February 2012 - Manitoba Museum

Posted on: Wednesday February 29, 2012

By Dr. Jamie Morton, past Curator of the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection

I started my position as the Curator of the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection in January, and am familiarizing myself with this fascinating collection, comprised of objects which reflect more than three centuries of HBC operations. There is not a single organizing principle, other than objects having some association with the HBC or its employees. The vast majority of the collection was donated by the Hudson’s Bay Company to The Manitoba Museum in 1994. Of the roughly 25,000 objects in this collection, about 1/3 are of indigenous origin – “curiosities of the country” collected by HBC employees – while about 2/3 are of Euro-North American origin. The collection contains some remarkable and iconic objects, but an equally important aspect is the ways in which the collection symbolizes and evokes larger themes in corporate, Canadian, and world history.

An example of this is the Halkett boat – a mid-19th century inflatable or collapsible boat intended for the use of travelers and explorers – in the HBC Collection.

An illustration of two men paddling in a small inflatable boat.

A period image of a two-man Halkett boat in use, from “Footnotes on the Franklin Search,” The Beaver, Outfit 285 (Spring 1955), 48.

The Halkett boat in the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection in its shipping box, labelled “Sir George Simpson,” prior to conservation. TMM, HBC 40-95.

A recent request came from Jeremy Ward, Curator of The Canadian Canoe Museum, Peterborough, ON. www.canoemuseum.ca He was interested in obtaining an image and information on this object for an upcoming exhibit on collapsible and folding watercraft. The information he provided, and my search into the records at The Manitoba Museum, produced some interesting results. First, it is one of two known Halkett Boats surviving worldwide. The other, in the Stromness Museum, in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, was associated with the Arctic explorer and surveyor Dr. John Rae – who was employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. (Click here to learn more)

Rae considered the boats very useful on his Arctic voyages in the 1840s, which included a search for the lost expedition of the famous Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.

Ironically, the Halkett Boat in the HBC Museum Collection was intended for Franklin, who in turn gave it to Sir George Simpson, the governor of North American operations for the HBC. It is possible that this boat has never been used, but has remained in its box in the corporate collection of the HBC until the HBC Museum Collection was donated to The Manitoba Museum.

Museum Stories: HBC Museum Collection

HBC Museum Collection

Friday April 25, 2025

Posted on: Wednesday February 8, 2012

Just outside my office on the 4th floor of the Museum is a big, hairy outlaw that can stare anybody down. It’s the mounted head of one of the original ‘outlaw buffalo’ of the Pablo/Allard herd of Plains Bison (Bison bison bison), the most significant of the private herds purchased by the Canadian government that helped to bring these magnificent animals back from the brink of extinction.

A taxidermized bison head mounted on a large, oval, wooden wall mount.

By 1890, it is believed that there were no bison remaining in Canada. Several private herds started from wild stock during the 1870s were obtained by the Canada government beginning in 1897. The Pablo/Allard herd, the origin of the Museum ‘outlaw’, had its beginnings in about 1872 when Walking Coyote, a member of the Pend d’Oreille First Nation, captured a handful of animals south of the Alberta/Montana border. About a dozen offspring of this group were purchased by Pablo and Allard in 1883 and augmented with others purchased from other private owners some ten years later. When protected and left to their own devices, this bison herd became quite large.

Image: The 4th floor Museum ‘outlaw’, an original member of the Pablo/Allard bison herd, but one of several that refused to be driven into a train boxcar for shipping and was shot for its obstinance. Times have changed, we’d like to think.

Michel Pablo rounded up his bison in Montana, loaded them onto boxcars and sent over 700 to Canada between 1907 and 1914. However, there were a few individuals that were too wild and managed to escape. In early 1911, in what was billed by the The New York Times in January that year as “the last big buffalo hunt in the history of the world,” Pablo hunted down and shot these ‘outlaw’ bison. The metal plaque on the Museum hallway head clearly identifies it as a member of Pablo’s ‘outlaw’ herd.

The New York Times headline of January 22, 1911 reporting the culling of the ‘outlaw’ bison.

The metal plate identifying the Museum bison head as an ‘outlaw buffalo’ of the Pablo herd.

I mentioned the Museum bison head mount to a volunteer in Geology and Paleontology, Dr. Jim Burns, who has a fascination with Winnipeg history. He brought to my attention a photograph he had researched that showed 11 bison heads lined up on Main Street in 1911, apparently from that famous last hunt by Pablo (see Burns, J.A. 2010. Edward Darbey, taxidermy, and the last buffaloes. Manitoba History, 63:40-41). It seems that a number of these animals had made their way to a well-respected Winnipeg taxidermist, Edward Darbey. Born in St. Thomas, Ontario in 1872, Darbey came to Winnipeg at the age of 15. In 1898 he purchased the taxidermy shop on Main Street that is the backdrop to the bison skulls in the photo. By 1902, Darbey had been appointed as the “Official Taxidermist of the Manitoba Government,” an odd title by today’s standards, but one that made sense at the time when animal mounts were frequently used to decorate public buildings.

The Pablo bison were hunted in early 1911, the bison head and taxidermy shop photo was dated by Dr. Burns to around mid-1911, and there is record of a Winnipeg auction of bison head mounts and capes in late November, 1911. According to the plaque on our Museum mount, it became property of the City of Winnipeg in 1912, a reasonable date to link it with the somewhat gruesome Main Street display.

Eleven bison skulls outside Edward Darbey’s taxidermy shop on Main Street in Winnipeg, mid-1911. Photo courtesy of the Archives of Manitoba through J.A. Burns.

A close-up of the horns of one of the skulls from the 1911 Main Street photograph. Enhancing images like this provided a way to compare the horns of the undressed skulls with that of the Museum head mount to see if it could have been one of these animals.

Two close ups of left-side bison horns. On the left side is a black and white photograph of a horn on an undressed skull bearing very similar markings to the horn on the right side image, which is a colour image of a horn on a taxidermized skull.

Enlarged images of the undressed skulls in the old photo show distinctive patterns on the horns. I spent some time photographing the horns of the hallway ‘outlaw’ at similar angles to those of the 1911 photograph. From careful comparison, I am reasonably certain that there is a match for our 4th floor ‘outlaw’ – skull #5, second from the right in the back row of the Main Street photo (just right of the bottom of the door to the shop). The numbers on the skulls likely linked them with the appropriate skins for later mounting.

Image: A comparison of the left horn of skull #5 from the 1911 photograph (left) with the left horn of the Museum ‘outlaw’ mount. Although difficult to discern on the low resolution images here, patterns on each of these horns and also the right horns are strikingly similar, suggesting a match.

So our big, hairy ‘outlaw’ bison mount is 100 years old this winter. This could be considered a depressing anniversary of the killing of some of the last ‘wild’ bison in North America. But for me, the old head commemorates the beginning of an incredible conservation story, the salvation of our provincial emblem and, just perhaps, an altered attitude of society towards the world around us.

Dr. Randy Mooi

Curator of Zoology

Dr. Mooi received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Toronto working on the evolutionary history of coral reef fishes. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Fishes of the Smithsonian Institution…

Meet Dr. Randy Mooi

Museum Stories: Zoology

Zoology

Thursday February 6, 2025

The E.W. Darbey Taxidermy Shop and the Making of the Manitoba Museum

The Manitoba Museum recently opened a “new” store in the Winnipeg 1920 Gallery, the Darbey taxidermy shop. Today, a taxidermy shop would be considered a minor player in our digital world…

Zoology

Wednesday February 7, 2024

The surprising snow fly – an insect that defies winter

As you trek across the snowy landscape in a (typical) Manitoba winter, one of the last creatures you might expect to be sharing the trail with is an insect…

Zoology

Wednesday May 31, 2023

A-toad hunting we will go

Posted on: Wednesday February 1, 2012

For the last several years I have been studying the pollination ecology in Birds Hill Provincial Park focusing specifically on the rare Western Silvery Aster (Symphyotrichum sericeum) plant. I discovered that this species is self-incompatible (meaning it can’t fertilize its own eggs), and visited by a wide range of insect pollinators, including both flies and bees.

I also discovered that although this rare plant competes for pollinators with the much more common Showy Goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis) plant, a negative effect on seed production only occurs when their blooming periods overlap.

My first thought was that reducing the number of Showy Goldenrod plants in the community would result in more insect visitations for the rare plant but then I reconsidered as this did not intuitively seem like the right course of action. I wondered if removing plants would actually end up reducing the local insect population by reducing the quantity of nectar available. Perhaps the plants aren’t really competing at all but rather working together to support their mutual pollinators throughout the year. I also considered that any plant species that completes its flowering before Western Silvery Aster begins blooming would not be competing with it for pollinators at all. In fact, you could argue that the common plants facilitate insect visitation to the rare plant by providing nectar to their shared pollinators. Purple Prairie Clover provides nectar to Western Silvery Aster’s pollinators in July.

Bee flies and syrphids pollinate Western Silvery Aster flowers.

Bumblebees love Showy Goldenrod!

Purple Prairie Clover provides nectar to Western Silvery Aster’s pollinators in July.

I decided to test this hypothesis by recording the insect visitors to other plant species before Western Silvery Aster even begins to flower. So far I have obtained some interesting results. One of the most important insect visitor species, a bumblebee (Bombus bifarius), was observed visiting five species of plants in June and July in addition to Western Silvery Aster. A second species, a bee fly (Anastoechus barbatus), was observed as early as July 12, pollinating three other plant species. It appears that when plants share pollinators, staggered flowering helps to (a) decrease competition, and (b) sustain pollinating insects throughout their active season.

I think that there is a tendency for western scientists to place too much emphasize on competition when interpreting the results of their research. We need to remember that co-operation, if it results in both species increasing their offspring, is also a beneficial strategy for survival.

Dr. Diana Bizecki Robson

Curator of Botany

Dr. Bizecki Robson obtained a Master’s Degree in Plant Ecology at the University of Saskatchewan studying rare plants of the mixed grass prairies. After working as an environmental consultant and sessional lecturer…

Meet Dr. Bizecki Robson