…against a swirling torrent of potentially Clark-related Lower Canada land grant documents. Progress is slower than expected. I’ll be back soon (I hope!) with some interesting results. Wish me luck.

And on a completely different subject, I wish a hearty Shana tova! to all my readers celebrating the start of Rosh Hashanah tonight.

Working a canoe upriver

Regular readers may remember that a few years ago we did a deep dive into Clark-era types of transportation, in a series we called “How’d they get here?” Unfortunately, I got distracted by other topics and never got around to a proper discussion of one very important early way of moving around Canada, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Great Lakes: the large, birchbark canoe. Not only was this a favored mode of transport for many Indigenous Peoples in Canada and Native Americans, it was quickly adopted by French-Canadian voyageurs and their Anglo-American successors involved the Great Lakes (and beyond) fur trade. And as I wrote in 2021, such a canoe was also used by some of Wisconsin Territory’s women pioneers as they made social visits between Fort Howard, Fort Winnebago and Fort Crawford..

Today we have a fine, hand-colored engraving of about 15 voyageurs making their way up river with their birchbark canoe. Some of the men are still in the canoe, paddling, others are standing in the water and maneuvering the boat by hand. Still others have off-loaded gear and are carrying it up the trail and past the rapids on their backs, probably with the assist of a tumpline. If the rapids are steep and powerful enough, the men may have to off-load all the gear and portage the canoe past the obstacle.

Image Credit

Bartlett, William Henry, artist and Samuel Bradshaw, printer. Working a Canoe Up a Rapid, hand-colored etching on paper, circa 1841. British Museum, accessed 14 Sept. 2023. Copyright © The Trustees of the British Museum, and used according to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license