Last week’s edition of the North Star carried a front-page story about two local canoe builders, John Hupfield and Pam Wedd, and their part in assisting members of the Fort Severn First Nation, on Hudson Bay, to restore some old cedar-strip freighter canoes.
Lucky for Sarah Bissonette, the North Star reporter who wrote the story, that I didn’t know she was working on it. Otherwise, I would have bombarded her with tales of negotiating frothing rapids and treacherous Hudson Bay tides in similar vessels — and just possibly in one of the relics pictured in last week’s paper. Still, I was pleased to read the article, for it provides a welcome opening to boast about a recent achievement in the photographic field.
Around a month ago, CBC’s 10 p.m. flagship National Television News ran a short documentary on the canoe restoration project at Fort Severn. No doubt Hupfield and Wedd were prominently identified in the film but I was too distracted for it to register. That’s because the feature opened with a familiar photograph, one so familiar and personal that seeing it flash on the TV screen momentarily floored me.  
You see, I snapped that picture (plus two more used in the film) 59 years ago this summer while running a rapids on the Black Duck River, a clear, fast-running, trout-infested stream entering Hudson Bay precisely where the Ontario–Manitoba boundary strikes salt water.
As a field worker with the Ontario Department of Lands & Forests I spent considerable time working out of Fort Severn. In the summer of 1953, it was a botanical survey of the Hudson Bay Lowland. Fort Severn Crees served as our guides, and their canvas-covered cedar-strip freighter canoes provided transportation on Hudson Bay and on rivers entering it. Those heavy-duty vessels, specially designed for freighting goods and for sea travel, would have been purchased at the local Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. As I recall, of the two major canoe-builders of the day, the Company favoured Chestnut over Peterborough. Perhaps while dissecting the old canoes at Fort Severn Hupfield and Wedd recognized the handiwork of one or the other of those great Canadian institutions.
By the way, Fort Severn (population about 150 in the 1950s, but probably larger today) stands out as both the most northerly community in Ontario and one of the oldest. The Hudson’s Bay Company first established a trading post at the mouth of the Severn River in 1684, sufficient grounds to claim it’s a hundred years older than Toronto.
So how did the CBC find my pictures when they needed period photographs to go with the documentary? A few years ago, I donated a thousand or so northern photographs to the Archives of Ontario. Presumably the producer asked the Archives if, by any remote chance, they could supply an old photo or two of freighter canoes in use at Fort Severn.
And the Archives responded, “Have we got pictures for you!”