Several renowned artists of the 19th century visited what is now North Dakota. Their portraits and paintings depict Native Americans, wildlife and scenery. One such artist was Paul Kane.
Kane was Irish-Canadian, born in 1810. As a young man he painted portraits in Mobile, Alabama. In 1842 in London, Kane saw the artist George Catlin lecture and exhibit his Native paintings. Kane subsequently traveled across much of northwestern North America from 1845 to 1848, including what is now the Manitoba/North Dakota boundary. In his travels, Kane produced hundreds of sketches and paintings.
In the spring of 1846, Kane accompanied voyageurs of the Hudson’s Bay Company from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg. After paddling into the mouth of the Red River and reaching Lower Fort Garry, he soon set off to meet Métis hunters gathering for a bison hunt. This hunt was for meat to be dried and made into pemmican.
Kane acquired a guide, a cart, and a saddle horse, then headed south to meet the Métis. On approximately this date in 1846, he arrived at the Pembina River where the Métis were cutting poles to be used for drying meat. The hunt included about 2,000 Métis men, women and children, as well as 1,500 horse- and ox-drawn carts to carry meat.
It’s unclear where exactly the hunt took place. Kane wrote of being “in the territory of the United States … a few miles south of the boundary line” on Sioux hunting grounds. Another source says “the Dakota plains.”
Kane made sketches during the hunt. He wrote of seeing a herd of bison that “stretched over the plains as far as the eye could reach.” The hourlong hunt left 500 bison dead or dying across five or six square miles. Kane took part in the hunt, killing a bison bull and mortally wounding another.
In 1859, Kane published a journal of his travels. Blindness eventually caused him to stop painting. He died in 1871 in Toronto at age 60. Today, his sketches are quite valuable, as are his highly regarded paintings based on those sketches. One such painting, completed in 1845, sold for more than 5 million Canadian dollars in 2002.
Dakota Datebook by Jack Dura
Sources:
- Kane, P. (1925). Wanderings of an artist among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver’s Island and Oregon through the Hudson’s Bay Company’s territory and back again. The Radisson Society of Canada: Toronto
- Harper, J.R. (Ed.). (1971). Paul Kane’s frontier. University of Texas Press: Austin, TX
- Eaton, D. and Urbanek, S. (1996). Paul Kane’s great nor-west. UBC Press: Vancouver, BC
- Images of exploration, discovery, and early settlement in the Pacific Northwest: Paul Kane. University of Washington. Retrieved from: guides.lib.uw.edu/c.php?g=341747&p=2304340
- https://www.ndstudies.gov/gr8/content/unit-ii-time-transformation-1201-1860/lesson-2-making-living/topic-4-explorers/section-4-john-james-audubon-exploring-upper-missouri
- https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/29449085/paul-kane
