Paul Kane
Paul Kane was an Irish-born Canadian painter whose paintings and especially field sketches were known as one of the first visual documents of Western indigenous life.
A largely self-educated artist, Paul Kane grew up in York, Upper Canada and trained himself by copying European masters on a "Grand Tour" study trip through Europe. He undertook two voyages through the Canadian northwest in 1845 and from 1846 to 1848. The first trip took him from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie and back. Having secured the support of the Hudson's Bay Company, he set out on a second, much longer voyage from Toronto across the Rocky Mountains to Fort Vancouver and Fort Victoria.
On both trips Kane sketched and painted First Nations and Métis peoples. Upon his return to Toronto, he produced more than one hundred oil paintings from these sketches. The oil paintings he completed in his studio are considered a part of Canadian heritage, although he often embellished them considerably, departing from the accuracy of his field sketches in favour of more dramatic scenes. Kane's work followed the tenets of salvage ethnography.
Early life and formative years
Kane was born in Mallow, County Cork in Ireland, the fifth child of the eight children of Michael Kane and Frances Loach. His father, a soldier from Preston, Lancashire, England, served in the Royal Horse Artillery until his discharge in 1801. The family then settled in Ireland. Sometime between 1819 and 1822, when Kane was around ten, they emigrated to Upper Canada and settled in York. There, Kane's father operated a shop as a spirits and wine merchant.Not much is known about Kane's youth in York, which at that time was a small settlement of a few thousand people. He went to school at Upper Canada College, and then received some training in painting by an art teacher named Thomas Drury at the Upper Canada College around 1830. In July 1834, he displayed some of his paintings in the first exhibition of The Society of Artists and Amateurs in Toronto, gaining a favourable review by a local newspaper, The Patriot.
Kane began a career as a sign and furniture painter at York until he moved to Cobourg, Ontario, in 1834. He may have taken up a job in the furniture factory of Freeman Schermerhorn Clench, the father of Harriet Clench who Kane married in 1853. While in Cobourg, Kane painted several portraits of the local personalities, including the sheriff and his employer's wife. In 1836 Kane moved to Detroit, Michigan, where the American artist James Bowman was living. The two had met earlier at York. Bowman had persuaded Kane that studying art in Europe was a necessity for an aspiring painter, and they had planned to travel to Europe together, along with Samuel Bell Waugh. But Kane had to postpone the trip, as he was short of money to pay for the passage to Europe and Bowman had married shortly before and was not inclined to leave his family. For the next five years, Kane toured the American Midwest, working as an itinerant portrait painter, travelling to New Orleans.
In June 1841, Kane left America, sailing from New Orleans aboard a ship bound for Marseille in France, arriving there about three months later, and immediately made out for Italy. Kane hiked much of this journey, travelling on foot from Rome to Naples, as well as the Brenner Pass in Switzerland. He went on to Paris, then London. In London he may have encountered George Catlin, an American salvage painter who had made his career painting Native Americans on the prairies and who now was on a promotion tour for his book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians. Catlin lectured at Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly, where he also exhibited some of his paintings. In his book Catlin argued that the cultures of Native Americans were disappearing and should be recorded before passing into oblivion. Kane found the argument compelling and decided to similarly document Canadian First Nations.
Kane returned in early 1843 to Mobile, Alabama, where he set up a studio and worked as a portrait painter until he had paid back the money borrowed for his voyage to Europe. He returned to Toronto late 1844 or early 1845 and immediately began preparing for his journey west.
Travels in the Northwest
Kane set out on his own on June 17, 1845, travelling along the northern shores of the Lake Huron, moving through Saugeen land. After weeks of sketching, he reached Sault Ste. Marie between Lake Superior and Lake Huron in summer 1845. He had intended to travel further west, but John Ballenden, the local Chief Trader for the Hudson's Bay Company stationed at Sault Ste. Marie, told him of the many difficulties and perils of travelling alone through the western territories and advised Kane to attempt such a feat only with the support of the company. After the Hudson's Bay Company had taken over its competitor, the North West Company of Montreal, in 1821, the whole territory west of the Great Lakes until the Pacific Ocean and the Oregon Country was operating under their monopoly, with about a hundred isolated outposts of the company along the major fur trade routes. Kane returned to Toronto for the winter, elaborating his field sketches to oil canvases, and in spring of the next year, he went to the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company at Lachine and asked company governor George Simpson for support for his travel plans. Simpson was impressed by Kane's artistic ability, and the letters of support of Ballenden and John Henry Lefroy, but at the same time worried that Kane might not have the stamina needed to travel with the fur brigades of the company. He granted Kane passage on company canoes only as far as Lake Winnipeg, with the promise of full passage if the artist did well until then. Kane would travel HBC routes with the company's explicit aid and blessing for the next two years, and much of his sketching was done at their tradeposts.Going west
On May 9, 1846, Kane departed by steamboat from Toronto with the intent to join a canoe brigade from Lachine at Sault Ste. Marie. After an overnight stop, he missed the boat, which had left in the morning earlier than advertised, and he had to race after it by canoe. Arriving at the Sault, he learned that the canoe brigade had already left, so he sailed aboard a freight schooner to Fort William on Thunder Bay. He finally caught up with the canoes about beyond Fort William on the Kaministiquia River on May 24.By June 4 Kane reached Fort Frances, where a pass from Simpson for travelling further was awaiting him. His next stop was the Red River Colony. There, he embarked on a three-week excursion by horse, joining a large Métis hunting band that went buffalo hunting in Sioux lands in Dakota Territory in the United States. On June 26 Kane witnessed and participated in one of the last great buffalo hunts, which within a few decades, aided by railroad travel, decimated the animals to near-extinction. Upon his return he continued by canoe and sailing boats by way of Norway House, Grand Rapids, and The Pas up the Saskatchewan River to Fort Carlton. For variety, he continued from there on horseback to Fort Edmonton, witnessing a Cree buffalo pound hunt along the way.
On October 6, 1846, Kane left Edmonton for Fort Assiniboine, where he again embarked with a canoe brigade up the Athabasca River to Jasper's House, arriving on November 3. Here he joined a large horse troop bound west, but the party soon had to send the horses back to Jasper's House and continue on snowshoes, taking only the essentials with them, because Athabasca Pass was already too deeply snowed in that late in the year. They crossed the pass on November 12 and three days later joined a canoe brigade that had been waiting to take them down the Columbia River.
In the Oregon country
Finally, Kane arrived on December 18, 1846, at Fort Vancouver, the main trading post and headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Oregon Territory. He stayed there over winter, sketching among and studying the Chinookan and other tribes in the vicinity and making several excursions, including a longer one of three weeks through the Willamette Valley. He enjoyed the social life at Fort Vancouver, which at that time was being visited by the British ship Modeste, and became friends with Peter Skene Ogden.On March 25, 1847, Kane set out by canoe to Fort Victoria, which had been founded shortly before to become the new company headquarters, as the operations at Fort Vancouver were to be wound down and relocated following the conclusion of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which fixed the continental border between Canada and the United States west of the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel north. Kane went up the Cowlitz River and stayed for a week among the tribes living there in the vicinity of Mount St. Helens before continuing on horseback to Nisqually and then by canoe again to Fort Victoria.
His painting of Mount St. Helens in eruption at night in 1847 which is in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was the only known image of an active Cascade volcano until the eruption of Lassen Peak in California in 1914. Although the scene was somewhat fictionalized, it did correctly show the active vent on the side of the volcano rather that the summit. He stayed for two months in that area, traveling and sketching among the Native Americans on Vancouver Island and around the Juan de Fuca Strait and the Strait of Georgia. He returned to Fort Vancouver in mid-June, from where he departed to return east on July 1, 1847.
Crossing the Rockies again
By mid-July Kane had reached Fort Walla Walla where he made a minor detour to visit the Whitman Mission that a few months later would be the site of the Whitman massacre. He went with Marcus Whitman to visit the Cayuse living in the area and happened to draw a portrait of Tomahas, the man who would later be named as Whitman's murderer. According to Kane's travel report, the relations between the Cayuse and the settlers at the mission were already strained by the time of his visit in July.Image:Kane Winter Scene.jpg|thumb|Kane crossed the Rocky Mountains twice in winter.
Kane continued with one guide by horseback through the Grande Coulée to Fort Colvile, where he stayed for six weeks, sketching and painting the natives who had set up a fishing camp below Kettle Falls at this time of the salmon run. On September 22, 1847, Kane assumed command of a canoe brigade up the Columbia River and arrived on October 10 at Boat Encampment. The party had to wait for three weeks until a badly delayed horse trek from Jasper arrived. Then they switched, the horse team taking over the canoes and going down the Columbia River, and Kane's group loading their cargo on the horses and taking them back over Athabasca Pass. They managed to bring all 56 horses safely and without loss to Jasper's House, despite the heavy snow and intense cold. As the canoes that should have been awaiting them had already left, they were forced to set out on snowshoes and with a dog sled to Fort Assiniboine, where they arrived after much hardship and without food two weeks later. After a few days' rest, they continued to Fort Edmonton, where they spent the winter.
Kane passed the time at the fort with buffalo hunting, and also sketched among the Cree living in the vicinity. In January he undertook an excursion to Fort Pitt, some down the Saskatchewan River, and then returned to Edmonton. In April he visited Rocky Mountain House, where he wanted to meet the Blackfoot. When they did not turn up, he returned to Edmonton.