Paul Kane is remembered as Canada’s premier painter of the 19th-century. Often referred to as the “father of Canadian art,” Kane was one of the very few artists to achieve fame and recognition on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades before Confederation. What is often overlooked is that Kane was also an important ethnographer who described the First Nations peoples of the west before their cultures were thoroughly disrupted by colonization and settlement. He describes many aspects and episodes of these peoples, including their vibrant communal activities, rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations. His descriptions allow us to reconstruct elements of the musical cultures of the First Nations and fur trading peoples who lived throughout the western Canadian and American landscape in the late 1840s.

Kane’s background

Born in Mallow, Cork County, Ireland in 1810, Paul Kane moved with his family (and many of his fellow countrymen) to York (Toronto) Upper Canada in 1818 or 1819, residing there for over a decade until his mid twenties. Kane grew up in a moderately wealthy merchant family that operated a wine and spirits store on the west side of Yonge Street. He received a rudimentary education at a district grammar school in York before working as a portrait, furniture and sign painter in Cobourg during his young adulthood. He struck off for the United States in 1836, just one year before major rebellions shook Upper and Lower Canada.

For the next five years Kane traveled through the United States, painting intermittently while saving up enough for his “grand tour” of Europe. He sailed from New Orleans and spent the following years traveling, studying, and apprenticing at various European cultural centers such as Paris, Venice, Naples, Rome and London. Kane returned to Canada in 1845 with the intent of traveling to the western reaches of the continent, painting the landscapes and North American “Indians” he encountered along the way.

A musical landscape

Descriptions of music turn up frequently in Kane’s travel narrative, because music was intertwined into many aspects of First Nations’ cultural and social life. Communal activities were often accompanied by singing and the beat of the drum. Music possessed deep social and spiritual importance. Its abundance reflected the wider culture of First Nations peoples, and the fact that spirituality was interwoven throughout their lifeways. On Kane’s journey, music was everywhere. This was amplified because Kane was given specific instructions to illustrate certain activities, most of which possessed musical accompaniment.

The Journey

Kane’s narrative really covers two expeditions, that of 1845 and the much longer voyage of 1846-48. Kane returned to Toronto in 1845 after an absence of nine years. Much had transpired in the young colony of Upper Canada, as the rebellion of 1837 had led to unification with Lower Canada. But Kane did not stay long in Toronto to study the political changes that were occurring. He quickly assembled his belongings and set out for the northwest in the spring of that year. Traveling by steamship through Georgian Bay and Lake Huron, Kane arrived at Sault Ste. Marie in the summer of 1845. There he spent a few weeks sketching bands of Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) and other Fist Nations groups around the islands and shorelines of the area.

Kane’s first recorded musical encounter occurred while walking one night close to the Ojibwa camp. He first heard the sound of music faintly emanating from the woods. Upon following the sound he encountered a man seated underneath a tree playing a flute-like instrument. Kane remarks that it resembled a flageolet (a short woodwind instrument with four-holes on the front and two on the back that was popular in Europe from the 17th to 19th-centuries) but produced a much softer tone. On approaching the man, Kane learned that he was playing a love song. These were often played in the vicinity of a desired mistress’s home during courtship among many First Nations groups. Kane seems to have deeply appreciated the melodiousness and soft timbre of the melody. He writes: “I have often listened with pleasure to this music, as its simple and plaintive notes stole through the stillness of the forest.”1

After traveling around Sault Ste. Marie for a few weeks, Kane greatly desired to push on westwards. But the experienced HBC officer John Ballantyne strongly advised him not to attempt such a journey. It was virtually impossible to travel alone to the west- with difficult canoe routes and portages, incredibly long distances, extreme temperatures, dangerous rivers and irregular food supplies. It was also inadvisable because of the social instability and potential violence of the western regions. Ballantyne recommended Kane visit HBC Governor George Simpson and request official passage aboard the annual canoe brigade. Disappointed but determined, Kane returned to Toronto and waited until spring before traveling to Lachine (near Montreal) with his sketches, hoping to convince the Governor of the merits of his passage. Simpson would prove to be the most essential figure in securing Kane’s passage to the west, commissioning twelve paintings and offering transportation and room in HBC facilities as far west as Lake Winnipeg. If Kane performed well and did not delay the brigade, he would be granted full transport all the way to the Pacific. This was an incredible offer from the iron fisted Governor who had earned the title of the “Little Emperor.”

In the winter of 1845 Kane transformed his sketches from the previous summer into one of his most well known pieces, entitled “Indian Encampment on Lake Huron.”

Kane’s western journey very nearly ended before it began early in the spring of 1846. Accompanying Simpson on a government steamer to Sault Ste. Marie, Kane discovered to his dismay that the Lachine brigade he was supposed to intercept had left five days earlier than expected. To add to his troubles, on May 12th Kane became separated from the steamer and stranded on Mackinaw Island in the western reaches of Lake Huron. Desperate, he commissioned a small sailboat from a few locals and made a dangerous all-night voyage to Sault Ste. Marie. When he miraculously arrived before dawn the next day, he discovered that the Lachine brigade had passed two days previously, and again his journey was in jeopardy. Kane was forced to stay-put and wait for an HBC schooner to take him across Lake Superior to Fort William. Finally, Kane caught up with the canoe brigade on Lake Superior to the west of Fort William, near Kakabeka Falls. Travel through the Great Lakes in the 1840s was certainly unpredictable and dangerous, but now Kane had a secure position in the era’s most reliable long-distance mode of transportation: the canoe brigade.

Kane sat in the centre of the lead canoe next to HBC clerk William Lane. Like many travelers, missionaries, and fur trade “bourgeois” before him, Kane would experience the rivers and waterways of North America from this privileged position. All around him were the French Canadian, First Nations, and Métis men who steadily laboured while singing chansons de voyageur to synchronize their strokes and maintain the pace of travel. These call and response songs were usually in the 2/4 time of a march and extended over long periods by alternating soloists, who sang out rhymed couplets inbetween booming choruses. The late 1840s was one of the final decades when this great French Canadian singing tradition would continue to hold sway over the transportation commerce of the Great Lakes and Rupert’s Land.

At the “Mountain Portage” that circumvented Kakabeka Falls, Kane had time to sketch while the voyageurs (usually called “servants”) carried the canoes and goods up the steep portage route. This sketch would hang for years in the dining room of George Simpson’s residence at Ile Dorval, and Kane would use it to compose one of his famous large oil paintings.

The brigade was following a route used by First Nations peoples for millennia and discovered by the French trader de Noyon in 1688, becoming the standard route during the French regime and era of the Montreal fur trade. When Kane’s men camped one evening near the end of the Kaministikwia River on the “Big Dog Portage,” a novice voyageur (known as mangeur du lard, or “porkeater”) appeared in the firelight with a handsome rabbitskin blanket around his shoulders. The experienced voyageurs, known as hivernants (winterers) or hommes du nord (men of the north), realized what had happened and that their lives were now, in fact, in danger. The young voyageur had taken a funerary gift that had been placed on a First Nations grave, an offense that was customarily punishable by death. Mr. Lane ordered the young voyageur to immediately return the blanket as he had found it, underscoring the reality that the HBC employees were merely guests passing through First Nations territory.

The brigade continued through the numerous portages and broken rivers that meandered to the northwest of Lake Superior. Finally they reached Rainy Lake and Fort Frances in early June of 1846. Located in the same location that La Vérendrye had built a post in 1731, Fort Frances had the good fortune of being located next to ample supplies of wild rice and sturgeon. It was also one of the few locations in the Northwest where wheat was being cultivated, and Kane made a watercolour of the gristmill that was located at the rapids, which ground wheat into flour.

A large band of Saulteaux (a branch of Anishinaabe) lived near the fort, and many of them arrived in the morning expressly for the purpose of meeting Kane. They had heard from William Lane that a “great medicine-man” had arrived and was traveling through the country with the ability to “paint their likenesses.” While the brigade was preparing to depart Kane made portrait sketches of several of the Saulteaux chieftains. This was the first time, but certainly not the last, that Kane would use his reputation to lure local First Nations for the purpose of painting their portraits.

Kane’s reputation did not, however, allow him to act with impunity. Upon investigating the Saulteaux village, Kane was drawn to the large “medicine lodge” erected at the centre of the encampment. This structure is described by Kane as large and oblong, with arched poles supporting a birch-bark roof. After hastily entering the lodge, Kane discovered “four men, who appeared to be chiefs, sitting upon mats spread upon the ground gesticulating with great violence, and keeping time to the beating of a drum.”2 At the centre of the men was an object “apparently of a sacred nature” that Kane was not allowed to observe. Around the walls of the lodge were hung mats with various offerings attached, such as strings of beads, scalps, and bits of cloth. Although the details of the ceremony and real significance of the materials were beyond his comprehension, Kane immediately recognized the lodge was a “sanctuary” and that the ceremony held great import for those involved. The music had stopped when Kane entered the lodge and the chiefs “seemed rather displeased at my intrusion.” After briefly taking note of the interior and realizing that he had fully stopped the ceremony and the music, Kane departed the lodge. This lodge was likely associated with the midewiwin, the secretive Grand Medicine Society that played a central role in the preservation of the Ojibwa language, culture, and spirituality from at least the early 19th-century until the present day.

The canoes soon departed Rainy Lake and traveled along Rainy River through to the Lake of the Woods. Here the forests and rocks shaped each unique shoreline, while the boats passed thousands of islands. This was a storied landscape: one of these islands was the site of the “massacre” in 1736 of twenty-one Frenchmen, including Jean Baptiste La Vérendrye and Father Aulneau by group of Sioux (Očhéthi Šakówiŋ). All along Kane’s journey he encountered the legacy of the earliest contact between Europeans and First Nations peoples. French Canadians still formed the majority of voyageurs in the express canoe brigades as well as in Governor Simpson’s own canoe. These men perpetuated the cultural history of their ancestors, singing the chansons de voyageur that were originally adaptations of 17th and 18th-century French military marches, dance and work songs. Kane’s crew continued to use the French place names that lined the route, and these served as beacons for oral histories, often told around the evening fire by experienced voyageurs and recorded by curious (and often only half-comprehending) literate “bourgeois” such as Kane.

By the second week of June excitement was palpable as the brigade entered the Winnipeg River. This was one of the grandest and most picturesque rivers on the route, and along the way Kane took sketches of canoes and riverside camps. These would be some of the last scenes depicting river travel before Kane left the canoe brigade for horseback.

In Red River Kane encountered one of the most diverse settlements in North America, surrounded by farmland and the Great Plains. Lower Fort Garry and Sir George Simpson’s mansion were prominent features of the settlement, as was the French-speaking parish of St. Boniface. There were some remnants of the original Selkirk settlers (mostly Highland Scots), while increasing numbers of Orkney Islanders who once served the HBC settled here, often with their Cree wives. There were large numbers of Métis who lived on farms in the vicinity and spent considerable time hunting the buffalo of the Western Plains. The French speaking Métis called themselves the “Boîs Brûlé,” and were mostly descended from Cree mothers and French fur trade fathers (although their origins were very diverse).3 Red River in the 1840s witnessed much hardship and some rifts, but it also witnessed remarkable coexistence and considerable cultural intermixing. Métis fiddling is perfectly representative of this: the low G of the instrument was typically tuned up to an A in order to mimic the drones of the Scottish bagpipes.4 This fiddle tuning would have made cross-cultural jam sessions much more practical and popular. Red River was the most important settlement in the 19th-century to inspire musical exchanges between Scottish, French, First Nations and Métis peoples.

Paul Kane did not spend much time taking in the sights and sounds of Red River. He was interested in the Métis primarily because he wanted to participate in their famed biannual buffalo hunt. When he arrived and heard that most had left the previous day for the Dakota plains, Kane quickly assembled supplies, a cart, and a guide, and set off for the Pembina River on horseback. There he encountered the Métis cavalcade, with its two hundred and fifty hunters and their families strung out in a rough line with their carts, horses, oxen, and dogs. “I was received by the band with the greatest cordiality” Kane writes, beginning a week long hunting adventure that clearly appealed to his Victorian proclivity for masculine prowess, physical ability, and camaraderie.5

Kane’s account of the buffalo hunt is very interesting and contains a few notable episodes. The drama is enhanced because the Métis were providing protection for a group of Saulteaux Indians who were essentially being smuggled into the territory of their longtime enemies, the Sioux. Kane notes that they passed a place known as “Dry Dance Mountain,” where the Sioux were known to gather when preparing to launch war parties, with “a custom of dancing and fasting for three days and nights.”6

Kane narrates the buffalo hunt with zeal, emphasizing his own riding and shooting ability, as well as his ability to prevail in the face of extreme danger and misfortune. Shortly into the hunt Kane’s horse stepped into a badger hole and “fell at once, and I was thrown over his head with such violence, that I was completely stunned.”7 Kane’s account vividly portrays the immense slaughter of the hunt and “buffalo pounds” that killed countless thousands of animals each season.

Kane’s description of the pound is particularly interesting because of the musical and spiritual associations. ‘Pounds’ were usually built around a tree where offerings were hung and where a medicine-man would climb and perch himself. Kane describes such a man “with a medicine pipe-stem in his hand. . . wav[ing] continually, chanting a sort of prayer to the Great Spirit, the burden of which is that the buffaloes may be numerous and fat.”8 Thus the Buffalo were not merely herded into the pound, but were also metaphysically drawn in through the incantations of a medicine-man. Hunting was never merely a physical act for First Nations peoples. Kane’s account is valuable documentation of this conceptualization of the hunt, which would be extinguished within a few decades by the almost complete extinction of the buffalo.

After a difficult and dangerous trip back to Red River, Kane rested for a few days at Upper Fort Garry and planned his passage to Norway House just north of Lake Winnipeg. Kane planned to join the Saskatchewan boat brigade on its trip from York Factory to Fort Edmonton. Kane desired to sketch western bands, such as the plains Cree, the Assiniboine, and the Blackfoot (Niitsítapi). By mid July the pace of Kane’s breakneck journey had finally slowed, and he spent four weeks waiting at Norway house, an important depot that received enormous quantities of goods from York Factory. Kane passed the time by sketching the surroundings and the local “Mas-ka-gau tribe, or ‘Swamp Indians,’” who spoke a dialect of Cree.9

On August 14th, Kane departed Norway House for Playgreen Lake and the North Saskatchewan River. Kane was now was a passenger on a “strongly built” York boat, twenty-eight feet in length, capable of carrying over eight hundred pounds in cargo, and manned by a steerman and crew of six rowers.10 The journey to Fort Edmonton was over two thousand kilometers and broken by rapids, long spells of bad weather, and encounters with enormous buffalo herds. On September 26th Kane reached Edmonton, where he would reside for weeks in the company of a few HBC clerks and forty or fifty French, Cree, and Métis families, mostly servants of the Company.

It was not until October 6th that Kane departed late in the season for the Rocky Mountains. He was traveling with a group of twenty, mostly servants of the HBC, with sixty-five horses to carry baggage and provisions. By early November they had made it to the small post of Jasper House in the Rocky Mountains. Kane writes “I arrived at Jasper’s House cold, wet and famished. But I was soon cheered by a blazing fire and five or six pounds of mountain sheep.”11 Kane had become accustomed to the relative comfort and amenities of the HBC’s more established posts, reporting that “Jasper’s House consists of only three miserable log huts.”12 Class divisions were strikingly illustrated by the dwelling house, of which one room was devoted entirely to the officer and his family, while the other was devoted to everybody else: “all comers and goers: Indians, voyageurs, and traders, men, women, and children.”13 One can only imagine the sounds and music that this ever-shifting community broadcast to the stillness of night and the magnificent mountains of the Athabasca.

On November 5th Kane’s party left with a cavalcade of thirteen loaded horses. This would be one of the most difficult and dangerous passages of Kane’s journey, involving a mountain pass crossing by snow-shoe. The group was frequently delayed when horses and members of the crew fell through or became trapped in the snow and ice. Besides the physical exertion and battling the elements, their greatest fear was of time itself. Everyone thought that the group waiting on the other side of the mountains might have given up and descended the Columbia River to Fort Vancouver. That would have meant almost certain death for the men who would be forced to overwinter in the mountains without supplies. Luckily Kane’s group arrived just in time. He writes:

The slow and arduous progress of the group since Jasper House was now alleviated, and Kane swiftly descended down the sixteen hundred kilometer Columbia River in just fifteen days. It would take him four months to ascend the very same route the following summer. He was now welcomed at the largest of all of the HBC’s posts, Fort Vancouver, ninety miles from the Pacific on the Columbia River in Oregon. Typically residing inside this palisaded fort were two chief factors, between eight to ten clerks, and over two hundred voyageurs. Many lived in log huts along the river, forming a small village that was “quite a Babel of languages, as the inhabitants are a mixture of English, French, Iroquois, Sandwich Islanders [Hawaiians], Crees and Chinooks.”15 Kane was to spend the winter along the Columbia in Oregon territory during a remarkable period of transition, when the HBC represented both the old fur trade economy and the imperial ambition of the British Crown. The HBC tried to hold the region by bringing two hundred settlers in 1841 from Red River, but the rapidly growing American population was resentful of this move and threatened to escalate animosities into war. In 1846 the Oregon Treaty resolved the border at the 49th parallel, and Fort Vancouver was slowly scaled back until it was finally abandoned in 1860.

Many First Nations groups were in close proximity to Fort Vancouver, including various groups of Flatheads (Salish). Kane made some of his most famous sketches and portraits here, including a chief of the Chinooks and Klickataats named Casanov.

Europeans tended to be very curious about the customs of the Flatheads. Kane was sure to make sketches and profile paintings of these peoples, and he includes an ethnographic description of how they produce their famed characteristic:

Kane departed for Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island in late March of 1847. He would spend the next four months exploring the Pacific Northwest, traveling along the coastlines and islands. Most of the time Kane was transported in a dugout canoe by various First Nations (Kane does not always specify who is transporting him) hired along the way. Kane provides a detailed description of the Chinook people, whose customs of gambling he elaborately describes. On traveling through some burial grounds, Kane makes the interesting cultural comparison between his portraits and the deceased, stressing his reputation

Kane would encounter groups of Clal-lums and provide an interesting account of their “Medicine Mask Dance.” He describes this dance as being performed before and after important group endeavours, such “fishing, gathering camas, or going on a war party.” 18 The fact that Kane presents this dance as being representative of both preparatory and celebratory ceremonies indicates his unfamiliarity with the details and reflects an essentializing tendency in his writing. It seems certain that a dance performed before a war party was substantively different than that performed on its return. Nevertheless Kane’s assertion that the ultimate purpose of a group dance before a communal endeavour is in order to gain “the goodwill of the Great Spirit” is probably correct. Kane describes the dance with interesting details:

Kane sketched the daily activities and handicrafts of the Clal-lum while making portraits of the chiefs bedecked in their most dramatic regalia.

Kane eagerly pursued the Cowitchin man Culchillum who wore a decorated Medicine Hat.

The ornamented dugout canoes were another object of interest for Kane.

In the fall of 1847 Kane slowly worked his way north along the Columbia River. Along the route his reputation continued to supply him with First Nations volunteers wishing to have their portrait taken. In the late 1840s, these groups were still relatively free to pursue their traditional lifeways, and Kane includes descriptions of Flathead rites of passage, healing ceremonies, and communal dances. These documents are valuable because they were taken at the beginning of a period of great tension and strife for western First Nations. It would be over one hundred years before Alan P. Merriam’s ground-breaking ethnomusicological work among the Flatheads would probe the nature of these ceremonies and dances.20 The 1850s was the onset of a period of great tension and strife for western First Nations. Disease was the greatest killer in the ensuing decades, but already by the fall of 1847 there were tensions about reciprocal violence between white settlers and First Nations peoples, sensationalized to some degree by Kane’s account of the “Whitman massacre.”21 Kane’s descriptions contribute to the historical record of the period preceding the American military’s “Indian campaigns” and the great displacement of western First Nations peoples.

One of the most memorable scenes in Kane’s account occurs on his return east from the Columbia in the Christmas of 1847 at Fort Edmonton. Kane mingled mostly with the officers and clerks, dining at the exclusive officer’s table and basing much of this account on the prominent men in the vicinity. But Kane also describes something of the fur trade culture that existed between the Scottish servants of the HBC, the French Canadians, the Métis and the Indian hunters who dealt with the company.

After the “Christmas feast” that Kane so enthusiastically describes, all the inmates of the Fort were invited to a dance, regardless of station or background. This was one of the rare moments when class divisions broke down and the entire group shared the same social space, mingling together on the dance-floor:

On May 25th 1848 Kane left Fort Edmonton with a large group of twenty-three York Boats, heading eastwards on the North Saskatchewan River. On June 1st they encountered a large war party of approximately 1,500 warriors of Blackfoot, Blood (Kainai), Gros Ventres (A’ani), and other groups who were planning a raid on the Cree and Assiniboine. The meeting was a friendly one, although the Blackfoot chief Omoxesisixany, “Big Snake,” walked around the party while “flourishing a whip,” continually singing a war song and refusing to lay down his arms with the rest. In a gesture that invoked honour and pride in Kane for the last time, the war party requested that he, as a great medicine-man, take part in their war dance the following afternoon so that Kane’s “magical powers” might increase “its efficacy.” 24

This event is a fitting climax for Kane’s journey, representing well the pattern that had recurred continually since leaving the Great Lakes. Kane secured artifacts and sketches from the First Nations groups he encountered because his artwork earned the respect necessary for his abilities to be considered seriously. This dramatic event secured in Kane’s mind, and likely in his readers’ as well, that he was admired and looked upon as a great figure by the First Nations peoples whom he encountered. In the process we learn something of their musical culture before their tragic demographic decline and military suppression by the Canadian and American governments in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries.

Why did Kane champion First Nations peoples?

“Primitive” motifs and themes were central to the early 19th-century Romantic movement. North American “Indians” were often represented as an antithesis to European “civilization,” with its complexities, inequities, and constraints. Romantic artists reacted against the influences of ‘progress,’ science and industry, seeing First Nations cultures instead as refreshingly simple and closely associated with nature. Kane apprenticed for years throughout North America and Europe when Romanticism was ascendant, and this acquaintance with European tastes clearly influenced both his paintings and ethnography.

Another major factor in inspiring Kane’s interest in North American Indians was his encounter in London with the American writer and artist George Catlin, who had painted and documented the First Nations peoples of the western prairies and Rocky Mountains. In the early 1840s he was touring Europe to publicize his illustrated two volume Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians. Kane attended Catlin’s speech at Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, and seems to have heeded Catlin’s call to record and document the First Nations peoples of North America before they and their cultures disappeared. This would remain the predominant view for the following century, driving countless anthropologists and scholars to study the First Nations of North America.

Kane provides a personal explanation as to why he was interested in First Nations peoples. He writes that the subject of North American Indians 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, muddy and dirty, just struggling into existence.. To me the wild woods were not altogether unknown, and the Indians but recalled old friends with whom I had associated in my childhood.25

Indeed Kane seems to have gotten along well with the First Nations peoples he encountered, traveled with, and lived alongside. Many were very impressed with Kane’s ability to capture facial features in his sketches, and he was hailed as a great “medicine-man” with supernatural powers. Yet Kane also offended and broke custom in his relentless pursuit of portraits, artifacts, and experiences.

Accuracy vs. Marketing

The claim to accuracy was the norm in 19th-century British travel writing. As an incredibly popular and lucrative industry, travel writing allowed Europeans to experience the exotic fringes of Empire. It served the dual purpose of entertaining and educating, and Kane repeatedly stressed the accuracy and educational value of his work. He writes in the preface that his writing is an honest and unadulterated representation of his experiences as he recorded them: that “The following pages are the notes of my daily journey, with little alteration from the original wording, as I jotted them down in pencil at the time.”26

Yet this claim has been thoroughly rejected by historians. Eaton and Urbanek write in Paul Kane’s Nor – West that “the alterations from diary to published journal are even more startling than the changes from field sketches to finished oil paintings.” 27 They demonstrate that Kane’s travel journal is tersely written, with brief entries, simple grammatical structure, and poor spelling. Wanderings of an Artist on the other hand is elegantly written with greatly expanded detail, and contains many additional episodes not found in the original. The question is, did Kane alone compose the published manuscript?

Ian MacLaren, the historian who transcribed and published Paul Kane’s field journal (held in the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas) argues that Kane’s book was likely ghostwritten by one or more London editors, and/or by Kane’s wife Harriet Clench. 28 Not only is there a discrepancy in content, but also in tone. It has been suggested that some of the Victorian stereotypes resembling the “noble savage” that appear in the book were contributed by an author other than Kane. This can perhaps explain some of the more improbable and absurd episodes in the narrative, such as the story of the elderly “Esquimau” man who nursed an infant for years with his own breast milk. 29

It remains unclear the degree to which Kane’s published memoirs were altered by a third party, or whether or not the editing met his full approval. The sensational episodes found only in the published account are certainly additions, but who created them is unclear. Certainly the editors at Longmans were well experienced in editing travel narratives and were keen to make a splash in the saturated British travel writing market. Discrepancies in chronology have been noted, for instance the placing of Kane closer to the Whitman massacre than he really was. 30 It seems clear that Kane’s editors were willing to exaggerate and modify his text for the purpose of selling books, and this should be considered when analyzing his work as a factual ethnography.

These points reflect the reality of the source, but they do not entirely negate its value. The fact remains that Kane’s account is full of detailed and acute observations. Wanderings of an Artist is among the best ethnographies of western First Nations groups from the mid 19th-century, a crucial time in the history of these peoples. Although there exists journals of fur traders, explorers, and missionaries from earlier decades, there are few detailed accounts with an explicit objective to document First Nations peoples. Kane’s work represents the most significant work of ethnography since Catlin’s pioneering efforts. There would be subsequent studies of First Nation peoples, including J.G. Kohl’s Kitchi Gami: Life among the Lake Superior Ojibway, also published in 1859 and containing many valuable descriptions of First Nations and Métis peoples around the Great Lakes.31 Kane’s work is remarkable not only because he conducted it comparatively early – in the late 1840s – but also because he described the peoples within the immense and scarcely documented landscape between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean. Kane’s journey remains fascinating and his sketches and observations crucially important to those interested in the history of the west, Canada’s early history, as well as the history of the fur trade and First Nations peoples.

All images with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.

Notes

1Kane, 10.
2Kane, 47.
3Jacqueline Peterson, “Many roads to Red River: Métis genesis in the Great Lakes region, 1680-1815,” The New Peoples: Being and becoming métis in North America. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 1985.
4Lawrence J. Barkwell et al. Métis Legacy: Michif Culture, Heritage and Folkways. Vol. II. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 2006.
5 Kane, 53.
6Ibid., 53-4.
7Ibid., 59.
8 Ibid., 81.
9 Ibid., 71.
10 Ibid., 72.
11Ibid., 104.
12Ibid., 105.
13 Ibid.
14Ibid., 113.
15 Ibid., 117.
16 Ibid., 123.
17 Ibid., 138-9.
18 Ibid., 150.
19 Ibid.
20 Alan Merriam, Ethnomusicology of the Flathead Indians (New York: Wenner-Gren, 1967).
21 Kane, 223.
22 Ibid., 261.
23 Ibid., 263-4.
24Ibid., 298-300.
25 Paul Kane. Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America: From Canada to Vancouver’s Island and Oregon Through the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory and Back Again. 1859. (1859; repr. Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig Ltd., 1968),
lxii.
26 Ibid., lxiii.
27Paul Kane’s Great Nor-West, xii.
28 Ibid., xii-xiv.
29 Kane, 308-9.
30 Visions from the Wilderness: The Art of Paul Kane. DVD. CineFocus Canada Production. McNabb Connolly, 2001.
31 Johann Georg Kohl, Kitchi Gami: Life among the Lake Superior Ojibway (1859; repr. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1985).

Bibliography

Barkwell, Lawrence J. et al. Métis Legacy: Michif Culture, Heritage and Folkways. Vol.
II. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 2006.

Davin, Nicholas. The Irishman in Canada. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1877.

Densmore, Frances. American Indians and Their Music (1926), reprinted. New York:
Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970.

Eaton, Diane and Sheila Urbanek. Paul Kane’s Great Nor-West. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995.

Haig, Bruce. Following Historic Trails: Paul Kane Artist. Calgary: Alberta Historical
Resources Foundation, 1984.

Kane, Paul. Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America: From Canada to Vancouver’s Island and Oregon Through the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory and Back Again. 1859; repr. Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig Ltd., 1968.

Kohl, Johann Georg. Kitchi Gami: Life among the Lake Superior Ojibway. 1859; repr. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1985.

Merriam, Alan. Ethnomusicology of the Flathead Indians. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1967.

Nettl. Bruno. Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives. Kent State
University Press, 1989.

Peterson, Jacqueline and Jennifer Brown. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 1985.

Podruchny, Carolyn. Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in
the North American Fur Trade. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Visions from the Wilderness: The Art of Paul Kane. DVD. CineFocus Canada Production.
McNabb Connolly, 2001.

Visions from the Wilderness: The Art of Paul Kane. DVD. CineFocus Canada Production. McNabb Connolly, 2001.

Audio 1: Music performed by Les Fils du Voyageurs

Audio 2: Music performed by Les Fils du Voyageurs

Image Gallery – With permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.

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