Shooting the Rapids, c. 1879 Frances Anne Hopkins (1838-1919) Courtesy National Archives of Canada

The first project to be undertaken as part of the Visiting Artisans Program is the construction of an 11 metre (36-foot) birch bark canoe. This canoe, often referred to as a Montreal canoe or "canot du Maitre", was most commonly used in the fur trade by voyageurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the late 1700s, at the peak of their use, they were built to carry as much as four tons of cargo, crew and provisions, and measured nearly 2m (6 feet) at their widest point. Under normal conditions, a loaded canoe such as this was paddled by eight to twelve voyageurs. Over each of the many portages between Montreal and Lake Superior, only half of the crew was required to carry the emptied, inverted canoe, as the others began the arduous task of packing over its contents. Due to its large size, the range of the Montreal canoe was generally limited to the larger waterways and portages connecting the St. Lawrence valley, the Upper Great Lakes and the Mississippi.

Large bark canoes were not an invention of the fur trade. The source of these particular great canoes was squarely rooted in the Algonquin tradition of bark canoe building. They were, in essence, an expanded or modified version supplied to meet the needs of these long-haul travellers. Accounts of large canoes appear in early European observations, but the awkwardness of these vessels on the smaller portages and canoe routes likely limited their traditional use.

The canoes themselves were built by Native men and women, as well as Metis and French builders. As such, the Montreal canoe came to bear, in many subtle ways, the influences of the people and cultures that produced them. Today, this great canoe has become an icon for that formative period in early Canadian history: the fur-trade era.