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General Details of Birch-Bark Canoe Construction, in a drawing by Adney. (From 

 Harper's Young People, supplement, July 29, 1890.) 



The eastern style of construction described here 

 produced what might be called a wide-bottom canoe 

 with some tumble-home above the turn of the bilge, 

 but a different method of construction was used to 

 produce canoes having a narrow bottom and flaring 

 sides. These canoes were not set up on the building 

 bed, in the first steps of shaping the hull, with the 

 gunwale frame on the cover bark. Instead, a special 

 building frame, mentioned earlier, was used. Each 

 tribe using the building frame had its own style, 

 but the variations were confined to minor matters or 

 to proportion of width to length. 



In general, the building frame is made of two 

 squared battens, about 1}^ inch square for an 18-foot 

 canoe. These, sometimes tapered slightly toward 

 each end, are fitted with crosspieces with halved 

 notches in each end to fit over the top of the battens. 



There may be as many as nine or as few as three of 

 these crosspieces, with seven apparently a common 

 number. Where ends of the long battens join they 

 are beveled slightly on the inside face and notches 

 are cut on the outside face to take the end lashings. 

 Each crosspiece end is lashed around the long battens, 

 a hole being made in each end of the crosspiece 

 for this purpose. The lashings, commonly bark or 

 rawhide thongs, are all temporary, as the building 

 frame has to be dismantled to remove it from the 

 canoe. Sometimes holes are drilled in the ends of 

 the crosspieces, or in the long battens, and in them 

 are stepped the posts used to fix the sheer of the 

 gunwales. 



The methods of construction, using the building 

 frame, varied somewhat among the tribes. Since the 

 gunwale was both longer and wider across than the 



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