Canoes: A Natural History in North America

Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910). Shooting the Rapids, 1902. Watercolor over graphite on off-white, thick, moderately textured wove paper with watermark, 13 15/16 × 21 13/16 in. (35.4 × 55.4 cm).

Wood-and-canvas canoes on a stop for provisions before a wilderness expedition prior to 1920.

Typical canoe camping equipment illustrated in the 1915 book, Canoeing and Camping, by James A. Cruikshank.

Florence Page Jaques wrote Canoe Country (1945) and Snowshoe Country (1944), both illustrated by her husband Francis.

Joe Mell, a Passamaquoddy Indian, sleeps under his canoe on Duck Lake, Maine, ca. 1895.

Frances Anne Hopkins, Voyageurs at Dawn, 1871. Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 151.1 cm.

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.

Frances Anne Hopkins, Shooting the Rapids, 1879. Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 152.4 cm.

In 1967, these paddlers reenacted part of the 1793 Mackenzie Expedition, paddling from Ft. St. John, British Columbia, to Expo ’67 in Montreal, Quebec.

Samuel Worcester Rouse, Portrait of Henry David Thoreau, 1854. Thoreau was thirty-nine years old at the time of this drawing.

Thoreau’s canoe route through Maine included Pockwockamus Falls on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, seen here in a 1915 photograph by Burt Call.

Edwin Tappan Adney in the Yukon, 1897.

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

Edwin Tappan Adney’s sketch of a moose appeared alongside an 1893 article in Our Animal Friends, a publication of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In June 1930, Eric Sevareid (left) and Walter Port started their canoe journey from Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and paddled 2,250 miles to Hudson Bay.

Eric Sevareid’s nickel-plated, cased magnetic compass that guided the 1930 canoe trip to Hudson Bay.

John McPhee poling a canoe with his daughters Jenny (in the bow) and Martha (in the middle) in Ontario in 1978.

John McPhee’s 1975 canoe trip to Alaska’s Salmon River was featured in his book, Coming Into the Country. The river’s headwaters pass through Kobuk Valley National Park.

T. W. Ingersoll, Views of Dalles of the St. Louis River, ca 1890, photograph.

Cover of The Camp Fire Girls at Camp Keewaydin by Hildegard G. Frey.