Wanderings in Search of Paul Kane's Wanderings of an Artist

today, Terms of the fur trade, such.as Company, canoe, cedar, andhorse, are variously spelled as "cumpney," "canew," "sedr," and"hors," while references to his art include words like "cetchis"(sketches) and descriptions of his Indian subjects as "grate warers"(great warriors), When one reconnoitres this unique orthography,there remains to work out the sense of each sentence in which punctuationappears infrequently and idiosyncratically. Of these twoprincipal traits, the spelling poses less of a problem, and far less ofan "offense" than one might first judge: after all, Kane travelled at atime when the standardization of English spelling was in its infancy.Even publishing houses did not necessarily agree on correctspellings. What gives Kane away as an unaccomplished writer is thesingle, run-on sentence for an entire day's or week's entry. Nodoubt, had the modern traveller a book in mind, he or she mightwell be inclined to make only notes, keeping the fUll-blown and polishednarrative as a project for the relative tranquility he or shecould expect after returning home. But stages of a project do notaccount for such a wide discrepancy as one finds with Kane's notebooks.The journals of fur trade factors, such contemporaries asSamuel Black and Peter Warren Dease, for instance, exhibit a muchmore developed narrative style, as do the field notes of explorersJohn Franklin and George Back. None of them, on the other hand,attended school in York, Upper Canada; or should have attendedbut didn't, as was perhaps more often the case with Kane. ,The examination of these two field books offers other insightsinto Kane the traveller which distinguish him from his persona inWanderingsofan Artist. Among these is the glaring fact that the journalscontain no pejorative references to Amerindians. Several suchreferences appear in Wanderings,partly because Kane's persona isthat of a civilized gentleman worthy of the sort of hospitality thatthe Hudson's Bay Company extended only to well-heeled typesdUring Sir George Simpson's reign as inland governor, and especiallyafter 1841,when Simpson himself was knighted. Just as Kane's oilpaintings of Indians--done back in his Toronto studio in the decadesfollOWing his travels--take on qualities less apparent in the watercoloursprecisely because most of those oils had to grace "civilized"walls in legislatures and the parlors of well-to-do British NorthAmericans, so the persona of a travel book published by Longmanhad to conform to the British reading public's expectation of theimperial globetrotter. Pejorative references to savages, howeverregrettable one finds them today, were the stock-in-trade of thisVictorian persona. Still, many readers of Wanderingshave likelyfound themselves bemused by the contradictions of his point ofview that OCcurwith respect to Indians at the outset of Kane's book.On the one hand, the persona vows to act as an objective recorder ofAmerindians and their territories; on the other hand, a personally34IiI(engaged narrator tells a t~le of adventure which yearns to retrievehis innocent boyhood past.The subject was one in which I feltda deep in~er~~ri;dm;;h d I had been accustorne to see u~~~a~soabout my native ,:illage, ,then Little Yor:~ ~~dC;;;d dirty just struggling into existence, now t y, 1~~ronto bursting forth in all its energ):' and comm erCl:' I f of the red man IS now no longerstrength. But t le f ~~: footsteps are fast being obliteratedseen, ~I t~~~e:a~ou~te haunts, and those who would see~~X::~~i~ines of this country in their original state, ~~stud their native manners and customs, rnus~~ae:elt~ar thrIugh the pathless forest to fikndthem, T~ ~~d not altogether un nown, an1~~i;;~~;~c~l:ct~~d friends with whom I had associatedin my childhood, .., I' assage has no near counter-Apart from the fac~ that thblSr e UStt~:;the draft manuscripts or thepa rt in anv of the SIX note 00 .s-