70 PAUL KAJSTE, TAB' CANADIAN ARTIST. 



whatever talents and proficiency I possessed to the painting of a series 

 of pictures illustrative of the North American Indians and scenery/^ 

 On applying to Sir George Simpson, the Governor of the Hudson's 

 Bay Company, and showing him studies of Indians he had already 

 made, Sir George entered cordially into his plan; furnished him with 

 letters of introduction to the chief factors at the Company's posts, and 

 ordered him a passage in the brigade of canoes which was to start for 

 Lake Superior in the spring of 1846. But before his arrangements 

 could be completed, — ^including all the miscellaneous supplies required 

 for an artistic tour through regions where it would be vain to seek for 

 the most simple appliances of his art, — the voyageurs had set out, and 

 he only succeeded in joining them, after much toil and hardship, before 

 the party reached the mountain pass, forty miles above the Hudson's 

 Bay Fort on the Kaministaqueah River, at the head of Lake Superior. 



Mr. Kane's romantic experiences and adventures during the next 

 four years are detailed with graphic truthfulness in the volume published 

 by him in 1859. He crossed the continent in canoe and on foot, made 

 his way up the valley of the Saskatchewan, and over the vast prairies 

 beyond it, stretching westward to the Rocky Mountains. Crossing 

 them, he navigated the Columbia River to Oregon, visited and explored 

 Puget's Sound, Vancouver's Island, and other regions of the then 

 savage "West : which, though now rapidly filling up with European 

 settlers, are described by him as " those wild scenes, amongst which I 

 strayed almost alone, and scarcely meeting a white man, or hearing the 

 sound of my own language." Everywhere his pencil was busily 

 employed on portraits of chiefs, warriors, and medieine-men of the 

 Indian tribes; and on hunting scenes, games, dances, and other 

 characteristic native rites and customs. He pictured various of the 

 Flathead Indians of the Cowlitz, Chinook, Newatee, and other tribes ; 

 had opportunities of studying the Crees, Blackfeet, Chimpseyans, 

 Clalams and others, including even the Esquimaux; and was every- 

 where received among them with mingled respect and apprehension, as 

 a great medicine-man, whose reproduction of their likenesses by his 

 mysterious art was supposed to give him some strange power over them. 



Among the most striking of the Indian portraits executed by him, 

 is one of Kea-keke-sacowaw, head chief of the Crees, whom he met 

 when travelling on the Saskatchewan, engaged in raising a war-party 

 against the Blackfeet. He had with him eleven elaborately decorated 

 pipe-stems, ten of which were the pledges of as many chiefs engaged 



