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

comparative frequency on the much more densely inhabited PacificSlope. Remarkable all the same for its comprehensiveness, the recordthat he compiled in the upper Athabasca watershed and what now formsthe principal waterway of Jasper National Park makes the pre-eminentvisual contribution to the park’s history during the fur trade era, ahistory not possessed by any other watershed or park in the mountains.That the Athabasca River remains a free-flow river connects this comprehensivepictorial record all the more immediately to a contemporarysensibility about wilderness and the human forces that have shaped andcontinue to shape it.In closing, one must take into account a final point. There is a notablediscontinuity in the visual tradition of the Jasper area. Apart from themapping done by David Thompson when he crossed Athabasca Pass inJanuary 1811, Warre and Kane made the first contribution, but onewould be hard-pressed to link their work to the promotional work doneby and for Jasper National Park by the railways and Dominion ParksBranch. When a few of the members of the Group of Seven were hiredby Canadian National Railways to depict Jasper in the 1920s, they hadno conception of continuing a “Canadian” tradition, or any other, exceptperhaps that of railway pamphleteering. 31 The restricted disseminationof Warre’s and Kane’s sketches drastically confined their influence. Thatthe sketches of the Athabasca watershed remain extant is all the moreremarkable given how little-known they have remained to subsequentgenerations. Apart from an uncoloured engraving of Kane’s sketch ofJasper House, which appeared as the seventh illustration in both the firstedition and the first Canadian edition of Wanderings of an Artist, 32 noneof his sketches from the upper Athabasca were developed and circulatedin other media; Kane chose none of them for the 100 oil-on-canvas paintingsthat he painted for his patron George Alan or for his other customers.Warre’s pictorial works remained similarly uncirculated. The work ofthese men may be well known in regard to other areas of midwestern andwestern North America, but, however much one might be inclined to viewthem as agents of a colonial discourse, “claiming” the land by recording itslandscapes in European forms and styles, that inclination must betempered in the case of the upper Athabasca by the acknowledgement ofthe nearly non-existent circulation of their sketches from that portion oftheir travels. Only with the centennial of Jasper National Park has theoccasion arisen for the first publication of most of them.I . S . M a c L a r e n 63