Canoes: A Natural History in North America

George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.7 cm.

This 1822 watercolor from the Manitoba Museum’s Hudson’s Bay Company Collection, illustrates a canot du maître carrying two officers.

Adam Sherriff Scott, Chief Trader Archibald McDonald Descending the Fraser, 1828, ca. 1942. 81.28 x 63.5 cm.

Frederic Remington’s drawing of a voyageur struggling with his load illustrates the use of a tumpline across the top of his forehead to help distribute the weight more evenly. ‘Tumpline’ is based on the Algonquian word for line.

The voyageurs plied the North American frontier for generations, often leaving from Montreal or York Factory or Lake Winnipeg on their long-distance trading journeys and not returning for many months, or sometimes years.

Jean Baptiste Nolin and Vincenzo Coronelli, Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, (Paris: J. B. Nolin, 1688).

Paul Kane, The Mountain Portage, 1849–56. Oil on canvas, 64 × 51 cm.

A lob tree was an evergreen, often like this white pine, trimmed of lower branches and smaller trees and brush around it to mark the head of the portage or a campsite.

H. A. Ogden, “At the Portage” from George Monro Grant, ed., Picturesque Canada (New York: Belden Brothers, 1882). Hudson’s Bay Company employees are shown in this engraving from the late nineteenth century. The sheer size of the 90-pound packs, boxes, and barrels to be transported in the canoes can be appreciated.

Colin Fraser Junior, a trader at Fort Chipewyan, held the job of sorting furs to prepare them for a trip to market in the 1890s.

George Franklin Arbuckle, The Spring Fur Brigades Leave Montreal for the West, ca. 1946. 77.47 x 78.74 cm.

Frances Anne Hopkins, Canoe Party Around Campfire, ca. 1870. Oil on canvas, 90.2 × 151.8 cm.

Music played an important role in the daily life of the voyageurs, from songs to help keep time while paddling to entertaining each other at the end of a long workday.

The fragile nature of the wooden canoe is evident in this old campaigner, found near the Takhini River in the Yukon in 1995 by the Lake Laberge Archaeology Project.

Hudson’s Bay Company: Historic Trading Posts and Territories of the Governor & Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay. Stanley Turner, Made in Canada. 1969

Modifications of the beaver hat as illustrated by Horace T. Martin in Castorologia, or The history and traditions of the Canadian Beaver.

Denis Diderot's depiction of a Parisien furrier from his L’Encyclopie, 1751–1757

The Canadian Canoe Museum holds this Algonquin canoe; the tribe primarily resided in the Ottawa River region.

This birch-bark canoe was given to the Prince of Wales by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1860.

William Armstrong, Indian Encampment, ca. 1860. Watercolor on paper, 29.8 x 42.2 cm.