Canoes: A Natural History in North America

Mark Hamel, Crossing the Shallows, Snake River, 2014. Oil on mounted linen, 40.64 × 50.8 cm.

Mark Hamel, Canoe Livery, Lake Nokomis, 2014. Oil on mounted linen, 16 × 20 in.

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

Birchbarks at Batchewang, 2012.

Bob Lavertue in command of the late 19th century all-wood sailing canoe Pretty Jane at the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association assembly at Paul Smith’s, New York, in 2012.

Alice Zalonis Brylawski stands in a dugout canoe at a Wooden Canoe Heritage Association MiniAssembly at Gifford Pinchot State Park in Pennsylvania in 2012.

Contemporary birch-bark builder Erik Simula working on a bark canoe in 2009.

Three cedar canoes on the beach at Skidegate.

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

A cedar-strip canoe made in Peterborough, Ontario, on exhibit at the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, New York, 2005.

Archeologists examine a dugout canoe found during a drought in 2000 at Newnans Lake, Florida.

The fragile nature of the wooden canoe is evident in this old campaigner, found near the Takhini River in the Yukon in 1995 by the Lake Laberge Archaeology Project.

Graham Herbert (Hornby Island, British Columbia), Sacred Escort, 1994. Watercolor on paper, 36.83 x 52.07 cm.

Bill Reid and Associates Creating a Dugout Canoe, 1985.

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

Walter Walker building a 16-foot cedar strip canoe, 1980

"In My Tippy Canoe." Music and lyrics by Fred Fisher. Recorded June 7, 1921 in New York

Canoe racing, with both professionals and Sunday cruisers competing, remains a popular form of outdoor adventure.

Sometimes canoe manufacturers went to extreme lengths to tout the quality of their synthetic canoes. In this case, Old Town dropped a Tripper model off of the roof of its plant in Old Town, Maine, to show it could take a punch and more-or-less snap right back to straight again.

The Kansas-based outdoors company Coleman was a formidable competitor in the low-end canoe market by the 1970s.