98 TREE ANCESTORS 



America the birch has all the attendant romance that clusters 

 about the birch bark canoes of the aborigines and early traders 

 and trappers, and they are still indispensable in the North woods. 

 Tliis is strikingly set forth in the eighteenth century journal of 

 Alexander Mackenzie on his journey from Montreal to the Pacific. 

 He relates how he hunted whales in a birch canoe in the estuary of 

 the river which bears his name and how he carried such a canoe 

 across the Rocky Mountains, at least during the intervals when 

 the canoe was not carrying him — probably the first white man to 

 make such a journey. 



Living in cities as most of us have the misfortune to do in these 

 modern days, we scarcely realize the number and variety of uses 

 to which our common trees are put in remote parts of the world 

 away from the beaten tracks. We are not quite so uninformed as 

 the slum children who think that apples grow in barrels and peaches 

 in baskets, but what city dweller would dream that some thirty 

 million spoons were each year made out of birch wood in Russia, 

 or that the Russian peasants use about twenty-five miUion pairs 

 of birch bark shoes annually, or that Kamchatkans grind up the 

 bark and eat it for the contained starch, or that considerable 

 mahogany furniture in the antique shops is of sweet birch, or that 

 eleven thousand cords of papqr birch are used each year in New 

 England in the manufacture of shoe pegs. One would be inclined 

 to think that shoe pegs were as obsolete as distaffs or flails, but 

 such is not the case. 



Our paper birch {Betula papyrifera) , also often called the canoe 

 birch, extends through our northern tier of States almost from the 

 Atlantic to the Pacific and reaches northward almost to the shores 

 of the Arctic. It is one of the few American trees that covers 

 more ground at the present time than it did when America was 

 discovered. It owes its spread to the success with which it col- 

 onizes spaces that have been opened in the forests by windfalls or 

 fires. Its light winged fruits are produced in great quantities and 

 are carried far and wide by the winds — they may often be seen 

 as tiny bird-like specks on the surface of winters snows. A similar 

 habit of rapidly spreading over clearings and waste places character- 



