2 minute read
Pathways
Pathways
The earliest known snowshoes—essentially solid blocks of wood with crude bindings— were created by nomadic hunters in Central Asia around 4,000 B.C.E. Eventually the technology spread to present-day North America where Indigenous peoples developed the more familiar lace-framed, tennis racquet-style. They customized their snowshoes to fit their local ecologies, naming the designs after the animals who inspired them: swallowtail, beavertail, bear paw. Here in the Northeast, for example, snowshoes tended to be shorter, which facilitated easier travel through dense forests. Tribes typically used white ash for the frame and rawhide from deer, moose, and caribou for the webbing. Far from being a form of recreation, snowshoeing was a collective activity critical for travel, hunting, and fur trapping in the deep snow. Early European settlers, who were ill-prepared for such snowy winters, gradually appropriated the use of snowshoes, a fact which Thomas Wickman, professor of history and American studies at Trinity College and author of “Snowshoe Country: An environmental and cultural history of winter in the early American Northeast,” argues enabled their survival and facilitated colonial expansion throughout the region.
Over the succeeding centuries, snowshoes became popular amongst winter enthusiasts. In the 1840s, snowshoeing clubs began to appear throughout Canada and the northern United States. They organized races, which led to improvements in the design and construction of the snowshoes. By the middle of the 20th century, lighter-weight aluminum frames had replaced the traditional wooden ones. Today, snowshoes come in a variety of shapes and styles for every type of adventure, from a casual walk on level ground to traversing soft powder and rocky terrain higher in the mountains.
In the above photo, taken in 1905 by Edward B. Morris at an unnamed park in Connecticut, we see two women snowshoeing in full-length dresses adorned with furs.
