CHAPTER II 



CANOES 



WHAT the camel is to desert tribes, what the 

 horse is to the Arab, what the ship is to the 

 colonizing Briton, what all modern means of 

 locomotion are to the civilized world to-day, 

 that, and more than that, the canoe was to 

 the Indian who lived beside the innumerable 

 waterways of Canada. The Indian went fish- 

 ing, hunting, campaigning, and sometimes even 

 whaling, in his bark canoe. Jacques Cartier 

 found Indians fishing in the Gulf of St Lawrence 

 and sleeping under their upturned canoes, as 

 many a white and Indian has slept since that 

 long-past summer of 1534. Every succeeding 

 explorer made use of the Indian canoe, up to 

 the time of Mackenzie, 1 who paddled north 

 to the Arctic in 1789, along the mighty river 

 which bears his name ; and who, four years 



1 For the canoe voyages of Mackenzie, to the Arctic in 1789 

 and to the Pacific in 1793, see Adventurers of the Far North and 

 Pioneers of the Pacific Coast in this Series. 

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