AMERICAN FOREST TREES 117 



Western red cedar is strong and stiff but falls from twenty to 

 thirty per cent below white oak in these factors. It is light, and the 

 texture of the wood is rather coarse. The springwood and summerwood 

 are distinct, the latter constituting one-half or less of the annual ring. 

 The medullary rays are numerous and obscure. The wood's color is dull 

 brown, tinged with red. The thin sapwood is nearly white. 



The ease with which western red cedar may be worked led the 

 Indians to use it in their most ambitious woodcraft. The gigantic 

 totem poles which have excited the curiosity and admiration of travelers 

 near the coast in Alaska and southward have nearly all been of this 

 wood. Some of them are the largest single pieces of wood carving in the 

 world. Trunks three or four feet in diameter and forty or fifty feet 

 long have been hewed and whittled in weird, uncouth, and fantastic 

 forms, decorated with eagle heads, bear mouths, and with various 

 creatures of the forest or sea, or from the realms of imagination. Before 

 the northern Pacific coast Indians procured tools from white men they 

 executed their carving by means of bone, stone, shell, and wooden tools, 

 assisted by fire. 



The making of canoes was in some ways a work more laborious 

 for the Indians than the manufacture of totem poles. Their canoes were 

 dugouts of all sizes, from the small trough which carried one or two 

 persons, to the enormous canoe which carried fifty warriors with all their 

 equipment. Such a canoe, now in the National Museum at Washington, 

 D. C., is fifty-nine feet long, seven feet, three inches deep at the bow, 

 five feet three inches at the stern, and three feet seven inches in the 

 middle, and eight feet wide. It was made on Vancouver island, and is 

 capable of carrying 100 persons. The capacity of the canoe is thirty-five 

 tons. Civilized man has produced no vessel with lines more perfect than 

 are seen in some of these canoes made by savages; but all the canoes 

 are not alike : some are crude and clumsy. It is claimed that large cedar 

 canoes of Indian manufacture were early carried from the Pacific coast 

 by fur traders, and New York and Boston shipbuilders took them as 

 models in constructing the celebrated clipper ships which formerly 

 sailed between New York and San Francisco. 



The Indians formerly made much use of western red cedar bark 

 which they twisted into ropes and cords, braided for mats, wove for 

 cloth, used in making baskets, roofing wigwams, constructing fish nets 

 and bird snares, ladders for climbing cliffs, and they even pulped the 

 inner bark by pounding it in mortars, and mixed it with their food. 



White men have put western red cedar to many uses, as shingles, 

 lumber, cooperage, poles, posts, piles, car siding and roofing, boat 

 building from skiffs to ships, and general furniture and interior finish. 



