Tappan Adney

In the summer of 1888, Tappan Adney, found Peter Jo building a birchbark canoe where Lanes Creek joins the Wolastoq (St. John River) in Upper Woodstock, New Brunswick. Adney built a full-sized canoe with Peter Jo and later built over 150 1/5 scale models that document the designs and construction details of canoes from various Indigenous cultures of North America. In addition, his well-illustrated research papers describe and show in detail how traditional Indigenous bark canoes are built. The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America was produced from these papers and published by The Smithsonian Institution. Adney’s model canoes along with this book is a high point in the preservation of Indigenous material culture. His book has become a workbench bible of those who are again building birchbark canoes.

Adney began learning the Wəlastəqwey language soon after he came to New Brunswick. He compiled the first Wəlastəqwey vocabulary. He continued this linguistic research for the rest of his life with the goal of assisting in the preservation of the language. Adney insisted that “language is culture and culture is language.” In Adney’s later years, Peter Paul, an elder of the Woodstock Wəlastəqwey community, became his linguistic mentor. His linguistic research papers are held in the Peabody Essex Museum and in the Harriet Irving Library at the University of New Brunswick. Carole Polchies, daughter of Peter Paul who remembers Adney as a frequent visitor in their home, is now a Wəlastəqwey language teacher.

Adney came to New Brunswick in 1887 at the age of 18 for a summer holiday and stayed for a year and half. When he returned to New York, he launched his career in natural history journalism and ethnographic reporting based on his experiences and research in NB. He published his first articles on birchbark canoes and on the Wəlastəqwey language. He wrote articles and gave lectures on the natural history of NB. He was already an accomplished artist. He illustrated his own publications and the work of other authors, including Theodore Roosevelt. He returned to NB five times in the next ten years, spending more time in the province than in NY. He married Minnie Bell Sharp from Upper Woodstock and made the hamlet his home. Adney wrote of his first visit to New Brunswick:

“Nothing had a more positive influence on my life… when I set out to earn a livelihood it supplied the experience of greatest service to me. Here was a whole new world thrown open to me, a kind of air I had never breathed before. No woods had ever impressed me as these woods did.”

Adney was a defender of Indigenous rights on several fronts. He introduced the 1725 Maritime region Peace and Friendship Treaty and its claim of Indigenous rights to land and resources into the Canadian legal system. This claim has now been validated by the Supreme Court.

He helped secure federal government recognition of the Wəlastəqwey as a bona fide tribe of Indigenous people. He intervened and stopped a government plan to force the relocation of several Wəlastəqwey communities to a central location at Kingsclear, NB. He persisted in a campaign to get Parliamentary support for a radical reform of the oppressive Indian Act.

Although it fell short of Adney’s demands, a reform bill was passed shortly after his death in 1950. In 1948 William Saulis, Chief of the Tobique band, wrote to Adney as follows:

“…you have a true Indian heart …I don’t know where I would have got to without your guiding hand… side by side we treaded along with one thing in view, the real justice for the tribe…”

Harper’s Weekly sent Adney to report on the Yukon Gold Rush where he spent 16 months and later published The Klondike Stampede, a 500 page, highly illustrated best seller and now classic book.

Adney did professional research for the Ethnographic Museum at McGill University.

He was active as an artist for most of his life, working in a variety of genera, including fine art, natural history illustration, public murals, photography, heraldic design, and sculpted carvings for architectural application.

Adney served in the Canadian Army during World War One where he was he was an officer’s training instructor in the design and construction of battlefield infrastructure.

All this and more is recounted in this long-awaited biography of an extraordinary man of remarkable and enduring accomplishments.

James W. Wheaton (1933-2005) When James Wheaton became interested in the life and legacy of Tappan Adney, the grandfather of his wife, Joan Adney Dragon, he began an extensive research and writing project aimed at producing the first biography and full account of Adney’s accomplishments. By 2003, Jim had completed the first draft of a fourteen-chapter Tappan Adney biography, which he passed on to Ted Behne for completion. Jim Wheaton is the author of Surgeon on Horseback: The Missouri and Arkansas Journal and Letters of Dr. Charles Brackett of Rochester, Indiana 1861-1863 and When I Think of Hingham.

Ted Behne (1943-2014) After working with James Wheaton on the biography of Tappan Adney, Ted took on its completion when Jim became ill. He expanded his research and continued to revise and develop the manuscript. During this time, he also transcribed and edited Adney’s travel journals from 1887 to 1896. Ted built a full-size canoe as well as scale models of birchbark canoes of the type built by Adney. He died before the biography was fully prepared for publication, and his wife, Elizabeth, picked up the work, added to the development of the manuscript, and kept the project alive.

Daryl Hunter is an adviser and consultant to the Carleton County Historical Society for the management of its Adney archive and the development of the Tappan Adney Room at Connell House Museum. He is also an adviser to the board of trustees of the Adney-Flemming Trust and the Town of Woodstock on the development of the Adney-Flemming Nature Preserve, as well as a property management volunteer. Involved in the creation of this book since 1998, Daryl's research and writing on Adney has created a major archive on his life and legacy.

Nicholas N. Smith (1926-2022) Nicholas Smith’s career as an ethnographer was devoted to the study and preservation of Wabanaki cultures and languages. As a young scholar in the early 1950s he was asked to sort and organize the Tappan Adney papers on Wəlastəkwey linguistics that had been deposited with the Phillips Library at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He became a close friend of Peter Paul of Woodstock First Nation and worked with him on the preservation of Wəlastəkwey language and culture.

From 1954 to 2018 Nick published many papers and book chapters on his Wabanaki research. He created an extensive computer-based bibliography for the study of Wabanaki history and culture, which is now administered by the University of Maine. He was the author of two books: Three Hundred Years in Thirty: Memoir of Transition with the Cree Indians of Lake Mistassini and Penobscot Traditions with Little Devil Fish.

Keith Helmuth is the publisher and managing editor of Chapel Street Editions. He worked for two decades managing independent bookstores that served university communities. He was library manager and faculty member at Friends World College and coordinator of its Independent Studies Program. He was a founding trustee of Quaker Institute for the Future and served for two decades as co-editor of its book publishing program.

The Helmuth family operated North Hill Farm at Speerville, New Brunswick, for almost thirty years. Keith is the author of Tappan Adney and the Heritage of the St. John River Valley, Tracking Down Ecological Guidance, and Working in the Commonwealth of Books:1960-2024, A Cultural Memoir(forthcoming in 2025). He is a co-author of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy and How on Earth Do We Live Now? Natural Capital, Deep Ecology, and the Commons. He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick.