metis; when the first &ed River Rebellion 

broJ(e out in the winter of 1869 - 1870, Riel had Hallet chained 

in an unheated room. Hallet was eventually released, but his 

health was broken and he died a shoo time later. It is speculated 

that he ended his life by committing suicide. 

Haritt/Harett/H., Mr. John Edward Harriott (1797-1866) 

joined the North West Company in 1813 at age twelve. He 

served at Fort Carlton. before and after the merger with the 

HBC in 1821 ~ and then at Fort Assiniboine, Stuart Lake (in the 

northern interior of modern British Columbia), Piegan Post (a 

short-lived post [1832-1834] on the Bow River near modem 

Banff. Alberta), Rocky Mountain House (see (be Mountain 

Hoos), and Fort Edmonton. He was appointed to Chief Factor 

in 1846, and was in charge of Fort Edmonton briefly when 

Kane wintered there in 1847 - 1848. 

In his "Character Book, "Governor Simpson judged him 

"mild tempered, well disposed, and bears an excellent private 

character .... A finished Trader. Speaks Cree like a native and 

is a great favourite with Indians: has much intftuence likewise 

with the people and is generally esteemed by his coUeagues" 

(197). When he retired to the Red River Settlement in t855, his 

library was estimated at some 200 books. A correspondent to 

Harper's magazine wrote in the February, 1861 . issue of how 

Harriott's "life of exPosure andadvenrure and toil is rounded 

with rest and calm and domestic peace. " 

Harriott married three times. His first wife, Elizabeth, suffered 

bouts of madness, the last of which sauck her in 1832 as 

she was crossing Athabasca Pass. She wandered from the trail, 

never to be seen again; likely she is the "Gentabnans wife" 

referred to by Kane on November 2, 1847. She did not have 

her newborn baby (see Prudence, Mr.) with her when she 

disappeared. and the child managed to survive the trip to Fort 

Edmonton. 

Hunter, M/Mr. James Hunter (1817-1882) was ordained a 

priest of the Churcb of England in 1844, the same year that he 

sailed with his wife to Hudson Bay and traveled to Cumberland 

Station, the new Indian mission where Kane encountered him. 

By 1846, Hunter was raising cattle, horses, pigs (one of which 

was roasted in honor of Kane's visit in 1846), and sheep, as 

well as crops of wheat, barley, and potatoes on the mission 

fann. By the time of Kane's rerum visit in June, 1848, he had a 

church built from handsawn local timber. Hunter provided dle 

first translations (using Roman characters) into Cree of the 

Gospels and Book of Common Prayer. He perfonned many 

baptisms annually, including some as far afield as Fort Simpson, 

on the upper Mackenzie River. 

Islaad npids on [or] faDs This is Kettle Fans, between Namakan 

Lake and Rainy Lake in modem northwestern Ontario. 

Guide

The channel is divided by a large i land, hence Kane's name 

for it when he passed it on June I, 1846. On SepleI11ber 12, 

1848, during his return nip. he chose to call lhe falls grand 

Shute and the grand rapped. 

Isle roy. Isle Royale, now part of .a national parte in lhe state of 

Michigan, is lhe largest island in Lake Superior, standing 

offshore from Thunder Bay and the fur trade posts of Grand 

Portage and Fort William on the north shore, 165 miles nonheast 

of Duluth, Minnesota. 

Jaculxs, Mr Pahtahsega (Pautaussigae), also known as Peler 

Jacobs ( 1807 - ) 890), was a Mississauga Ojibwa, not a "half 

brede, .. who converted to Christianity early in his life. Shortly 

after his conversion. he read from the New Testament in 

English and Ojibwa at a meeting in New York of the Missionary 

Society of lhe Melhodist Episcopal Church. Jacobs worked 

at missions near Norway House and at Fort Alexander, traveling 

to England in 1842 to be ordained. Returning to the West, 

he was stationed, when Kane saw him, at Fort Frances. He 

went to England again, in 1850, but without permission. and 

was expelled by the Methodists in 1858 for soliciting funds 

without church approval. Pahtahsega was one of the most 

critical opponents of the HBC whom Kane met; the missionary's 

chief complaints were the company's immoral practices 

and way of life. Besides seeing him at Fort Frances, Kane, 

according to WA (49), rode with him to Upper Fort Gany on 

June 13, 1846. 

~pers / jaspers House See gaspers. 

jMpers Iake/.i-pers Lake Today's Bride Lake, a widening of 

the Athabasca River at the eastern gate of Jasper National Park 

in western Alberta. this lake is continually swepl by winds, 

which often reach gale force, coming out of the mountains. 

The lake is shallow, with many sand bars at the upriver end. 

jochet, Father In 1843, Father Joseph Joset emigrated from 

France to the West, where he spent his life as a missionary. He 

worked out of Coeur d' Alene mission (see Cour de lane) on 

the Spokane River. 

King oftbe frencb Louis Philippe (1773- 1850), Ie Roi ciroyen, 

was king of France from 1830 until 1848, when he abdicaled 

and fled Paris. 

Knew Caladonia New Caledonia was the HBC's name for its 

fur trade district on the Pacific Slope north of the Columbia 

district. Roughly speaking. this disuict covered the drainage 

basin of the Fraser River, in the interior of modem British 

Columbia. 

Lack Ie PIue 

See Raney Lake. 

lake Atba"-ca Kane does not mean the large lake of this name 

in northern Alberta, but another widening of the Athabasca 

River, upriver of BrUle Lake but downriver of modem Jasper 

Lake, where Jasper House was located. This stretch of river is 

not conunonly regarded today as a lake, and bears no name of its 

own; nor was the name, lake Athabasca~ retained in WA. 

Lake de Booet Lac du Bonnet, a widening of the lower Wmnipeg 

River, still exists, but has been much altered by hydroelectric 

developments. It marks the beginning of the lower stretch of Ibis 

river. 

The American Art Journal! Volume XXI • Number 2 

lake de Roch Rock Lake, a widening of the Pembina River east 

of Twtle Mountain, is in modem southwestern anitoba. 

Lake of they 1000 IsIancb Lac des Mille Lacs i lhe - 1803 

fur trade route's first lake in the Lalce Winnipeg (Hudson Bay 

watershed that brig headed w t reached afier crossing the 

height of land from Lake Superior, Kaministilcwia River, and 

Great Dog Lake. Beautifully tudded with i lands, its shores 

touch the Trans-Canada Highway at the settJemem.of Savanne, 

Ontario. 

Lake of they Woods/Lake of the Woods A huge, complex 

lake strnddling the modem Ontario/Minnesota border, this 

lake, having Rainy Lake flowing into and Winnipeg River 

flowing out of it on the fur trade route, caused voyagews 

constant navigational complexities. They had 1.0 knife their 

way through islands and grau the western tip of Aulneau 

peninsula. 

the lakes/the Lakes This nondescript identification refe t.o 

Upper Arrow Lake and Lower Arrow Lake, natural widenings 

of the Columbia River which account for almost eighty miles 

of the river's length in the southern part of modem British 

Columbia. Kane passed through them November 17-18, 

1846, and again September 25-29, 1847. 

Lake Winapeg Lake Winnipeg, the sixth largest in Canada and 

second longest lraverse on the fur trade routes after Lake 

Superi.or, is over 260 miles long, having both Wmnipeg and 

Red rivers feeding it on the south, and taking in the waters of 

me Saskatchewan River on the northwest. It dominates pres~ 

ent~y central Manitoba. Although unpossessed of Lake of 

the Woods 's navigational complexities, it caused voyagews 

endless anxiety because its extremely shallow waters (onJy ten 

or twelve feet for much of its swface) produced steep-fronted, 

choppy waves, not the long swells of mammoth Lake Superior. 

Neither the canoe nor the Yoric:: boat (nor even the sloop that 

Kane sailed on in July, 1846) handled with ease the tempests 

that so often blew up suddenly on this great but shaUow lake. 

Apart from the crossing of the southernmost part of the lake, 

from the mouth of the Winnipeg (0 the moulh of the Red River, 

on June 11 and 12, 1846, Kane made two entire travm;es ofme 

lake: both involved Norway House, and they took him up and 

d.own the east side of the lake, with traver.;es at the narrows, 

and then across the top of me lake, from Norway House to the 

mouth of the Saskatchewan River. Only a ingle island is 

mentioned in the description of the trip by sloop in 1846. 

(perhaps Kane was too busy acquiring his sea legs (0 make 

other observations.) 

On the 1848 return trip, Kane' s journal identifies the features 

of the shoreline as follows: little island is al the neck 

between Lake Winnipeg and Playgreen Lake; spder Islands lie 

off the nonheastem shore; point de Tramble (tremble, Fr. for 

"poplar' ') or papeler point is the name of the point where the 

Poplar River flows into the lake on the east shore; Bareings 

river is Berens River, which flows into the lake from the east at 

about its middle; stwgun river, probably present-day Pigeon 

River, is the next principal tributary on the east side as one 

travels south, above rabbet point, wJtich begins the arrow ; 

dogs hed, or the Narrows, is today's Bullhead, Manitoba on 

the west shore, where the lake's girth dwindles to a mere two 

and a half miles; Lune narrows (Loon Narrows), back on me 

east shore, occurs where a narrows separates an island from a 

prominent point twenty miles south of the Narrows; buffalo 

75

I • La 

hed (" Otter Head" in WA [313]) remains unidentified but 

would seem t be on Black Island; ,imilarly unidentified is 

point mitass (" Point Mille Lac " in WA [313]). 

lane / Lane, Mr Kane traveled with two men named Lane: William 

Aetcher Lane, from , ort William to Fort Alexander May 

25 to JWle II, 1846; and Richard Lane, who was in charge of 

Kane's party from Norway House to Fort Edmonton and 

continued with Kane aU the way to Fort Vancouver August 14 

to December 8, 1846. 

William Fletcher Lane (b . c. 1794) worked in the fur trade 

intennittently from 1820 until 1863. Not particuJarly disposed 

toward Iri hmen, Governor Simpson considered him in his 

"Character Book" a "low Drunken Worthless fellow who 

... i very active and can rum his hand to any thing but such a 

blackguard that he disgraces the Service" (216). Concerned 

about possible reprisals from Lane, however, Simpson did not 

discharge him; rather he regularly posted him to the most 

remote stations in the fur trade empire. Lane periodically 

retired in disgust, ,and rejoined, always al a decreased salary . 

When Kane met him on the Kaministikwia River, Lane was 

being reinstated after a brief retirement, am was headed for 

Peel River, in today's Yukon Territory. WA reports that "he 

had ani ved at his post almost starved to death, after travelling 

about 700 miles on snow-shoes through the depth of wmter" 

(46). 

Richard Lane ( 1816- 1877) was a clerk in the HBC when 

Kane knew him and his bride. He had joined the fur trade in 

1821, serving in the Red River district until 1845. when he 

moved to the Colwnbia Department, traveling west with the 

artist/spy Henry James Warre (see author's essay). In June, 

1846, he returned to Fort Garry to marry Mary McDennot. 

Their honeymoon was the western trip with Kane to Fort 

Vancouver, where Lane delivered not only the written confirmation 

of the Oregon Boundary dispute's final settlement, 

which had been concluded at Washington, D.C., only in June, 

but also the annual payment of furs from the HBC to the 

Russian government, which ensured the HBC's continued 

privilege of trading along the Pacific Ocean in Russian territory. 

Lane remained at Fort Vancouver and was elected judge for 

Vancouver County on June 7, 1847. He resigned from the 

HBC in 1851, a year after moving to Oregon City, where he 

became a merchant. His resignation occurred under a shadow 

of dubious business practices. In laler life, he became a lawyer 

but also an alcoholic, eventually committing suicide at The 

Dalles in 1877. 

La Shute/Sbotes/Shoots Presumably, les Chutes or the 

Chutes or HeU Gate Rapids, this feature on the lower Columbia 

River occurs near modem Wisram, Washington, whe,re the 

Deschutes River (Oregon) joins the Columbia. It is not to be 

confused with "Great Shoots, " the name given by Lewis and 

Clade to the Cascades. See also the Dalh. 

Lefrombeys This voyageur, whose name was perhaps Laframboise, 

a more common name at Red River. has not been further 

identified. Like the names of Lucie, Montrose, PeUaw, Prew, 

and Sanschay. Lefrombey's does not appear on HBe roll of 

men who signed service contracts with the company. 

Le grose point A less common name for any of the rapids on the 

Columbia River, this one may ~ following the apparent downriver 

order of the list in which it appears, be either the lower 

Little or the Upper Little Dalles of the upper (not lower) 

76 

Colwnbia River. This wouJd place it either just upriver or just 

dowruiver of the Arrow Lakes. 

Ie Rocks prarey lie Rocks prarie Larocque's Prairie, also 

called Prairie de la Vache, was named f, rChiefTrader Joseph 

Rocque (1787- 1866). It stood on the east side of the 

Athabasca River approximately halfway between the mouth of 

the Whirlpool River (see Grand Travers) to the south, and the 

townsite of modem Jasper to the north. It supplied brigades 

with level camping, and, more important, forage for the horses 

used to cross Athabasca Pass. 

littee DaDs These are the Lower Linle Dalles on the upper· 

Columbia River, about twenty miles upriver of Kettle Falls but 

below the Arrow Lakes. Kane passed them on September 23, 

1847 . WA calls them "the narrowest part of the Columbia 

River for full one thousand mile . It is here contracted into a 

passage of one hundred and fifty yards by lofty rocks" (226). 

This asse ment appears to forget about The Dalles, on the 

lower Columbia, which were not 1000 miles away. 

little DaDs Upper Little Dalles, as it was also known, lay, in 

contrast to Lower Little Dalles, upriver of the Arrow Lakes, at 

the site of modem Revelstoke, Briti h Columbia. WA describes 

it as "a very long rapid shoot of three or four miles" (299). 

little dog portage On the Kaministikwia River north of Fort 

William, this portage into Little Dog Lake was still traceable in 

the 1960s. 

little dog river lbis is probably Jourdain Creek, up which the 

brigades struggled to the height of land between Lake Superior 

and Lake Winnipeg (Hudson Bay). It flows mto Dog River and 

thence to Dog Lake. TIle small lake that Kane subsequently 

mentions is probably tiny Cold Water Lake. 

little ~ See Lake Winapeg. 

little portage This portage occurred oddly in the middle of Lake 

of the Woods, at the Aulneau peninsula, where low water 

occasionally would make necessary a carry over a barely 

submerged island. 

little rock Like all the rapids and falls below Lac du Bonnet 

on the Winnipeg River, this one, normally called Petit Rocher, 

and its portage no longer exist. 

long ~ See a valley called Iong~. 

lost IDem portage Like that of pin portage, the whereabouts of 

this portage cannot be determined today. because of the 

changes that the Kaministikwia River valley has llndergone as 

a consequence of hydroelectric developments. Moreover, for 

some reason, names of features OIl this stretch of the river often 

varied; no two fur trade narratives agree entirely about them. 

Loucie, Fransis See Lucie, Framway. 

lAu, Mr. The Mr. Louis mentioned on July I, 1847, at Fort 

Vancouver and the Mr. Louis mentioned on August 6, 1847, at 

Fort Colville are one and the same. Kane first met OtiefTrader 

John Lee Lewes (1791 - 1872) at Fort Colville November 

20 - 23, 1846. Although Lewes was a veteran chief trader in 

the Columbia district, he was at Colville only a few years, 

following five years at Fort Simpson, on the upper Mackenzie 

River, where, during a gun accident in 1843, he had blown off 

Guide

Detail O/MAP TO ILLUSTRATE M~ KANE'S TRAVELS IN THE TERRITORY OF THE HUDSON'S BA Y COMPANY shown in ilS entirery on pages 

16 and 17.

his right hand. He was noted as the last of the fur made f to 

customarily to wear the ceremonial w rd. In his " Character 

B k, ' Governor imp n regarded him as •'a very active 

bu tling fellow who i not paring of personallabouc to forward 

the intere ts of the concern .. . .Ius integrity i unq 'onabl 

and I have never d . teeted him in a faJ hood wruch i more 

than I can say of his associates" 185). In 1849, he left Colville 

for Cumberland House. Harper prints a certificate of authenticity 

wrinen by Lewes after he examined Kane' an at Fort 

Colville, September 16, 1847 (329-330). Lewes was me son 

of Charles Lee Lewes. a famous actor at Covent Garden and 

Drury Lane theatres. 

Low, Mr. Kane met Thomas Lowe (1824-1912) at Fort Vancoover 

m December, 1847, but mentions him in his journal 

only in the entries for October 28 - 30, 1847, when they passed 

at Boat Encampment. and for May 22, 1848 , when Lowe 

reached Fan Edmonton. These meetings occurred because, 

although Lowe was nominally stationed in the Columbia district" 

he was in, charge of the annual express brigade to York 

Factory on Hudson Bay. When he left the HBC in 1850, he set 

up business in Oregon City, San Francisco, and Victoria. 

Iowr fort See tone on Red River /lowr fort. 

Lucie, Fransway / F~ Loude Fran~is Lucie, a Cree Metis 

hunter who taught Kane the fine points of bison hWlting when 

Kane stayed at Fon Edmonton in December, 1841, traveled 

downriver with Kane for a day in January, 1848. He has not been 

further identified. In some of its inflated prose, WA recounts 

Lucie's prudent refusal to allow Kane to fire at agrizzIy bear: Hit 

was ten chances to one that: three balls would not kill him quick 

enough to prevent a hand-to-hand encounter, a sort of amusement 

that neither [Kane nor Lucie] were Quixotic enough to 

desire" (266-267). See also Lefrombeys. 

Lone narrows See Lake Winapcg. 

Macanac Mackinac Island, western Lake Huron, where the fur 

trade had been established in the early eighteenth century, and 

where a settlement had succeeded forts by the time of Kane's 

visits, served as a rendezvous where the United Saares Government 

armuaUy made its payments to the Ojibwa and Onawa 

tribes. Kane spent three weeks there on his trip of 1845 (see 

Inrroduction), as weU as his whisde stop in May, 1846. 

Mcbane, Mr. William McBean, a Metis, had joined the HBC in 

1828 and was the Chief Trader stationed at Fort Walla Walla, or 

Nez Perce, from 1846 until 1851 , when be retired from the 

service. Like John Lee Lewes (see ~, Mr.), McBean 

supplied Kane with a certificate of authenticity respecting his art 

(Harper [328]). Also in 1847, he met John Mix Stanley, the 

American painter who narrowly escaped death at the Whitman 

mission massacre. According to Governor Simpson's "Owacter 

Book, " McBean would have been about forty years of age in 

1847, when Kane met him; " Writes a fair hand and \Ulde:mands 

common accounts which is the extent of his Education. Neither 

bright nor useful ' ~ (232). 

McKi.osey, M See McKimey, Mr./tbe Majer/the Mager. 

McKinsey, Mr /tJre Majer I the Mager There is a strong possibility 

that M McKinsey is Major Mc.l(imey, and that the Mc 

Kinseys brigade includes the Major, his wife, aod his daughter. 

Thus all the McKinseys listed here refer to the same man, HBC 

78 

cleric Donald MCKenzie (ft. 1818- 1850), and . 3mily. In 

making an ironical reference the M . r' courage on Lake 

Winnipeg, Kane ms to have ized up this man ' t the fur 

trade did. Indeed, judging by Governor impson' " ''-IloiIlIlII..4,1;;. 

B k" portrait of MCKenzi , the epilhet of " Ma· r'" i 

ironical: •• A hman about 45 Years f Ag [in 1832, thus 

about sixty when Kane met him in 1848] ... Tolly well 

Educared and has an imposing Manner and address but a trifling 

useless superficial feUow who can Drink. & pilfer and rarely 

speaks the truth. Was a Lieu~ [not a Major] in the Army but 

[was] Sent to Coventry' and liged to Sell out having hewn 

the 'White feather'. A blustering Cowardly poltroon who . 

retained in the Service through mere charity" (221 . 

MCKenzie was tationed at Rar Portage in 1848. When Kme 

just missed catching the next brigade there, perhaps M[ajor] 

McKinsey [Mc Kenzie J continued past his post to help him .ca!Ch 

up. The Major tetired to the Red River SeaJemenl in I SO. 

The Mr. M~ Kinzey whom Kane met at Fort William in ay, 

1846 could have been either James MCKenzie, a son of the 

Major. who was a postmaster stationed in the Rainy River 

district at the time, or Hector MCKenzie, who w stationed at 

Fort William until 1845. but whose cmJers list him aI post on the 

Ottawa River the next year, perhaps the oIde were tponed 

or did oot reach this MCKenzie in time for him to carry them out 

W1til the next season. 

TIle Mr. McKinzey whose arrival Kane was awaiting at Boat 

Encampment in October, 1847, tm not been further identified. 

Given the Major's duties at Rar Portage and his n sin the 

Rainy River district, it seems very doubtfulthal either would 

have been rraveling west across the Rocky Mountains in thaI 

month. Hector MCKenzie was even farther east, in the Ottawa 

River district. Yet, no other MCKenzie/MacKenrie W1dcr c0ntract 

to the JiBe in 1841 was stationed in any of the western 

districts or in the 'Saskatchewan. 

M£ Kimey/McKimey, Mrs. and dugbter These are 'the relatives 

of Major MCKenzie whom Kane met at Slave Falls, 

Winnipeg River, August 9- 10, 1848, and by whom he \Va 

Guide

the date wilen Kane hears the story, or 1859, the date of the 

book's publication, is uncertain. MCMillan was in the Colwnbia 

Department as a North West Company tradelj after the merger of 

1821, he remained there until .825, when he was posted to Fort 

Assiniboine, on the Athabasca River. He did no( return to the 

Columbia district after that time. 

McTavBb, Mr. William Mactavish (1815 - 1870) was to become 

the most storied of the fur trade factors whom Kane 

met. In 1848, Mactavish, who had apprenticed with the 

HBC in 1833, and who had spent every year since then at 

York Factory, was moving to Sault Sainte Marie; hence 

his trip wirh Kane. Until 1858, Mactavish enjoyed a fine 

career as a factor and Cbief Trader. Once he was forced 

into an administrative role as Governor of Assiniboia (Red 

River), however, he took on a complexity of l"eS(X>mibilities 

which he never mastered. In 1869- 1870, suffering 

from wberculosis, no doubt brought on in part by all those 

years spent in York Factory's "dismal . .. climate and 

country" (WA (321)), he was imprisoned by Louis Riel's 

Metis provisional government. Released in the spring, he 

sailed to England but died two days after reaching Liverpool. 

the Majer/the Mager See McKimey, Mr I the Majer /tbe 

Mager. 

Manson, Mr Donald Chief Trader Donald Manson (1796- 

1880) joined the HBC in 1817. An energetic, active personality, 

Manson manned, at one time or another, nearly all 

the remote HBC posts in inland and coastal New Caledonia 

(northern British Columbia) district. In his "Character 

Book, "Governor Simpson estimated him as a "stout 

strong active Man well adapted for Opposition, exploring 

Service or any other duty requiring strength and activity. 

Qualified for the charge of a Post and has influence both 

with Indians and Servants, but deficient in Education and 

cannOl be left to the exercise of his own judgement in any 

matter requiring head work" (221). In 1857, he retired to 

the Willamerte River valley, taking up farming. In early 

July, 1847, when Kane traveled with him from Fort Vancouver 

up the Columbia to Fort Walla Walla, Manson was 

en route to Fort St. James, Stuart Lake. The site in northern 

inland British Columbia is a town today, bearing the 

same name. 

Mary Dare The HBC pW'Chased this 149-ton brigantine in 

1846. It arrived at Fort Victoria on May 23, 1847, under the 

command of James Allen Scarborough, and served for 

seven years in a triangular route, from Victoria to the 

Sandwich Islands and back to Fort Vancouver. The HBC 

sold the Mary Dare in 1854. 

Maioo, Mr William Mason (d. 1891) was a missionary in the 

West from the 18305, when he received his appointment 

from the Wesleyan Methodist Omrch. Posted to Rainy 

Lake in 1840, he was at Rossville Mission (on Playgreen 

Lake, near Norway House) for eleven years, 1843-1854. 

Kane mel him there. Like most missionaries of the time, 

be worked not only as a priest, but also as a translator, 

intetprerer, and teacher. Although Mason is sometimes 

credited with a ttanslation of the Bible into Cree, the work 

seems to have been undertaken largely by his wife, Sophia 

Thomas Mason, who also found the time to bear him nine 


children. In 1854, Mason left me Methodist OlUrch, taking 

up an appoinbTlent with the Omrch of England at York 

Factory. 

Meayet5 Rock Roche Miette, a inguJar fial cliff face 7(JX) 

feet high, remains a landmark today because the YeUowhead 

Highway passes at its foot. It is located beside the 

Athabasca River, between Jasper and Bnile lakes, east of 

the Jasper townsite. It is named for me reason given by 

Kane. 

MetbedS JUbon of Mr Wacker and EaIes/ Mr. Walkers and 

EaIls mBhon See EaIes/EaIk. 

Mill Fort Vancouver had put both a Hour mill and a saw mill 

into operation by 1828. 

MOIltnJse/montrauslmootrous The identity of this person is 

uncertain. WA calls him "M'Gillveray" (lOl, 103). See 

also Lefrombeys. 

Moodey t Ca~ See Comuble. 

the Mountain HOIIS Rocky MOWltain House (est. 1799) was 

visited by Kane from April 21 until early May, 1848. It lies 

on the North Saskarchewan River, approximately 165 

miles upriver of Edmonton, at the edge of the foothills of 

the Rockies. Kane made his hip to it overland by horse. 

The HBC first located a post there in 1835. 

MounteD falls Better known as Kakabelca Falls (the portage 

around them was called the Mountain Portage), these falls 

of 120 feet occur thirty-six miles upriver from Lake 

Superior on the Kaministikwia River. 

Mount sL Hellam A 9600-foot-high volcanic mountain 

north of the Columbia River and west of the Cowlitz River 

in Washington state, Mount St. Helens can be seen from a 

point eighty miles out at sea. It was seen and named in 

1792 by the British explorer, Cap(ain George Vancouver. 

He named it in honor of Baron St. Helens (1753-1839), 

who conducted British negotiations with Spain regaroing 

possession of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. 

Kane wanted to climb it but could find no willing 

participants or guide. It was first climbed six years later, in 

1853. 

Mr. a ~hanery 

See Jacuhes, Mr. 

Muck-e-IOO/pouder /Tbe Powder This Cree chief, whom 

Kane met near Fort Pitt on September 15. 1846, and at Fort Pitt 

in late January, 1848, is well identified by Kane as the aide-decamp 

of Caw-ke-leis suw-k-way. 

musk..e-gaw A tribe of the Swampy Cree, the Mas-ka-gan (the 

name derives, as does the name Muskeg, from the Algonquian 

word for •• grassy bog' ') were the Indians that the Reverend 

William Mason ministered to at Rossville Mission, near Norway 

House. WA judges them harshly, as the journal does not 

"they are decidedly the dirtiest Indians I have met with, and 

the less that is said about their morality the better" (71). The 

sketches that Kane mentions having made of this tribe have not 

been located. 

Nasqualy /N~uuly 

See nesqualey. 

79

Paul Kane. NORWAY HOUSE. July or August. 1846. Oil on paper. 8x /3". Collection. Stark Museum of Art. 

Nepersey This is Kane's spelling of the French words Nez 

Perces which were used to identify the tribe Nez Perces. Given 

that Kane rode from Fort Walla Walla, on the Walla Walla 

River, overland to the Tuchci/Tushciy (Touchet) River and on 

again thirty miles to the Nepersey, which he had to cross to see 

the Palouse River valley and to recross to go to the Whitmans' 

mission, and given that WA describes the "Nezperees" River 

as being "250 yards wide ... at the mouth of Palouse River" 

(191), the journal's Nepersey is a misnomer for the Snake 

(once the Lewis) River, the foremost tributary of the Columbia 

River. It joins the Columbia at modem Pasco, Washington, at 

the lower great bend, where the Columbia makes its final 

dramatic change of direction toward the Pacific Ocean. 

nesqualey /N~ualy /N~uuly/Nesqualy Fort Nisqually 

(est. 1833) was visited by Kane April 7 and June 15, 1847. In 

1841, Captain Charles Wilkes (see WiIk's party, Capt) described 

this fort, located at the southeastern end of Puget 

Sound, near the site of modem Nisqually, Washington, as 

being "constructed of pickets, enclosing a space about two 

hundred feet square, with four comer bastions. Within this 

enclosure are the agents' stores, and about half a dozen houses, 

built of logs, and roofed with bark." By 1847, it had been 

transformed mainly into a fann, operated by the Puget Sound 

80 

Agricultural Company, a company formed by the HBC but 

distinct from it. By 1847, the farm had 6000 sheep and 2000 

cattle; it was successfully exporting wool to Russia, Hawaii, 

and England (WA [142]). 

Nesqualy Chief In his landscape and portrait log, Kane names 

this chief Lach-o-let and calls the Nisqually "the largest 

Indians I have met with ... WA speUs his name "Lach-oh-Iett" 

(143). 

Norway House Norway House (est. 1814) was visited by Kane 

July II to August 13, 1846, and July 18-23, 1848. Originally 

on Lake Winnipeg, in 1826 this post was moved to the site 

visited by Kane, on Playgreen Lake, at the northeastern outlet 

of Lake Winnipeg. Its name derives from the Norwegian 

axmen who were hired to open land communications to York 

Factory and Hudson Bay. The post served as the divisional 

point for goods coming up from Hudson Bay and destined for 

inland posts to the west, south, and north. As well, the company's 

famous York boats were built at this point. Other 

distinctions include the fact that the Northern Council of the 

HBC met annually at this post, as Kane observes on July 18, 

1848; Sir George Simpson had a residence there and presided 

at the meetings; the Reverend J. Evans invented Cree syUabic 

Guide

characters while there; and the transfer of Rupert's Land to the 

Dominion of Canada was arranged there in 1869. 

oaId mans river A tributary of the Athabasca River, Oldman 

Creek enters it from the south, at a point between the mouths of 

two other tributaries: the Berland and the McLeod. Modem 

Whitecourt, Alberta, lies to the east of Oldman Creek. Kane's 

brigade had to make two portages on the Athabasca River at 

this point because of low water levels in October. 

Ockanagan Fort Okanagan (est. 1811) was visited by Kane 

November 28, 1846. Situated at the forks of the Okanagan and 

Columbia rivers (near modem Brewster, Washington), 

this post was established by John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur 

Company, bought, along with Astoria, by the North West 

Company in 1812, and taken over by the HBC in 1821, at the 

time of the merger with its rival. 

oragan Kane here uses the term (i.e. Oregon) to designate the 

entire Pacific Slope drained by the Columbia River: a post as 

far inland as Fort Colville is included. The name was first 

used by Jonathan Carver, in Travels through the Interior 

Parts of North America (1778), and seems to derive from the 

Shoshoni word, oyer-un-gon. meaning" a place of plenty. " 

Orkey / orknie The HBC traditionally hired on men at the 

Orkney Islands, off the northeast coast of Scotland, which was 

the last stop for the company's ships before the traverse to 

Hudson Strait. Natives of the Orkneys are properly called 

Orcadians, but were known as Orkneymen in the fur trade. 

P. River/pambani Pembina River flows east and south out of 

the northern Turtle Mountain, in the southwestern comer of 

Manitoba. It crosses the Manitoba/North Dakota border and 

empties into Red River at Pembina, North Dakota. Its name 

comes from the Cree for "wateIberry" or "high bush cranberry." 

Paganes The Piegan (U .S. sp.)/Peigan (Can. sp.) are the largest 

of the three tribes comprising the Blackfoot Nation. The 

Piegan language differs only slightly from that of the Blood 

and Blackfoot. This tribe once occupied hunting grounds in the 

Rocky Mountain foothills, extending from Rocky Mountain 

House, on the North Saskatchewan River, in the north, to what 

today is known as Heart Butte, Montana, in the south, and east 

out onto the Plains. By the time of Kane's travels, they had 

moved farther south, but were occasional visitors to Fort 

Edmonton and Fort Pitt, where they chanced to encounter their 

traditional enemies, which included the Assiniboine. 

Pallaw See Pellaw. 

pallett Paul Paulet Paul, one of the steersmen of Kane's brigade 

of York boats in August, 1846, was renowned for a great feat 

of strength that he performed at Grand Rapid, the debouchement 

of the Saskatchewan River, through Cedar Lake, into 

Lake Winnipeg. When he accidentally snapped his steering oar 

and fell overboard, he managed not only to gain a footing in the 

ferocious rapid, but also to spring into the next boat coming 

downriver. Then, he urged the men to catch up to his foundering 

vessel; when they succeeded, he sprang into it, regained 

control of it before it overturned, and conducted it safely into 

the next lake (WA [73-74]. 

paluse River A tributary of the Snake River, the Palouse River, 

The American Art Journal! Volume XXI • Number 2 

in southeastern Washington, drains the portion of the Columbia 

Basin that lies south of Spokane, Washington. 

pambani See P. River. 

Pambena MounteD Probably, Pembina mountain is meant 

here, but that name is not a current feature on maps. Because 

Kane mentions it before, but on the same day that he mentions 

P[ embina] River, the hill could be the one identified as Le Gros 

Bute on the map prepared by the British expedition, under 

Captain John Palliser, a decade later (1857 - 1860). This would 

place the hill near the site of present~y Baldur, Manitoba, 

north of Rock Lake (Kane's lake de Roch) , and south of 

Spruce Woods Provincial Parle. 

papeler point See Lake Winapeg. 

parey de bute or hill parey Neither name has survived on 

modem maps. Kane's landscape and portrait log states that 

"Prarey de Bute" was situated "between the cow e litz and 

Nesqually [rivers] . . . 20 miles from [Fort] Nesqually." Together 

with the fact that Captain Wilkes records his encountering 

the prairie after crossing the Deschutes River on his trip 

from Fort Nisqually to Fort Vancouver in May, 1841, Kane's 

information matches the feature known today as Violet Prairie, 

Washington. 

Whereas the journal credits Captain Wilkes with having 

investigated the hills on the prairie, WA entrusts this investigation 

to Kane himself: "I dug one of them open, but found 

nothing in it but loose stones, although I went four or five feet 

down. The whole surface is thickly covered with coarse grass" 

(142). For his part, Wilkes described "Bute Prairies" as 

"extensive, and covered with umuli or small mounds, at 

regular distances asunder. As far as I could learn, there is no 

tradition among the natives relative to them. They are conical 

mounds, thirty feet in diameter, about six or seven feet high 

above the level, and many thousands in number. Being anxious 

to ascertain if they contained any relics, I subsequently 

visited these prairies, and opened three of the mounds, but 

nothing was found in them but a pavement of round stones. " 

the paw/the Paw/the P./the Pau The Pas (est. 1751) was 

visited by Kane August 25, 1846, and July 12, 1848. On the 

Saskatchewan River just east of the Saskatchewan/Manitoba 

border, this post took its name from the Cree opa, a "narrow 

place"; the expression is descriptive of the river at this point. 

It was known to the French as Pasquia and Le Pas. 

PeDaw /Pallaw The identity of this voyageur is not known. See 

also Lefrombeys. 

pin portage On the Kaministikwia River upriver from 

Kakabeka Falls, the vicinity of this portage, like the rapids it 

avoided, has been submerged by hydroelectric projects on the 

river. 

Pitt Fort Pitt (est. 1830) was visited by Kane September 19- 

20, 1846, and Janwuy 14 to February 3, and May 27- 28, 

1848. On the North Saskatchewan River just east of the 

Alberta/ Saskatchewan border, Fort Pin served as the midway 

provisioning post between forts Edmonton, on the west, 

and Carlton, on the east. 

play geene lake/Play geene lake Playgreen Lake, depending 

upon one's point of view, is the northeastern extension of Lake 

81

Winnipeg, to which it is connected by a narrows, or the 

recommencement, after passing through the north end of Lake 

Winnipeg, of the Saskatchewan River, its waters continuing on 

to Hudson Bay. 

point de boan/Point de boan In the Wood River valley, Pointe 

des Bois, flooded today by one of the Columbia River's thirteen 

dams, was a point of land around which the ttail across Athabasca 

Pass had to negotiate. It was both densely wooded and 

boggy. In such a narrow valley, the ttail must have seemed at 

times to be the riverbed itself, at times dense, flooded woods - 

both bitter tonnents, especially in cold weather, for man and 

horse alike. 

point de Tramble See Lake Winapeg. 

point min. See Lake Winapeg. 

Point of Woods Pointe des Bois, or Pointe aux Chenes, was the 

name given to the fall and portage ten miles downriver from 

Chute a Jacques (see rapid de gock) on the Winnipeg River. 

Alternatively, it lay one mile above Rocher Briile portage. 

)lOuder See Muck-e-too. 

Pourtage new In his list of portages on the Columbia River, Kane 

mentions a name not commonly used. His list appears to follow 

the course of the Columbia, the last entry being the lowest 

feature on the river. The Cascades, however, were always 

described as the last downriver, or, for those venturing inland, 

the "first" (WA [180]) upriver obstructions; yet, the name of the 

Cascades precedes that of Pourtage new in this list. 

Powder See Muck-e-too. 

prarie de fay Thirty-six miles up the Columbia River from Fort 

Vancouver and fourteen miles downriver from the Cascades, 

Prairie de The must have been somewhere between modem 

Multnomah Falls, Oregon, and Skamania, Washington. Its 

whereabouts have not been confirmed, but it is known that the 

name was widely used in accounts of the lower Columbia. 

Prew This is another voyageur who is known entirely by his 

(probably) misspelled surname. See also Lefrombeys. 

Prudence, Mr. Chief Factor John Peter Pruden (bapt. 1778; d. 

1868), the man for whose baptismal place Fort Edmonton was 

named, was the great uncle of the bride, Margaret Harriott 

Rowand, the daughter of John Harriott (see Haritt/Harett/ 

H., Mr.) and his first wife, Elizabeth, who disappeared in 

Athabasca Pass, and who was herself John Peter Pruden's 

daughter. (Could the bride, then, possibly have been the newborn 

baby who had to be saved in Athabasca Pass and taken to 

Fort Edmonton? She would have been age seventeen that 

December of 1847.) 

Pruden had become a councillor of Assiniboia in 1839, 

retiring to Red River eventually, although he had obviously 

come to Fort Edmonton (perhaps for the wedding) in De· 

cember, 1847. In his "Character Book," Governor Simpson 

thought little of him: "A man of good conduct and character 

and of respectable appearance and manner but weak minded 

vain & silly without decision in or knowledge of business 

beyond the simple process of dealing with an Indian across the 

Counter" (188). 

Punch Bowl 

82 

See Cometees punch boal. 

R. River See Red River. 

rabbet point See Lake Winapeg. 

Raney Lake/ Lack Ie Plue Rainy Lake is located in rough 

woodlands along the modem Ontario/Minnesota border, 150 

miles west of Lake Superior. By way of Rainy River, its waters 

flow west to Lake of the Woods. 

rapid de god/Chute a Jocka Chute a Jacques, a fall of fifteen 

feet on the Winnipeg River, ninety miles downstream from Lake 

of the Woods, was seen by Kane on June 9, 1846, and August 

11, 1848. WA explains that the fall takes its name from a 

voyageur who attempted an unprecedented shooting of it and 

died (44). The modem name is Lamprey Falls. 

rapped de More Named "Rapids de Mort" in WA (101), 

today's Gooseneck Rapids lie forty miles below the town of 

Hinton, Alberta, on the Athabasca River, they form part of a 

swift stretch of the river, with waves more than three feet high, 

which extends from the mouth of Oldman Creek (Kane's oald 

mans river) to the mouth of the Berland River (Kane's Bateseis 

River of November 22, 1847). This is likely the same rapid as 

the one Kane called Grand raped when he went by snowshoe 

downriver on November 18, 1847. 

Rapped de prate Probably Kane's spelling of Rapid de Pretre, 

Priest Rapids is now inundated by a reservoir of the same name 

in central Washington state. According to Gabriel Franchere, 

an Astorian (see Astoria), the rapid on the Columbia River 

was "thus named in 1811 ~y [another Astorian] Mr [David] 

Stuart and his party on meeting a number of Indians, one of 

whom mimicked religious ceremonies and the action of sprinkling 

with holy water." 

rapped of deth See daD de more. 

Rapped St. Marton/river S~ Martin/Rappe st Maran Presumably, 

Kane means St. Martin rapids and St. Martin River. At 

the rapids the incident concerning cannibalism by the Iroquois 

began. Given the order of incidents in that narrative, both the 

river and the rapid, where it joins the Columbia, lie upriver of 

Dalle de Mort, that is, below Boat Encampment and above 

modem Revelstoke, British Columbia, and Upper Arrow Lake. 

Rat portage/Rat Portage Rat Portage (est. 1790) was passed 

by Kane June 7, 1846, and visited August 14-16, 1848. 

Situated along the portage of the same name at the outlet 

(north shore) of Lake of the Woods into the Winnipeg River 

(at modem Kenora, Ontario), Rat Portage was built by the 

North West Company and maintained as a provisioning point 

and trading post by the HBC following the merger of 1821 . 

","Red River The name refers to both a river and the oldest 

settlement in the fur trade empire. At 550 miles, Red River 

takes its rise at Lake Traverse, on the Minnesota/North Dakota 

border, flowing north into Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg. The 

river's color comes from the clay in its trench. 

Red River Colony began as a settlement for retired voyageurs 

and their Metis families, and was introduced to systematic 

farming in 1812, when Lord Selkirk attempted to 

"plant" a colony of British and European immigrants at it. 

Of tangential interest are the Red River carts of the Metis, to 

which Kane refers (see, for example, the entry under June 24, 

1846) and which several of his paintings depict. These were of 

Guide

a unique construction, made entirely of wood, held together by 

leather strips. Easily repaired, a Red River cart had two high, 

deeply dished wheels that made it stable, even in mud and 

marsh. The combination in moving parts of wood and leather 

made the cart a very noisy machine, but such materials also 

made the cart a solid, buoyant raft and a transporter capable of 

loads as great as 1000 pounds (450 kilograms). The carts were 

hooked up to a pony or ox by two shafts attached to the axle. 

Richerdsion/Richerdson, Sur John Sir John Richardson 

(1787- 1865) explored the Arctic for the North West Passage 

with Franklin in 1819- 1822 and again in 1824- 1826. In June, 

1848, he was traveling north again, this time to search for his 

missing corruade, whose expedition of 1845 seemed to have 

disappeared. Heading north by way of the fur trade route, 

Richardson planned to scour the northern coast of the continent. 

Of coincidental interest is the fact that Richardson had spent the 

entire winter of 1819-1820, during the first Franklin expedition, 

at Cumberland House, near where Kane meets him. 

river Le PIne/River Ie PIuie Rainy River, the modem border 

between Ontario and Minnesota, runs from Rainy Lake to Lake 

of the Woods. It was thought by traders to be one of the prettiest 

watercourses on the route, but because modem travelers sometimes 

find it monotonous, the traders' judgment may well be 

ascribed to the fact that the river's I ~mile length required no 

portages or other interruptions. 

River MaIane Maligne River is the name of the watercourse 

between Sturgeon Lake and Lac La Croix (in present-day 

Quetico Provincial Park) that served the fur trade after 1830 in 

the complex and circuitous stretch over the height of land 

between the Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg watersheds. 

River Naloin Another riviere maligne, this one seems to be 

Kane's reference to a point on the Winnipeg River where an 

island fonns two channels, whose more common names were, 

simply, the River and Blanche River. The latter name came 

from the color given the channel by all its rapids and ledges. 

Kane's brigade apparently passed up Blanche River. On any 

given day, almost any river on the fur trade route, except 

perhaps Rainy River, could have garnered the epithet of riviere 

maligne from weary voyageurs. Naloin is probably Kane's 

attempt at the word, Maligne. WA erroneously offers 

"Malaine" (314), likely a phonetic transcription of the word 

intended. by Kane. 

river S! Martin See Rapped St. Marton. 

River Tuch3/tbe Tush8y The Touchet River, in southeastern 

Washington state, is a tributary of the Walla Walla River. South 

of the lower Snake River, its channel mirrors that of the Snake as 

it flows in a southwesterly direction to meet the Walla Walla 

several miles inland from the Columbia River. 

River Winapeg See Winepeg River. 

Roches Brules Kane means Rocher Bnile portage, on the lower 

Winnipeg River, nine miles upriver of Barrier Falls (see 

Barriere portage) and one mile below Pointe des Bois (see 

Point of Woock). 

R~, Mr. Chief Factor Donald Ross (17'n? - 1852) was stationed 

at Norway House from 1830 until 1851. Kane appears to have 

enjoyed his company during his two five-week stays there, in 

1846 and again in 1848. Ross, who had served for seven years as 

The American Art lournal/ Volume XXI • Number 2 

Paul Kane. DONALD ROSS, CHIEF FACTOR, NORWAY HOUSE. 

August 13, 1846. Oil on paper, 7 x 6". Collection, British 

Columbia Archives and Records Service, Victoria, British 

Columbia, Canada. 

Governor Simpson's secretary prior to the posting to Norway 

House, was particularly active, not only because the Northern 

COWlcil of the HBC held its annual meeting at his post, but also 

because Wesleyan Methodist missionaries made their mission 

(Rossville) at Playgreen Lake a sort of northern center for their 

activities. Not swprisingly, Governor Simpson assessed him 

favorably in his "Character Book" as a "very steady regular 

well behaved man .... Bears an excellent private character, is 

quite a man of his woni, and qualified to become useful in the 

direction of the business" (198). Kane's high regard for Ross 

seems to be reflected in the fact that his is the only portrait of a fur 

trade factor Kane painted during his trip. 

Rowand MJ: Joining the North West Company at age sixteen, 

John Rowand (c. 1787 -1854) became a Chief Trader in the 

HBC at the time of the companies' merger (1821). He rose to 

head the Saskatchewan Department in 1823. For the next thirty 

years, Rowand built Fort Edmonton into not only the district's 

hub, from which fws were shipped annually to York Factory on 

Hudson Bay, but also, once Rowand convinced Governor 

83

George Simpson to open a trail from Edmonton to the Athabasca 

River (see Frot Asneboin), the vital supply link in the transcontinental 

trade route from the Colwnbia River, New Caledonia, 

and 1bompson River districts on the Pacific Slope. 

One of the most important chief factors in the HBC, Rowand 

built Fort Edmonton into one of the most profitable and physically 

imposing posts in the empire. His success lay partly in his 

ability to negotiate among the various opposing tribes of Plains 

Indians; the Blackfoot Confederacy warred with the Cree and 

Assiniboine for the territory in which the North Saskatchewan 

River lay. TIley all came to find Rowand a brave, fair man, 

calling him "Iron Shirt" and "Big Mountain," this despite the 

fact that he was short and quite lame. [fhe exhibited a shortcoming, 

it was his disinclination to support wholeheartedly the 

efforts of the missionaries on the prairies. In his '"Character 

Book, " Governor Simpson reserved his highest praise for Rowand: 

"One of the most pushing bustling Men in the Service 

whose zeal and ambition in the discharge of his duty is unequalled. 

. . . Of a fiery disposition and as bold as a Uon. An 

excellent Trader who has the peculiar talent of attracting the 

fiercest Indians to him while he rules them with a Rod of Iron and 

so daring that he beards their Chiefs in the open camp while 

surrounded by their Warriors .... full of drollery and hwnour 

and generally liked and respected by Indians Servants and his 

own equals" (182-183). 

Rvwand was returning to Fort Edmonton from Yom Factory 

in August, 1846, when Kane joined his annual Saskatchewan 

brigade at Norway House. The Chief Factor was on furlough in 

Montreal in 1847-1848, when Kane spent Christmas at Fort 

Edmonton. In 1854, although he had decided to retire, he died in 

the course of duty , apparently of a stroke, while en route to Fort 

Pitt. 

Rown, Mr. J. John Rowand Jr., the one son of Rowand Sr. to 

join the fur trade, was the trader at Fort Pitt. He came to 

Edmonton at Christmas, 1847, and on January 6, 1848, he 

married Margaret (see Prudence, Mr.), daughter of John Edward 

Harriott (see Harltt/Harett/H., Mr.), who was superintending 

Fort Edmonton during the furlough of Rowand Sr. 

Sandwitch Islanders The Pacific Slope districts of the fur trade 

had long employed native Hawaiians, much as the eastern and 

northern districts had employed Orcadians (see Orkey /orknie). 

Wilson Price Hunt, an Astorian (see Astoria), had begun the 

practice on the Colwnbia River as soon as Astoria was built in 

1811. Nonnally, the Hawaiians proved to be reliable employees, 

with especially well developed skills on the water. John Mc 

Loughlin, Chief Factor at Fort Vancouver from 1824 to 1846, 

named Owyhee River, in southeastern Oregon, in recognition of 

the part played by Hawaiians in the fur trade. 

Sanschay See Lefrombeys. 

Saskatchawan The Saskatchewan River is the principal river 

system north of the Missouri, draining much of the Canadian 

prairies from the Rocky Mountains to Hudson Bay. Its name 

derives from the Algonquian words, KisiskaJchewani Sipi. for 

"swift-ftowing river." At its eastern extent, Cedar Lake (see 

seder Lake) and Grand Rapid (see grand Rapid/grand 

raped), where it enters Lake Winnipeg, the Saskatchewan is 

unified. Upriver 375 miles (west) are the forks of the North and 

South Saskatchewan, which drain very different land. Taking its 

rise in the Columbia Icefield (and for that reason, never used as a 

route across the mountains), the North Saskatchewan remains 

84 

entirely within the prairie parlc1and, while the South Saskatchewan, 

which is fed by the Bow and Oldman rivers, drains 

grasslands. This distinction is crucial for the understanding of the 

paramount significance to the fur trade of the North, and the 

comparative insignificance of the South Saskatchewan: the 

beaver thrives only where trees do. As well, because the South 

Saskatchewan lay, in the time of Kane's travels, within the 

territory controlled by the bellicose Blackfoot Confederacy, 

travel along it was hazardous. Nevertheless, the fur trade relied 

on bison for its supply of pemmican, with which brigades could 

sharply reduce the time taken from travel for hunting, thereby 

making possible communication from the more remote Athabasca 

River, Mackenzie River, and New Caledonia districts to 

Hudson Bay and back in a single season's travel. Thus, st>rne 

auxiliaIy use of the South Saskatchewan district was necessarily 

made. 

Saot de S~ Marey /sault/Sault Sault Sainte Marie (est. 1668) 

was visited by Kane July, 1845, May 19, 1846, and October 1, 

1848. Established as a mission in 1668 by Pere Marquette, a 

post at the rapids of the Saint Marys River, between lakes 

Superior and Huron, was maintained from that point on. 

seder Lake On the transcontinental fur trade route, the first lake 

that lay west of Lake Winnipeg, Cedar Lake was reached by a 

portage around Grand Rapid (see grand Rapid/grand raped). 

[t is a widening of the Saskatchewan River, having The Pas to its 

irrunediate west. 

Setter, Mr. George Setter (c. 1782-1868), named "Seder" in 

WA (47, 48), joined the HBC as a laborer in 1805. He retired in 

1858, and died at the Red River Settlement. Setter spent most of 

his very long career in the Red River district, and had been the 

postmaster at Fort Alexander for one year when Kane met him in 

JWle, 1846. An Orcadian (or Oricneyman, as the HBC referred 

to a native from the Orkney Islands), Setter proved a faithful 

employee; according to Governor Simpson's' 'Character Book" 

(235), however, an acci~nt that rendered Setter lame precluded 

his assuming the command of any important post. 

Sew/Sews/Sewes Sioux are Dakota whose territory in the 1840s 

included the drainage basins of the Red, Rainy, and upper 

Mississippi rivers, as well as the Qu'appelle, Platte, and even 

Yellowstone river valleys. In the vicinity of Red River, where 

Kane encountered them, the Sioux' enemies were the Saulteaux 

and, because they competed with them for bison when the 

numbers of that animal were quickly dwindling, the Metis. 

Shew shwopp/Sbew~hops The Shuswap are the northernmost 

of the four native groups occupying the interior plateau of 

present~y southern British Columbia. 1beir territory was once 

vast, and is still large. Villages on the North and South Tho~ 

son rivers and around the Shuswap Lakes are the most prominent 

"'" 

settlements; these areas lie to the west of the site of Boat 

Encampment, across the Monashee Mountains. 

Shutes/Shoots See La Shute/Shu~/Sboots. 

Silver falls/Silver faD 

fall. 

See fall of the Pransin Horses or silver 

Sirmon, Sir George/Sir Gorge/Sir G./Sur G. Sir George 

Simpson (1787 -1860; lent. 1841) entered the employ of the 

HBC as its Governor-in-Olief in 1820. He helped to effect the 

merger of the HBC and North West Company in 1821, and for 

Guide

forty years developed the strengthened business into a continental 

dominion, knowing nearly every post firsthand and the business 

of all of them intimately. His record-breaking trip in 1824, 

which reached Fort George (Astoria) at the mouth of the Columbia, 

eighty-four days after leaving York Factory on Hudson Bay, 

exemplified his tenacity, eagerness, and sheer devotion to his 

job. (He even had his bride. Frances Ramsay Simpson, spend 

their honeymoon on a fur trade route [see fourt Franas/Fort 

Frames].) Only three of his forty years' service did not include 

an extensive trip. Kane did well, indeed, to keep up to and to 

impress him, for Simpson's concerns during 1846 were riveted 

on the Oregon BoWldary dispute and the ramifications of its 

settlement for the HBC. 

Silmon a brother in law of the Governur, Mr. Identified as W. 

Simpson in WA (67), this is Wemyss M. Simpson (1825-1894), 

the youngest brother of Frances Ramsay Simpson, Governor 

Simpson's cousin and wife. Wemyss Simpson joined the HBC 

in 1841. When Kane met him in July, 1846, he was stationed at 

York Factory and at Oxford House (on the Hayes River, between 

NOlway House and York Factory). 

Simpson had been in charge of the post of Sault Sainte Marie 

for some time when the HBC began to curtail its operations after 

1860. Simpson remained, however, serving first as Indian Commissioner 

at the Sault, and then, in 1867, when Canada came 

into being as a dominion, as the Algoma constituency's fust 

Member of Parliament elected to the House of Commons in 

Ottawa. 

slave ~ See Barriere portage. 

Smtheers, the reverant Mr. The Reverend John Smithurst 

(1807-1867) went to Grand Rapids (St. Andrew's), on the 

lower Red River, in 1840 as a deacon missionary of the Church 

of England. He was the first Anglican missionary to attempt to 

learn an Indian language. During 1846, when he hosted Kane, 

Smithurst was voluntarily conducting garrison services for the 

6th Regiment of Foot, detachments of which were posted at 

Lower Fort Garry (see erNey, Mr. and COI&IbIe, Mr.). After 

being embroiled in a dispute between the Metis and the HBC 

regarding secular matters, he resigned, returning to England in 

1851. 

Soto Saulteaux are the westernmost Ojibwa in Canada (Chippewa 

in Wisconsin). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 

many of those Ojibwa and Ottawa who hired on as freeman 

trappers with the North West Company at Lachine (west of 

Montreal) stayed in the West. Moving beyond the Great Lakes in 

the 1780s, the Saulteaux - these Indians were named by the 

voyageurs after the "jumping waters" of Sault Sainte Marie - 

took up territory along the Winnipeg River, on the eastern shore 

of Lake Winnipeg, and, when aligned with the Metis, on the 

prairie west of Red River. Because the smallpox epidemic of 

1836 diminished their numbers less than it did other tribes', it 

appears that the Saulteaux had built an immunity to the disease 

from earlier contact with Europeans. 

spder Islands See Lake Winapeg. 

the spocan The Spokane River, a tributary of the Columbia, flows 

out of Coeur d' Alene Lake in Idaho, joining the Colwnbia near 

its first great bend in American territory, in northeastern Washington 

state. 

Spokan Fort/spocan Fort Spokane House was not visited by 


Kane. The North West Company established a fort on the 

Spokane River in 1810. It was situated on the east bank at 

Spokane Falls, ten miles northwest of modem Spokane, Washington. 

In 1826, the HBC abandoned the post in favor of Fort 

Colville. 

stincun river In 1860, on the map made by the British exploring 

expedition, under Captain John Palliser, "Riviere Sale or 

Stinking River" is shown flowing from west to east into the 

Red River just south of the forks of the Red and the Assiniboine 

(at Upper Fort Garry). The river's name today is La Salle, a 

euphemistic but confusing homonym that improves sale, the 

French for "dirty," into the name of the celebrated discoverer 

of the Mississippi River, who never set foot in the region of 

lower Red River. 

Although the low-lying land through which Kane was strug 

gling often flooded for miles around when the Red River 

overflowed its banks, Kane seems to have encountered a 

notably wet season. Palliser's map describes the area a.\ 

"Level Plains with long rich grass, being an Ancient Lake 

bottom." Not so ancient, Kane was finding. 

Stone Fort Red River/Iowr fort Lower Fort Gany (est. 

1831) was visited by Kane June 13-14, and again on July 5, 

1846. This fort, at St. Andrews, twenty miles down the Red 

River from Upper Fort Garry, was built with a distinctive solid 

stone wall around it. 

straits/Strates By "straits," Kane seems to mean Juan de Fuca 

Strait; by "Strates," the Strait of Georgia. The first is the ocean 

between Vancouver Island and the northern coast of Washington 

state. The Reverend Samuel Purchas reported in Hakluytus 

Posthumus (1625) that one Michael Lok told him of meeting in 

Venice in 1596 Apostolos Valerianos (also known as Juan de 

Fuca), who claimed that, while serving on Spanish ships, he had 

discovered, between 47° and 48° latitude, the Strait of Artian, the 

mythical canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. However 

apocryphal, the story was recalled in the eighteenth century by 

the British merchant, John Meares, who named the strait "John 

de Fuca" in 1787. 

-The Strait of Georgia was named for George ill in 17fJ2 by its 

discoverer, the British explorer Captain George Vancouver. 

sturgun river See Lake Winapeg. 

Sursees Sarcee are a fonner Athapaskan, or Dene, tribe who split 

from a northern tribe and moved south to the Plains, aligning 

themselves with such disparate tribes as the Blackfoot, Cree, and 

Stoney. Their retention of the Athapaskan language distinguishes 

them from other Plains tribes. Their hunting took them 

across the northern Plains; their reserve today is on the Elbow 

River, contiguous with the southwest limits of the city of Calgary, 

Alberta. 

ToImey, Dr. Trained as a surgeon, William Fraser Tolmie (1812- 

1886) joined the HBC in 1833, serving at posts on the northern 

Pacific coast before starting the Puget Sound Agricultwal 

Company's fann at Nisqually in 1843. He was promoted to 

Chief Trader the month before Kane met him, and to Chief 

Factor in 1855. In later decades, Tolmie turned his career to 

administration, politics, and private fanning on Vancouver 

Island. 

Tom-a-quin Chief of the Cascades (Watlala), a tribe of the 

Chinook family, Tomaquin returned the Hawaiians who had 

85

·\ 

.. { 

Paul Kane. WHITE MUD PORTAGE. August 4 or 12,1848. Waterco!or on paper, 5'/4x9 J /8". Collection, Stark Museum of Art. The 

scene depicts one of two portages named White Mud. The upriver direction of the portagers indicates that the picture was not 

made in 1846 when Kane was traveling downriver. 

deserted from the brigade of John Lee Lewes and Donald 

Manson at the Cascades. Kane almost certainly meant to write 

that in transporting the deserters back into the brigade's custody, 

Tomaquin and his cohort held their knives in their mouths, 

"not thare hands while paddeling": WA (181) confinns as 

much. Kane's landscape and portrait log says that he first met 

Tom-a-quin December 6, 1846, when he painted his portrait. 

Tuem/the Tush8y See River Tueh8/the Tush8y. 

a valley called long gI'tiS Between forts Pitt and Edmonton, 

Kane followed the horse trail overland. No valley bears the 

name of Long Grass today, but the general area between the 

modem villages of Alcurve and Marwayne, Alberta (near the 

Alberta/ Saskatchewan border, about twelve miles south of the 

North Saskatchewan River valley) has several valleys whose 

location and topography would make Kane's name appropriare. 

vanwuvairs Island Vancouver Island, lying off southern British 

Columbia in the Pacific Ocean, was visited by Captain Cook 

in 1778 and discovered to be insular by Captain George 

Vancouver in 1792. The HBC selected it for its Pacific 

headquarters in 1843 (see Fort victoria). Kane was the first 

painter to visit the Indians of this island and the mainland 

opposite. 

vancouvr/vancouver Fort Vancouver (est. 1824) was visited 

86 

by Kane December 8, 1846, to January 10, 1847,andFebruary 

7 to March 25, and June 20 to July 2, 1847. After its merger 

with the North West Company in 1821, the HBC determined to 

build a central depot on the Pacific Slope. Choosing the site on 

the north shore of the Columbia River, where Vancouver, 

Washington, now stands across from Portland, Oregon, they 

named it after the British explorer, Captain George Vancouver 

(l757-1796), whose expedition charted the Columbia River 

up to the mouth of the Willamette River (six miles downstream) 

in 1792. 

Victoria, Fort See Fort Victoria. 

Wabes-a-mong the White Dog See Belcour, Mr. 

Wacker See Eales/~. 

Walker and EaIIs mishon See Eales/EaUs. 

the walla walla [river] The Walla Walla River, in southeastern 

Washington state, parallels the lower Snake River, entering the 

Columbia from the east on the outside of the great river's final 

dramatic bend toward the Pacific Ocean. The Whitman mission. 

like Fort Walla Walla, stood on the Walla Walla, upriver 

from its confluence with the Colwnbia. 

walla walia/waD a walla Fort Walla Walla (also known as Fort 

Guide

Nez Perce) (est. 1818) was visited by Kane December 2-4, 

1846, and July 12 and 22- 29, 1847. Situated on the left bank 

of the Columbia River at the mouth of the Walla Walla River 

(now Walla Walla, Washington), the post was erected by the 

North West Company, and rebuilt by the HBC in 1841 with 

mud brick walls. 

white mud/White Mud As the fur trade did, Kane uses this name 

for two portages on the Winnipeg River, one passed on August 4 

and the other on August 12, 1848. This name was used for a 

portage on the upper river (see Grand Decbarge), and for a 

portage above Eaux qui Remuent, on the lower river below Lac 

du Bonnet (see fall of the Pramin Horses or silver fall). 

Whitmans, nor/Dr. W. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman went to 

Oregon in 1836 and established a Congregationalist mission at 

Waiilatpu (near Fort Walla Walla). On November 29, 1847, 

four months after Kane had visited them, they were slain. 

Cayuse visitors to the mission mwdered them and twelve others, 

and held fifty-three people captive Wltil they were ransomed by 

the HBC. In this fashion, the Cayuse wars began. 

wiDhamed The Willamette River (Oregon) was first explored by 

the Astorians (see Astoria) in 1812. In 1829, its valley was 

farmed for the first time by whites. It flows from south to north, 

entering the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon. In 1842, the 

HBC established Oregon City at the faUs of the Willamette. 

Kane's journal does not recoWlt his trip in the valley, January II 

to February 6, 1847. The Clackama, a Chinook tribe, lived on 

the Clackamas River, a tributary that joins the Willamette River 

from the east at Oregon City . 

WiIk's party, Capt Charles Wilkes (1798-1877) was the American 

naval officer appointed in 1830 to head the Depot of Charts 

and Instnunents. In May, 1841, with other officers, servants, 

two Indians, and a voyageur, he examined the overland route 

between Nisqually and Fort Vancouver, as part of his global 

survey with the United States Exploring Expedition. 

Willam/Willum See Fort WiUam/fort WiIIam/WiUwn. 

Winepeg River Winnipeg R!ver flows north for 500 miles from 

Lake of the Woods to Lake Winnipeg. The name comes from 

win-nipi, the Cree for "murky water." TIle name could not be 

less appropriate for this river. It fonned a singular part of the fur 

trade route to and from Lachine (near Montreal), although it 

presented twenty-six different carrying places. Now harnessed 

by six hydroelectric projects, its spectacular beauty, as it tumbled 

over the Canadian Shield, made it the most arresting, if 

laborious, part of the transcontinental route. For descriptions of 

various features of the river, see Barriere portage, Bek:our, 

Mr., Grand Bonet, Grand Decbarge, Grand GuUete, 

Grand raped, Lake de Bonet, little rock, Point of W~, 

rapid de gock/Chute a Jocka, River NaIoin, Roches Bru.Ies, 

and white mud/White Mud. 

wodin Horse Cheval de bois (Wooden Horse) was one of the 

seven portages in Blanche River (see River NaIoin). 

YaDo Mud See Grand Decbarge. 

York Fa ctary York Factory (est. 1684) was not visited, only 

mentioned, by Kane. The first HBC fort, it was named for the 

Duke of York, later King James II, second Governor of the 

HBC. Located on Hudson Bay at the mouth of the Nelson 

Ri ver, this post loaded furs transported from inland posts onto 

HBC ships sailing for England through Hudson Strait. During 

his first stay at Norway House, Kane was awaiting the arrival 

of the brigade from York Factory, returning from its annual 

early summer descent to the Bay, en route in August back to the 

posts of the western interior. 


87

Selected Bibliography 

The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the following 

individuals who assisted with the preparation of various entries in 

the Guide to People and Places in Kane's Journal: Debra 

Moore and Ann Morton, of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives, 

Winnipeg; Dr. Patricia McConnack, of the Provincial 

Museum of Alberta, Edmonton; Dr. Gerhard Ens, and Professors 

Olive Dickason, William Sampson, and John Foster, of the 

Department of History, and Professor Rudy Wiebe, of the Department 

of English, The University of Alberta. The following 

sources were consulted in the preparation of the Guide. 

Atlas of Canada. The Reader's Digest, Canadian Automobile 

Association , [Toronto], 198 I. 

Atlas of the Pacific Northwest. 6th ed. Edited by Richard M. 

Highsmith and A. Jon Kimerling. Corvallis, Oregon, 1979. 

Brasser, Ted J. "Paul Kane: His Contributions to Ethnography." 

1980. Collection, Ted J. Brasser. 

The Canadian Encyclopedia. 2d. ed. Editor-in-Chief James H. 

Marsh. 4 vols. Edmonton, 1988. 

Camock, Maj., ed. Cavalry in the Corunna Campaign. London 

and Aldershot, 1936. 

Dictionary of Canadian Biography. General editors: Francess G. 

Halpenny and Jean Hamelin. II vols. Toronto and Quebec, 

1966 - 1988. 

Dill, Clarence C. Where Water Falls. Spokane, 1970. 

Drury, Clifford M. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the 

Opening of Old Oregon. 2 vols. Glendale, Calif., 1973. 

Franchere, Gabriel. Journal of a Voyage on the North West Coast 

of North America during the Years 1811, 1812, /813, and 

1814. Transcribed and translated by Wessie Tipping Lamb. 

Edited, introduction, and notes by W. Kaye Lamb. Toronto, 

1969. 

Galbraith, John S. The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial 

Factor 182/ - /869. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957. 

Haig, Bruce. Paul Kane: Artist. Following Historic Trails 

Series. Calgary, 1984. 

Hamilton, William B. The Macmillan Book of Canadian Place 

Names. Toronto, 1978. 

Harper, J. Russell, ed. , biog. introd., and cat. raisonne . Paul 

Kane's Frontier including Wanderings of an Artist among the 

Indians of North America. Austin and London, 1971. 

Holmgren, Eric J., and Patricia M. Holmgren. Over 2000 Place 

Names of Alberta. 3d ed. Saskatoon, 1976. 

Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba. 

Search Files. 

Irving, Washington. Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprize 

Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836). Reprint, edited by 

Richard Dilworth Rust. Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1976. 

Jasper National Park/ Parc national Jasper 1 :200 000. Ottawa, 

1985. 

Kane, Paul. Landscape and portrait log. 1846- 1848. Stark 

Museum of Art, Orange, Tex., 11.85/4. 

Lent, D. Geneva. West of the Mountains: James Sinclair and the 

Hudson's Bay Company. Seattle, 1963. 

McArthur, Lewis A. Oregon Geographic Names. 3d. ed. Portland,1952. 

MacGregor, J. G. John Rowand: Czp,r of the Prairies. Saskatoon, 

1978. 

McLoughlin, John. The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort 

Vancouver to the Govenwr and Committee. Second series. 

1839- 1844. Edited by E. E. Rich. Introduction by W. Kaye 

Lamb. London, 1943. 

Middleton, Lynn. Place Names of the Pacific Northwest Coast. 

Seattle, 1969. 

Morse, Eric W. Fur Trade Canoe Routes ofCaruuia/Then and 

Now. 2d. ed. Toronto, 1971. 

The National Atlas of Canada. 4th ed. Compiled by Surveys and 

Mapping Branch, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources. 

Ottawa, 1973. 

The New International Atlas. Chicago, 1980. 

Palliser, Capt. John. A General Map of the Routes in British 

Nonh America explored by the Expedition under Captain 

Palliser, during the Years /857. /858, /859, /860. London, 

1865. Facsimile reprint. Calgary, 1984. 

Russell, R. C. The Carlton Trail. Saskatoon, 1971. 

Simpson, George. "The 'Character Book' of George Simpson, 

1832." in Hudson's Bay Miscellany 1670- /870. Edited and 

introduction by GlyndwrWilliams. Winnipeg, 1975 

---. Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson's Journal, Remarks 

Connected with the Fur Trade in the Course of a Voyage 

from York Factory to Fort George and back to York Factory 

/824 - /825 .. together with Accompanying Docwnents. Edited 

and introduction by Frederick Merle. Cambridge, Mass., and 

London, 1931. 

--- . Simpson's /828 Journal to the Columbia. Edited by E. 

E. Rich. Introduction by W. Stewart Wallace. London, 1947. 

Thompson, David. David Thompson's Narrative 1784- /8/2. 

Edited by Richard Glover. Toronto, 1962. 

Voorhis, Ernest, compo Historic Forts and Trading Posts of the 

- French regime and of the English Fur Trading Companies. 

Ottawa, 1930. 

Wallace, W. Stewart, ed., introd., notes, and apps. Documents 

Relating to the North West Company. Toronto, 1934. 

Wilkes, Capt. Charles. Narrative of the United Stales Exploring 

Expedition. During the Years 1838, 1839, /84(), /841, 1842. 

5 vols. and maps. Philadelphia, 1845. 

88

Acknowledgments 

THE AMERICAN ART JOURNAL would like to thank the following people for their help in the 

preparation of this special issue: 

Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas 

NeldaC. Stark, Chainnan, NeldaC. and H. J. Lutcher Stark Foundation 

Anna Jean Caffey, Registar 

Laura Bowler, Secretary 

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 

Kenneth R. Lister, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Ethnology 

Helen Kilgour, Departmental Assistant, Department of Ethnology 

Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 

Katherine Pettipas, Curator of Native Ethnology 

Doug Leonard, Assistant Curator of Native Ethnology 

Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec, Canada 

Ted J. Brasser, Plains Ethnologist, Department of Ethnology 

The Paul Kane family 


Index 

Allan, George William, 8-9. 20, 21n., 68 

Allan, Maude. See CasseUs, Maude Allan 

Ask-a-weelish, 44, 67; Paul Kane portrait of 

49 ' 

Ask-a-weelish (Chiefofthe Lilkes) and See pays 

(Chiefofthe Waters) (Kane), 49 

Assannitchay (Capote Blanc) [Cappow Blaugh] 

67 ' 

Assiniboine. band of, Paul Kane sketch of, 30 

Assiniboine man, Paul Kane portrait study of, 

68.28 

Astor, John Jacob. 66,81 

Athabasca, Lake. Paul Kane sketch of, 34 

AthabascaRiver, Paul Kane sketch of, 34 

Athabasca River valley. mountain in, Paul 

Kane sketch of, 34 

Ballenden, Jobn,9-IO 

Belcour, Mr. See BeUecourt, George-Antoine 

Belcourt. See Bellecourt, George-Antoine 

BeUecours. See BeUecourt, George-Antoine 

Bellecourt. George-Antoine (also BeUecours, 

Belcourt) [Mr. Belcour]. 61. 66, 8:7 

Berland, Baptiste. 66 

Bethune, Angus, 10 

Big Dog Portage. See Little Dog Portage and 

Big Dog Portage 

Big Mountain. See Rowand, John 

Bison, Paul Kane depictions of: herd chased 

by Metis (painting), 26; herd feeding in 

Long Grass Valley (sketch), 32; wounded 

bull (painting), 18.27,27 

Black, Samuel, 14,2In. 

Blanchet. Fran~ois-Norbert. 67 

Boat Encampment (Kane). 51 

Brazeau. See Broza, Mrs. 

Brigade of Boats (Kane). 60 

Brigade stopping for breakfast at French R. 

rapids, Paul Kane sketch of. 23 

Broken Arm. The. See Meskepatoon 

Brown, Mr., 61,67,68 

Broza, Mrs., 57. 67 

Buffalo. See bison 

Cabrey. band of, Paul Kane sketch of, 30 

Camp, breaking. Paul Kane sketch of, 24 

Canada, Parliament of. 8, 20. 21n. 

Capote Blanc. See Assannitchay 

Cappow Blaugh. See Assannitchay 

Carlton. Fort, Paul Kane sketch of, 30 

Carver, Jonathan, 81 

Cash-aut [Cashe-Cubitl, 61.,67; Paul Kane 

sketch of. 67 

Cashe-Cubit. See Cash-a-cabut 

CasseUs, Maude Allan, 8. 13-14. 21n. 

Catlin,George.8,67 

Caw-ce-ca.ce che-cock. See Caw-kee-kakeesh-e-ko 

Caw-ke-kis suw-k-way. See Kee-a-kee-ka-sacoo-way 

Caw-kee-ka-keesh-e-ko [Caw-ce-ca.ce checock; 

The Constant Sky], Paul Kane portraits 

of, 15, 21n., 29,68,29 

Caw-kee-ka-keesh-e-ko, The Constant Sky 

(Kane), 15, 21n., 29, 68,29 

Chiefs, two (June 4, 1846). See Waw-gaskontz; 

Iacaway 

Chipewyan [Chip a wayan] (at Fort Pitt), 67; 

Paul Kane sketch of, 32 

Christie, Alexander [Mr. Cristey], 28,70,85 

Chute a Jacques [Rapid de Gock] , Paul Kane 

sketch of, 23-24 

C/~ckama Indians, Willamette Valley (Kane), 

Columbia River, grand rapid of, Paul Kane 

sketch of, 74 

Colville, Andrew, 68 

Committee's Punch Bowl, Rocky Mountains, 

The (Kane), 33 

Constable [Mr. Consuble], 61. 68. 85 

Constant Sky, The. See Caw-kee-ka-keesh-eko 

Consuble, Mr. See Constable 

Cook. James. 86 

Cree (at Fort Carlton), Paul Kane sketch of,30 

Cree Indian (Kane). 30, 69 

Cristey, Mr. See Christie, Alexander 

Crooked Arm. See Meskepatoon 

Cun-ne-wa-bum, One that Looks at the Stars 

(Kane),54 

Cun-ne-wa-bum, Paul Kane portrait of, 54; 

dressof,55 

de Fuca, Juan. See Va1erianos, Apostolos 

de Gurlay, Frances, 27, 28, 70 

de Merce, Mr. See Demers, Modeste 

Demers, Modeste [Mr. de Merse; Mr. de 

Mence] , 58, 67,70 • 

de Merse, Mr. See Demers, Modeste 

D'Eschambeault, George [Mr. de Shombo], 

58,70-71 

de Shombo, Mr. See D'Eschambeault, George 

Douglas, Thomas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, 82 

Eales. See EeUs, Cushing 

Eal1s. See EeUs, Cushing 

Edmonton, Fort, Paul Kane painting of,32 

EeUs, Cushing [Eales, EaUs, EeUs], 39,42,48, 

71, 79, 86; mission station of Walker and 

EeUs, Paul Kane painting of, 48 

Encampment, Winnipeg River (Kane), 18 

Evans, J., 80-81 

F?lIs on the Upper Pelouse River (Kane), 10 

Fmdelson, Mrs., 62, 71 

Finlayson, Nicol, 78 

First Night on the Prairies (Kane), 24, 9, back 

cover 

Fort Edmonton (Kane), 32 

Franchere, Gabriel, 82 

Fran,ois Lucie, a Cree Half-Breed Guide 

(Kane),56 

Fnwruklin,John,58, 71, 73,83 

Fraser, Mr. See Frazer, Colin 

Fraser, Paul [Paul Froshur], 58, 73 

Frasher, Mr. See Frazer, Colin 

Frashur, Mr. See Frazer, Colin 

Frazer, Colin [Fraser, Frasher, Frashur], 32, 

33,51,53,58,71 

Froshur, Paul. See Fraser, Paul 

Garry, Nicholas, 71 

George 111, 85 

Grand rapid, Columbia River, Paul Kane 

sketch of, 74 

Gray, Robert, 70 

H., Mr. See Harriott, John Edward 

Hallet, Henry, 74 

Hallet, William [Mr. Hllet], 24, 25, 74 

Harett, Mr. See Harriott, John Edward 

Haritt, Mr. See Harriott, John Edward 

Harriott, Elizabeth [Gentleman's wife], 50, 

73,74, 82 

Harriott, John Edward [Mr. H., Harett, 

Haritt], 57, 58, 74, 82,84 

Harriott, John Edward [Mr. H., Harett, 

Haritt] , 57,58,74,82,84 

Harriott, Margaret. See Rowand, Margaret 

Harriott 

Hawes, Jasper, 73 

Hllet, Mr. See Hallet, William 

Hood, Mount, Paul Kane sketch of,36 

Hood, Robert, 14,2In. 

Hunt, Wilson Price, 84 

Hunter, James [Mr. Hunter], 30, 58, 74 

90 

Index

Iacaway (fhe Loud Speaker), Paul Kane 

sketch of (June 4, 1846), 23 

Indian depictions by Paul Kane 

-Assiniboine: band of, sketch of, 30; man, 

portrait study of, 68, 28 

-Blackfoot: medicine pipe-stem dance, painting 

of, 59. front cover 

-Cascade: Tom-a~uin [T~ma~uin], 39, 85- 

86; portrait of, 86,34 

-Chipewyan: person, 67; sketch of, 32 

-Chualpays: female dancers, painting offaces 

of, 49; Seepays (Chief of the Waters), portrait 

of, 49 

-Clackama: group, painting of, 6 

-Cowichan: Saw-se-a, portrait of, 4() 

-Cree: Kee-a-kee-ka-sa-c~way [Caw-ke-kis 

suw-k-way] (Man Who Gives the War 

Whoop), 67, 79; portrait of, 30, 3/; man 

(that shot the wolf with an arrow), portrait 

of, 30, 69; Muck-e-too (pouder; The Powder), 

79; portrait of, 30; two men (at Fort 

Carlton), sketch of, 30 

-Half-breed. See Metis 

-Kootenai: Ask-a-weelish (Chief of the 

Lakes), 44, 67; portrait of, 49 

-Mas-ka-gan [Musk-e-gaw]: persons, sketch 

of,29 

-Metis: Cun-ne-wa-bum (One that Looks at 

the Stars) (part Cree), portrait of, 54; hunters 

at camp, painting of, 26; hunters chasing 

bison herd, painting of, 26; Lucie, 

Fran~ois [Fransway] [Fransis Loucie] (part 

Cree), 20,57-58,60, 76, 78; portrait of, 23 

-Mississauga Ojibwa: Jacobs, Peter (Pahtahsega 

[Pautaussigae]) [Mr. Jacubes], 24, 62, 

75; portrait of, 62 

-Nisqually: Lach-o-Iet (Lach-oh-Iett), sketch 

of, 38, 80 

-Saulteaux: [Soto] Cash-a-cabut [Cashe 

Cubit), 61, 67; sketch of, 67; Caw-kee-kakeesh-e-ko 

[Caw-ce-ca.ce che-cock; The 

Constant Sky], portrait of, 15, 2In .• 29, 68, 

29; Iacaway (fhe Loud Speaker), sketch of, 

23 Ctwo chiefs"); person(s) fishing, sketch 

of, 23; Rat Portage, Chief of, 61, 67; sketch 

of, 67; son of, 61, 67; Waw-gas-kontz (the 

Little Rat), sketch of, 23 ("two chiefs"); w~ 

man, portrait study of, 28 

-tribe unidentified: ceremonial lodge interior 

(Columbia River), painting of, 35; medicine 

man with mask (Strait of Juan de Fuca), 

painting of, 43; war party, 42 

- waUa waUa: Peo-pe

Mayer, Frank BlackweD, 14,21n. 

Meares, John, 85 

Meayet. See Miette 

Medicine Man with Mask from Strait of Juan 

de Fuca (Kane), 43 

Medicine Pipe-stem Dance (Black/oot) (Kane), 

59. front cover 

Meskepatoon [The Broken Ann; Crooked 

Arm], 58, 67; George Catlin portrait of, 67; 

son-in-law of, 58 

Metis Camp and Hunters (Kane), 26 

Metis Chasing a Buffalo Herd (Kane), 26 

Miette [Meayet], 34, 79 

Mission Station of Walker and Eells. Spokmae 

River (Kane), 48 

Montraus. See Montrose 

Montrose (Montraus; Montrous), 33,34,35, 76, 

79 

Montrous. See Montrose 

Moodey,

Walker, Mary Richardson, 8, 21n. 

Walla Walla River, Paul Kane painting of, 47 

Wane, Henry James, 10, 21n., 76 

Waw-gas-kontz (The little Rat), Paul Kane 

sketch of (June 4, 1846),23 

Wheeler, A. 0.,21 

White Mud Portage (Kane), 86 

Whibnan, Marcus [Dor Whitmans; Dr. W.] and 

Narcissa, 16,20,41,47, 71, 78, 80, 86, 87; 

mission of, Paul Kane sketch of,47 

Whitman, Narcissa. See Whitman, Marcus and 

Narcissa 

Whitman Mission at WaH/alpu, The (Kane), 47 

Whitmans, nor. See Whitman, Marcus and 

Narcissa 

Wilk, Capt. See Wilkes, Charles 

Wilkes, Charles [Capt. WiIk], 38, 80, 81,87 

Winnipeg River (Kane), 25 

Winter Scene in the Rockies, A (Kane), 11 

Winter Travelling in Dog Sleds (A Wedding 

Party Leaving Fort Ednwnton) (Kane), 57 

Wounded Buffalo Bull (Kane), 18,27,27 

Yellow Serpent, TIle. See ~x-mox 


93

THE AMERICAN ART JOURNAL 

Published by Kennedy Galleries, Inc.

Paul Kane's Journal of his Western Travels, 1846-1848 - History and ...

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