It was immediately obvious to the Europeans that they would have to use the canoe, which became a common link between the enormously different cultures of Europe and North America. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain made an attempt to explore inland moving west on the St. Lawrence River. His boats were stopped by the Lachine Rapids near present day Montreal. He wrote “he who would pass them must provide himself with the canoes of the savages, which a man can easily carry.”

This ingenious design, the bark canoe, also had the ability to change when needs required. Originally the canoes carried a family and the few possessions that nomadic people needed to survive. When the trade in fur demanded an increase in size and carrying capacity, canoes became as large as thirty-six feet long with up to seventeen paddlers. Such canoes could carry more than four tons of goods and provisions. The voyager of the fur trade cannot even be imagined without the canoe. Grace Lee Nute wrote, “It was his carriage by day, his house by night, the topic of fully half his conversation, and the object of his pride.”

For explorers, the canoe was so ubiquitous and such a daily fact of life that it seemed barely worth mentioning. Often the journals and diaries mention their only mode of transportation as little as we would mention an automobile in our own journals. Fortunately, there are notable exceptions to this oversight. An example is Alexander Mackenzie. As the first European explorers to cross the continent, his men were particularly hard on their canoes. They had to make frequent stops to make repairs and, in one case, to replace “one which has become an absolute wreck.” On June 13, 1793, Mackenzie and his party had their greatest canoeing challenge. On the Fraser River, with its frightening volume of water, first their canoe’s bow was crushed, then the stern caved in, then the bottom became riddled with holes while going over a falls. The thwarts untied and the canoe unraveled to the point that Mackenzie wrote, “The wreck becoming flat on the water, we all jumped out.” In spite of all this damage, the canoe was repaired and the party continued on.

There was a sense of urgency in the early decades of the 19th century to document Indians and their way of life. Pressure by Europeans was rapidly forcing Native American cultures to change. Artist George Catlin predicted their disappearance altogether. This prompted more than a few artists to head into the wilderness with a canoe and easel. One of the most ambitious was Irish-born artist Paul Kane. He crossed the continent in 1844 to 1848 painting portraits of Indians and some of their traditions. He sketched the annual gifts to tribes on Manitoulin Island and land payments to the Indians on Mackinac Island. He spent quite a bit of time in the Lake Superior region and, as an example of the work he did there, painted a scene of Sauk Indians night fishing from birch bark canoes on the Fox River in present-day Wisconsin. Due to the fine detail, the painting, now in the Royal Ontario Museum, adds much to historical knowledge of this common method of fishing.

Reproduced in “Picturesque Canada,” 1801, from a painting by Henry Ogden in the late 1870s. It depicts a crew on the Saskatchewan River loading 90-pound bales of furs into a canoe for the annual spring trip to the head of the Great Lakes.

By the 1820s, there were wooden plank boats carrying people and goods along North America’s major waterways. Canoes still worked the back country where there were endless portages and shallow water, but the next decades would see a shift to canoeing as recreation and sport. As an example of things to come, a canoeing regatta took place in Halifax in 1836. Charles Lanman’s publications in the years preceding the Civil War, epitomized this change in attitude. A journalist, artist, librarian, and travel writer, Lanman was said to have been the first person to use the canoe as a pleasure craft. His writing, in some ways, would sound more familiar to readers today than they would have to the fur traders of his own generation. He saw the wilderness as a place to renew oneself, not merely as an obstacle to survive in or to overcome. He described nature in spiritual and religious terms and frequently quoted poetry. Lanman worried that the “Indian canoe is giving way to the more costly but less beautiful rowboat, and those rivers are becoming deeper every day. Instead of the howl of the wolf, the song of the husbandman now echoes through their vales.”

Another example of the romanticizing of the Indians, the history of the North Country, and of the canoe is Longfellow’s 1855 Song of Hiawatha, from which the exhibit title is taken. For better or for worse, this image has become part of our culture.

Thus the Birch Canoe was builded
In the valley, by the river,
In the bosom of the forest;
And the forest’s life was in it,
All its mystery and its magic,
All the lightness of the birch-tree,
All the toughness of the cedar,
All the larch’s supple sinews;
And it floated on the river
Like a yellow leaf in Autumn,
Like a yellow water-lily.

The romantic image of explorers and traders navigating the highways of white water has been especially good material for young adult fiction. Novels in the 1910 to 1930 period used the subject matter of the wilderness to sell books. Sometimes the image of a canoe is used on a book’s dust jacket even when there is very little canoeing content in the book, indicating the commercial appeal of canoe imagery. As the country became more urban, with its attendant problems like juvenile delinquency, writers wanted to encourage the values of a simpler time. Dietrich Lange, who was principal at Mechanics Arts High School in St. Paul, exemplified this. He wrote about twenty adventure stories for young boys and set them in the era of the fur trade and westward exploration.

Recreational canoeing, which had been popular in Maine and New York in the 19th century, began to be promoted by the tourism industry in the Great Lakes area in the early 20th. Experts in outdoor crafts wrote books to help the amateur get out into nature. One of the best-known outdoorsmen was Calvin Rutstrum. In one of his seventeen books he wrote, “Of the thousands interested in camping, I have found few who did not believe that they were proficient in it. Yet . . . I’ve discovered only a few individuals who had acquired real competence.” His books encouraged and helped many people experience canoe camping.

W. H. Bartlett, “Wigwam in the Forest,” from the title page of N. P. Willis, Canadian Scenery. London: Virtue and Company, 1842.

At the close of the 20th century, canoeing is more popular than ever. Along with this boom in the sport, the canoe has become something of an icon. Canoes are now loaded with symbolic cultural baggage, instead of with trade goods. Ironically, while representing the values of health and wilderness, the nearly ubiquitous image of the canoe is now being used to sell cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets, and sports utility vehicles.

Patrick Coleman
MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

John Murray Gibbon, The Romance of the Canadian Canoe. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1951. 145 p.

Timothy J. Kent, Birchbark Canoes of the Fur Trade. Ossineke, Michigan: Silver Fox Enterprises, 1997. 343 p., 326 p.

Kenneth Roberts & Philip Shackleton, The Canoe: A History of the Craft from Panama to the Arctic. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1983. 278 p.

“Give Me Of Your Bark, O Birch-Tree” is a collaborative exhibit of the Minnesota Historical Society and the James Ford Bell Library. The following two books are from the James Ford Bell Library: Samuel de Champlain, Les voyages du sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois. Paris: Jean Berjon, 1613; and Codex Canadiensis. Paris: Librairie Maurice Chamonal, 1930. The rest of the items are from the Minnesota Historical Society collections.

The exhibit will be available for viewing through the months of April to June 1999, during the hours of 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday. In addition the exhibit will be available for viewing the weekend of April 24, noon to 6:00 pm, and April 25, noon to 5:00 pm.

Special thanks to Terry Scheller and to Tom Amble from the Minnesota Historical Society for their help in mounting the exhibit and to the Associates of the James Ford Bell Library for their financial support.