This essay provides the historical contexts of two events: artist Paul Kane's travels in the 1840s, and the publication of Wanderings of an Artist at the end of the 1850s. It then offers an interpretation of the book's anti- and non-USAmerican dimensions before discussing the subsequent production of the image of Kane as solely a Canadian-born figure with no USAmerican connections, and a hero for Canadian expansionists by virtue of his having captured Native lifeways and people in the years before they "vanished" to make way for the emerging dominion.
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