iRoquois Elm-Bark Canoe, after a drawing of 1849, equipped with paddles 

 for a crew of six, with owners' personal marks on blades. Length of canoe 25 

 feet, with capacity for a war party of a dozen or more men. Note supporting 

 piece of cord tied in with the end battens. Far gunwales are improperly 

 sketched. 



Still other methods included the use of grass or moss 

 impregnated with warm tallow from the cooking pot. 

 If available, the stems would be liberally smeared with 

 spruce or other gum, of course. 



While the ribs were customarily tree branches or 

 small saplings, in some canoes the saplings were split 

 and bent so their flat face was against the bark. In 

 the East, hunters' canoes were often given the lath-like 

 ribs of the birch-bark canoes, for when steel tools 

 became available such ribs were easily made during 

 the winter for use in the spring, when the temporary 

 canoe would be needed. 



According to the early reports, the ribs were placed 

 some 6 to 10 inches apart in the bark cover, with the 

 heads forced under the inwales against the bark, and 

 were supported there by the outwales as well. No 

 mention is made of any sheathing; Kalm refers to a 

 piece of bark and some saplings or tree branches laid 

 over the ribs to protect the bottom inboard. In the 

 large Iroquois canoes it would have been possible and 

 practical to employ a piece of bark inside the main 

 bark cover, as noted on page 213; this inside piece 

 needed to be only long enough to reach to the end 

 thwarts, or abreast the crimps, and wide enough to 

 cover the bottom and bilges up to 3 or 4 inches short 

 of the inwales. With the ribs over this inner sheet, a 

 stifiT bottom would result. In a long canoe, split poles 

 could be laid lengthwise inside the bottom of the 

 canoe and fastened there by lashing them to a few 

 ribs; these would serve to protect the bottom in load- 

 ing and to stiffen the bark cover. However, in a 

 small canoe the stiffness of elm bark when the rough 



outside layer was not fully scraped off would make 

 sheathing of any kind unnecessary, and the bark mat 

 inside the ribs, mentioned by Kalm, would be suffi- 

 cient. 



The difficulty in reconstructing the building methods 

 of the large Iroquois canoes on the same basis is that 

 Kalm's description is of a rather small canoe; the 

 information on the temporary canoes of the eastern 

 Indians also deals with short craft. It is evident, 

 however, that poles were not usually placed between 

 the bark and the ribs, as in temporary skin canoes 

 built by Indians. It is also apparent that splints were 

 not used by the Iroquois for sheathing large canoes. 



The ends of the outwales in the Iroquois canoes 

 seem to have been secured by snying them off on the 

 outside face and holding these thin ends by the cord 

 around the ends, as well as by the closure battens 

 of the stems. In some eastern canoes, notably the 

 elm-bark canoes of the St. Francis, the outwale ends 

 projected slightly outboard of the stems and were 

 lashed across them by a simple athwartship lashing 

 which passed through the bark cover and under and 

 over the lashing at the inwale ends. 



In a drawing of an Iroquois canoe made about 

 1849, the cord around the stems is shown together 

 with the outside stem battens and lashing; the ends of 

 the outwales are apparently under the cord and per- 

 haps under the stem battens. The stem batten is in 

 one piece sharply bent under the stems in U-form. 

 The end lashing shown seems to be in groups and the 

 bottom, for a little distance inboard of the stems, 

 is also shown as lashed. Three thwarts are shown. 



218 



