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

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
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