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

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