‘An Almost Unknown Country'

How artist Paul Kane chronicled Indigenous people and landscapes during an epic journey across Canada

- Harry Wilson

“HE DID NOT, HOWEVER, fall, but stopped and faced me, pawing the earth, bellowing and glaring savagely at me. The blood was stream-ing profusely from his mouth, and I thought he would soon drop. The position in which he stood was so fine that I could not resist the desire of making a sketch.”

And sketch Paul Kane did on that June day in 1846, several days’ ride south of present-day Winnipeg, with Métis hunters and thousands of bison thundering around him in a maelstrom of excitement and confusion — even though seconds later the bison he’d just shot would charge, prompting the artist to spring back onto his horse and make a narrow escape.