The Canoe and Exploration
The first European explorer to use and write about the birchbark canoe was Samuel de Champlain. He was quick to admit that it was a far better craft for Canadian exploration than the skiff in which he had traveled to reach what is now known as the Lachine Rapids.
“With the canoes of the savages” Champlain wrote in 1603, “one may travel freely and quickly throughout the country as well up the little rivers as up the large ones.”
In the year 1608, Champlain joined a war party of Huron, Algonquin, and some Montagnais Indians against the Iroquois. They traveled south on the Richelieu River, eventually reaching a large lake which Champlain named after himself. What impressed him most was the speed with which they traveled. “…every day we made 25 to 30 leagues in their canoes,” he wrote. In 1615 he and Etienne Brule traveled by canoe up the Ottawa River and from there to Lake Huron via the Mattawa and French River systems. On this trip the canoe route to the west was laid open and the great period of exploration and fur trade began.
In 1660, Jean Nicolet canoed across Lake Michigan and reached Green Bay, the Fox River, and Lake Winnebago. A dozen years later Radison and de Grosselliers paddled northward from Lake Superior to the headwaters of the Albany River and from there into Hudson Bay. When they returned to Three Rivers, they brought with them 360 canoes laden with furs. Pierre de Voyer, the French governor at Quebec, who had forbidden them to take such journeys, fined the two explorers onethird of their furs. As a result, they switched their allegiance to the English, and, on visiting England, told King Charles of the unlimited wealth in furs waiting to be traded in the wilderness around Hudson Bay.
In 1673, Count Frontenac, governor of New France, sent Louis Joliet and Father Marquette, a Jesuit, westward to find the giant river of the west. They left in two birch-bark canoes on May 17 and reached the Mississippi a month later. Joliet returned to Lachine four months later, having covered 2400 miles. An expert canoeist, he claimed that 50 portages were needed to make the journey upstream - westward; to return, only 15 were needed if one were skilled enough in running rapids.
It was not until 1682 that La Salle, with a party of 54 men, canoed down the Mississippi. Leaving Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario, they canoed westward through the Great Lakes to Illinois, and from there inland to the Mississippi River and south as far as the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way the party visited numerous Indian villages, and La Salle claimed the land for the King of France. This epic journey still stands as one of the most audacious canoe trips of all time.
For the next hundred years, canoe exploration turned to the Canadian west. It was La Verendrye who first canoed from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods, where one of his sons was killed by the Sioux. His two other sons, Francois and Pierre, continued exploring westward establishing forts on Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, the Red River, and finally the Assiniboine River.
This bold move enraged the Hudson Bay Company. Fearing that the French forts in Manitoba would stop the Indians from going northward to their trading posts on Hudson Bay, the company began to send flotillas of canoes westward on the big rivers that flow to Hudson Bay. By this time the French had already established posts on the Saskatchewan River. In spite of this, Hudson Bay Company employees, such as Curry Finlay, Frobisher, Paterson, Alexander Henry, and even such independent traders as Peter Pond, a Connecticut Yankee, continued their canoe travels on the western rivers.
A new, and perhaps the greatest, era of canoeing began with the formation in Montreal of the North West Company in 1783. In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie, an officer of the company, left Fort Chipawayon on Lake Athabaska and canoed down the river that later bore his name - the Mackenzie. He wanted to reach the Pacific Ocean. His canoe was a 32-foot birch-bark craft. On reaching the ocean, Mackenzie saw that it was not the Pacific but the “Frozen Ocean” of the north. His round-trip of over 2000 miles took 102 days to complete.
Up to then, no white man had crossed the Rocky Mountains.
But in 1793, Alexander Mackenzie traveled over the Peace River Pass and re-launched his canoe on the Blackwater River. From there he made his way to an Indian village on the Bella Coola, near the coast, having just missed meeting George Vancouver, who was exploring the British Columbia coast from the sea. The next man to cross the Rockies was David Thompson, a surveyor in the employ of the North West Company. Thompson chose a different route. He canoed up the Saskatchewan River to the Howse Pass. There he abandoned his canoes and traveled on horses purchased from the Indians. On reaching the Columbia River, the party camped and built new canoes with which they traveled to Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia.