Paul Kane - Travels in The Northwest - in The Oregon Country

In The Oregon Country

Finally, Kane arrived on December 8, 1846, at Fort Vancouver, the main trading post and headquarter of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Oregon Territory. He stayed there over winter, sketching among and studying the Chinookan and other tribes in the vicinity and making several excursions, including a longer one of three weeks through the Willamette Valley. He enjoyed the social life at Fort Vancouver, which at that time was being visited by the British ship Modeste, and became friends with Peter Skene Ogden.

On March 25, 1847, Kane set out by canoe to Fort Victoria, which had been founded shortly before to become the new company headquarter, as the operations at Fort Vancouver were to be wound down and relocated following the conclusion of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which fixed the continental border between Canada and the United States west of the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel north. Kane went up the Cowlitz River and stayed for a week among the tribes living there in the vicinity of Mount Saint Helens before continuing on horseback to Nisqually (today Tacoma) and then by canoe again to Fort Victoria.

His painting of Mount St. Helens in eruption at night in 1847 which is housed in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was the only known image of an active Cascade volcano until the eruption of Lassen Peak in California in 1914. Although the scene was somewhat fictionalized, it did correctly show the active vent on the side of the volcano rather that the summit. He stayed for two months in that area, traveling and sketching among the Native Americans on Vancouver Island and around the Juan de Fuca Strait and the Strait of Georgia. He returned to Fort Vancouver in mid-June, from where he departed to return back east on July 1, 1847.