Henry James Warre's and Paul Kane's Sketches in the Athabasca ...

figure 2.22I.S. MacLaren. Committee’sPunch Bowl, Athabasca Pass,August, 1996.prominent, marks the interprovincial boundary between Alberta andBritish Columbia, a boundary that bisects Committee’s Punch Bowlbecause it straddles the Continental Divide. 28A contemporary photograph (Fig. 2.22), shot from the BritishColumbia side of the tarn, does not quite match Kane’s prospect, whichwas likely from the middle of a frozen pond, with the Engelmann spruceat the base of McGillivray Ridge (on the right) nearer to him than theyare to the camera position. As in number 38, so in Kane’s treatment ofthis famous tarn, some grey wash and blank paper alone produce theillusion of snow in a consummate, delicate treatment. He resisted anyurge to overpaint the scene, certainly. He would have been in the samehurry to reach Boat Encampment and the brigade waiting there for hisbrigade’s much-delayed arrival as he was the next year to reach JasperHouse, when he noted wryly that he “passed the Punch Bowl (rathercoald Punch at present) though sun is shining vrry bright.” 29Because he had recorded the landscape adequately in his outward tripof 1846, Kane made no landscape sketches of the upper Athabascawatershed on his return trip, at least none that he finished in watercolours.Some of his sketches, of snow-laden trees, of a goat, and of asheep, might well have been made on his return trip in 1847, 30 but bythen he had seen many more of the West’s mountain ranges; consequently,as he did once back on the prairies, Kane evinced less interest insketching landscape that was no longer entirely novel to him or thatoffered him fewer scenes of Native life, which he had encountered with62 Henry James Warre’s and Paul Kane’s Sketches in the Athabasca Watershed, 1846