Canoes: A Natural History in North America

Camille Poirier, Duluth Pack Patent, December 12, 1882

Album page with one photograph, “O.C.C. War Canoe Crew, Champions of Canada 1904,” with John R. O’Connell at center. Photograph and hand-illustration by John R. O’Connell.

Canadian Olympian Larry Cain at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, California.

High-level racing, here featuring a women’s C4 race at the National Canoe/Kayak Championships in Sherbrooke, Quebec, has been a part of canoeing history since clubs were formed in the 19th century.

The Canadian Olympic hero Francis Amyot at the Berlin Games in 1936, where he won his country’s only gold medal in a custom-built canoe made to fit his 6-foot-plus frame.

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

In the late 1970s, legislation to ban motors from canoe country in Minnesota was a controversial issue.

Threats to canoe routes across the continent came (and sometimes went) as industry and government eyed the land for other uses.

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

Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, seen here in the bow of a canoe on the Namekagon River in 1966, is considered the founder of Earth Day. The first Earth Day came in 1970.

A cleanup of the Potomac River via canoe was one of the hundreds of activities featured on the first Earth Day in 1970.

Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes enjoyed a high level of popularity among adults and children during his tenure; his advocacy for clean water extended beyond the Cuyahoga River controversy and included opening up neighborhood pools such as this one at Edgewater Park, on July 4, 1969. Utilities director Ben Stefanski (next to Stokes) joined the mayor for a swim.

A dramatic event that drew more interest to environmental issues was the oil spill off of Santa Barbara, California, in 1969.

The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, seen from above the critical platform, was at the time the worst spill in American history, later surpassed by the Exxon Valdez (1989) and Deepwater Horizon (2010) spills.

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.

Groups interested in preserving canoe country from development sprang up all over the continent. Canoes were often used as images of a free and quiet outdoors experience, including this poster with artwork by Francis Lee Jaques, ca. 1949.

Sigurd Olson, a biologist by training and a canoe outfitter in Ely, Minnesota, was among the important writers and political activists in the environmental movement.

Biologist Aldo Leopold (center) accompanies his son Starker (left) on a canoe trip in the Quetico boundary waters in 1924.

President Lyndon Johnson signs the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964.

Howard Zahniser was a significant figure in the American environmental movement in the 1950s and 1960s. His work on the Wilderness Act of 1964—he is credited with writing most of it—was instrumental in its final passage.