Tappan Adney, born in 1868 in Athens, Ohio, was an artist, a writer, and a photographer. He was credited with saving the art of birchbark canoe construction and built more than 100 models of different types. During World War I, he was an engineering officer for the Royal Military College. His book about the Klondike Gold Rush has become a well-loved standard. He worked in Montreal, where he worked as a consultant on aboriginal lore, then retired to Woodstock, New Brunswick, where his wife, Minnie Bell Sharp, had been born. He died in 1950.