Duluth Pack vs Frost River vs Red Clouds Collective: Heritage Canvas Packs Compared

For canoe trips and portages, buy a Duluth Pack canoe pack: it’s the original design, patented in Duluth in 1882, and nothing carries a canoe load better. For the widest choice of canvas packs with more modern carry features, look at Frost River, the other Duluth maker. For a small-workshop bag where the design matters as much as the canvas, look at Red Clouds Collective in Portland. All three build in waxed canvas and leather in the United States, and all three sell from their own websites.

Here’s how they line up.

	Duluth Pack	Frost River	Red Clouds Collective
Made in	Duluth, Minnesota	Duluth, Minnesota	Portland, Oregon
Roots	Camille Poirier’s 1882 pack and tumpline patent	Founded around 2001 by a longtime Duluth Pack designer; revived in 2009	Started by four snowboarding-industry veterans
Known for	The original canoe pack	A broad range of waxed-canvas packs and bags	Design-led canvas and leather bags from a small workshop
Best for	Canoe trips, portages, truck and barn	Hiking, hunting and travel packs in canvas	Everyday carry and the commute
Watch for	Traditional canoe packs have simple straps and no padded back	Canvas is heavier than synthetic, whichever model you pick	A smaller shop than the two Duluth makers

Duluth Pack, the original

Camille Poirier, a French-Canadian shoemaker who had moved to Duluth from Montreal, received U.S. Patent No. 268,932 on December 12, 1882, for a canvas pack and the tumpline that went with it. His customers were the timber, mining, shipping and railway crews working out of Duluth. In 1911 he sold the business to Duluth Tent & Awning, which later took the Duluth Pack name. The company still makes the canoe pack in Duluth, and its original design is sold today as the No. 3.

The canoe pack is a big square canvas sack with a foldover flap, leather straps and buckles, and a tumpline: a strap across the forehead that moves part of the load off the shoulders on a portage. It sits flat in the bottom of a canoe, it takes rough handling, and with few seams and fittings it has little to break.

A green cedar-and-canvas canoe pulled up on a rocky shore in the Boundary Waters, with two wooden paddles, a pack basket and a canvas pack beside it. — A cedar-and-canvas canoe, paddles, a pack basket and a canvas pack on a Boundary Waters shore. This is the trip the Duluth canoe pack was built for: load, paddle, carry across the portage, load again. *Photo: ModalPeak via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.*

What the traditional canoe pack is not built for is long trail miles. Leather shoulder straps and an unpadded canvas back are fine across a portage and wearing by mile eight. For hiking in canvas, look for a pack with padded straps and a back panel rather than a classic canoe sack.

Frost River, Duluth’s second canvas shop

Frost River started around 2001, founded by Steve Emerson after more than twenty years as a designer at Duluth Pack. The recession closed it in September 2008. Chris Benson and Jared Rinerson bought the business and reopened it in September 2009, and it now builds in Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, with waxed cotton canvas from an East Coast mill and leather from the tannery owned by Red Wing Shoes.

Its catalog is broad: rucksacks and bushcraft packs, bags, totes, luggage and accessories, all made in the Duluth factory. That breadth is the main reason to start here if you know you want canvas but need a particular shape or size.

Red Clouds Collective, the Portland workshop

Red Clouds Collective is a Portland, Oregon, workshop started by Jason Brown, Owen Johnson, Seth Neefus and Dan Weaver, longtime snowboarding-industry people, and since grown into a small group of designers and craftspeople. It makes waxed canvas and leather bags and totes in the United States.

The difference from the two Duluth makers is mostly design. Red Clouds bags lean toward everyday carry and the look of the piece, where Duluth Pack and Frost River grew out of canoe country and working use. If the bag is going to the office more often than to a portage, that matters more than it sounds.

How to choose by use

Canoe trips and portages: a Duluth Pack canoe pack. The original is still the right tool.

Day hiking and hunting: a canvas pack with padded shoulder straps and a back panel. Frost River’s broad catalog is a good place to start.

Truck, barn and ranch utility: a traditional Duluth Pack canoe pack or bag, which will live in the back of a pickup for years.

Office and commute: any of the three. Red Clouds if design is the point; Frost River or Duluth Pack if you want the bag to match the rest of your canvas gear.

What canvas packs are bad at

Weight is the trade. A waxed canvas pack weighs noticeably more than a nylon pack of the same size, before you put anything in it. Waxed canvas sheds rain well, but the seams and the flap opening still let water in during a long downpour, so pack anything that must stay dry in a liner. And wet canvas dries slowly. None of that matters on a canoe trip or around the ranch; it matters a lot on a long trail day.

Care, same for all three

An olive-green waxed cotton jacket on a mannequin, showing the matte, slightly waxy surface of the fabric, with a corduroy collar. — Waxed cotton on a field jacket shows what a pack's canvas should look like after a fresh coat: matte, slightly waxy, and beading water. When the beading stops, it's time to re-wax. *Photo: Robert Sheie / Menswear Market via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.*

Waxed canvas packs from any of these makers share the same care routine:

Brush off dirt with a stiff bristle brush after heavy use.
Spot clean with a damp cloth and cold water. Soap and hot water strip the wax, so skip both.
Re-wax every two to three years of regular use, or when water stops beading. Use Otter Wax, Filson’s wax, or the maker’s own. Warm the wax and the canvas with a hair dryer so it works into the weave.
Condition the leather straps once a year with pure neatsfoot oil or Bickmore Bick 4.
Repair early. A small tear closed with a sewing awl and waxed thread is a ten-minute job. Left for a season, it becomes a patch.

Ask the maker about repairs before you buy. Heavy canvas and leather are also work any good canvas shop or saddler can take on, which is a large part of why these packs last.

Trying the material first

All three makers sell mainly through their own sites, so there’s rarely a store nearby to handle one. If you want a feel for the weight and stiffness of heavy waxed canvas before you spend on a heritage pack, a generic waxed canvas rucksack gives you the hand of the fabric, though not the stitching, leather or hardware of the three makers above.