Who Was Tappan Adney?

Since I uploaded this post in 2023, a new biography of Tappan Adney has been published. My thanks to his great-granddaughter, whose comment below prompted me to check out the Amazon site!  Click here to access more info –

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Edwin Tappan Adney (July 13, 1868 – October 10, 1950), commonly known as Tappan Adney, was an American-Canadian artist, writer, and photographer. (source)

So begins the Wikipedia page providing a brief outline of Tappan Adney’s life and why he is still remembered 75 years later.  It was the time he spent in Woodstock in New Brunswick’s St. John Valley that had the greatest impact on his life. In his early 20s, Adney befriended Peter Lewis Paul, a member of the Wolastoqiyik First Nation, and learned how to build canoes in the Wolastoqiyik way. [These “people of the beautiful river” are also known by their Mi’kmaq name Maliseet.]  He would also learn the Wolastoqiyik language and become a strong advocate for their culture.

Adney died in 1950, leaving unfinished his life’s major project.  As John McPhee writes in his The Survival of the Bark Canoe (click on the title to access a PDF file of the book) –

Adney so thoroughly dedicated himself to the preservation of knowledge of the bark canoe that he was still doing research, still getting ready to write the definitive book on the subject, when, having reached the age of eighty-one, he died. Over the next dozen years or so, Howard I. Chapelle, curator of transportation at the Smithsonian Institution, went through Adney’s hills of paper and ultimately wrote the book, calling it The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. (p.7)

The Adney/Chapelle book was finally published by the Smithsonian in 1964.

Along with the material for the eventual book, he constructed exact replica models of about 130 canoe and kayak styles and forms at a one-fourth or one-fifth scale. McPhee’s book includes a section on some of Adney’s models and traditional construction techniques.

Adney’s book and models remain the primary sources of information on the construction and development of the bark canoes of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the northern U.S., in particular the Anishinaabe (i.e. Algonkian) cultural family to which the Wolastoqiyik belong.

This Mariners’ Museum slide show presentation provides an introduction to a few of Adney’s canoe replicas. [The models are on display at the museum in Newport News, Virginia.]

Downloadable copies of the book are readily found online. See here for the Gutenberg site, where it is available in various file formats. The Internet Archive site also has copies for free download or to borrow.

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Adney’s  Missinaibi Visit:

In 1930 a 62-year-old Adney spent some time in the Missinaibi region. Five years before the area framed by the CPR, Algoma Central, and CN tracks and the Chapleau River on its eastern side had been designated as the Chapleau Crown Game Preserve. His main motivation was undoubtedly to learn more about traditional Ojibwe and Cree canoe building from the local people who still remembered the old ways.

While I have yet to find possible journal entries he made about this trip, his sketchbook images and photographs are available online, thanks to Montreal’s McCord-Stewart Museum.

Other than his continued interest in birch bark canoe construction, he also visited some of the pictograph sites found in the Missinaibi area.  With him, he had an Ojibwe and a Cree paddler as guides.  Along the way, he made sketches of the images found at the rock painting sites. Receiving the most attention were the pictographs

• at Missinaibi Lake’s Fairy Point site,
• on the east side of  Missinaibi Lake’s Whitefish Bay,  and
• at two sites on nearby Little Missinaibi Lake.

These drawings and notes of the various sites are the oldest we have of Anishinaabe rock painting sites in northeast/north-central Ontario. Of these sites, Fairy Point is the most significant.

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The name Fairy Point comes from what was thought to be the English equivalent of the Ojibwe term maymaygweshiwuk, who were the mischievous elf-like creatures who lived in the dramatic vertical rock faces of lakes and rivers of the Canadian Shield.  They acted as intermediaries who would connect the manitous with the petitioning shamans and vision questers who left their painted images as a part of the ritual connection.

As far back as 1875, Robert Bell of the Geological Survey of Canada used the English translation Fairy Point in his report of his route up the Missinaibi River and the Lake from Moose Factory and James Bay to his Michipicoten destination. It does seem strange that he makes no mention of the collection of pictographs at Fairy Point, given that they are one of the largest in northeast and north-central Ontario.

Fortunately, when it came to the pictographs, Tappan Adney would not be so silent – or so unimpressed. He seems to have spent a couple of days at the Fairy Point site, sketching the images which make up the various panels. As well, he took some photographs, including the ones above. They represent the oldest still existing- and perhaps first – visual records of the pictographs in the Missinaibi area.

The entire McCord-Stewart Museum collection of Adney sketches, photographs, and other artifacts (81 items in all, some going back to his time in the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1890s) can be accessed here.

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What follows are individual pages from Adney’s sketchbook. Whenever possible, I also included photos of the same panel of images taken by my brother and me on our last visit in 2016.

The Moose and Stars Panel

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The Mishipeshu and Caribou Panel:

For more on the Fairy Point pictographs and other sites on the lake, see the post below –

The Anishinaabe Pictograph Sites of Missinaibi Lake

The nearby pictograph sites on Little Missinaibi Lake are covered in a second post –

The Pictographs of Little Missinaibi Lake

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