Curiosity about the Cat

Very little is recorded about this small tankard, but it is one of the few artifacts in the HBC Museum Collection depicting an animal that isn’t a carving or artwork. The person who catalogued it refers to it as a catlike creature that “appears to be racing across a green painted ground surface.” Made from tin, it measures only 6.8 centimetres high and 5.9 centimetres wide. Once part of the collection that Hudson’s Bay Company kept at Beaver House in London, it was transferred to Winnipeg’s Lower Fort Garry in 1973, where it joined the HBC Museum Collection. What purpose could an item like this serve and why did it find its way into the HBC Museum Collection? Such a tiny tankard couldn’t hold much liquid and the catlike creature seems to have no connection to the types of animals that HBC employees would be encountering, so it remains a mysterious little artifact.