Determined to document the lives and customs of the Native people of the Northwest before contact with white settlers changed them forever, the Canadian artist Paul Kane set out in 1845 to cross the continent 'with no companions but my portfolio and a box of paints, my gun and a stock of ammunition.' Travelling by canoe and snowshoe, on foot and on horseback via the Hudson's Bay Company fur brigade routes, he made his way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast and back again. When he returned to Toronto in the fall of 1848, he brought back some five hundred field sketches and a remarkable collection of artifacts, which he used as raw material for one hundred oil paintings depicting scenes of Native life.