Canoes: A Natural History in North America

Map of Maine’s Moosehead Lake and the headwaters of the Aroostook and Penobscot Rivers, drawn in 1880 by W. R. Curtis.

Map of Caribbean.

The range of the paper birch (Betula papyrifera) in North America. The tree is sometimes called canoe birch.

Samuel de Champlain, Map of New France, 1632.

John Bowles, Thomas Bowles and Herman Moll, A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King, 1731.

Nicholas de Fer, Le Cours du Missisipi, 1718.

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).

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.

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

The National Wild and Scenic River system, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, is an attempt to protect U.S. rivers in their natural state from development as much as possible. More than 12,500 miles of rivers have such protection.

The Missouri National Recreation River, established in 1964, is administered by the U.S. National Park Service.

The Northern Forest Canoe Trail covers parts of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, running 740 miles.

A map of Alexander Mackenzie’s routes from Montreal to Fort Chipewyan and then onward to the Arctic Ocean in 1789 and to the Pacific Ocean in 1793. Published by Mackenzie in 1801.

Edwin Tappan Adney’s map of the eastern woodlands shows western migrations of Native peoples and the diffusion of their canoe types.