Portable Boats. 



261 



In our wilderness, the first substitute for the birch canoe 

 was the light boat known as the bateau, well-suited for 

 the transportation of military stores, and extensively used 

 during the French and Indian and revolutionary wars. 

 Thus we find the savagery of civilization making the first 

 improvements by substitution of the bateau for the boat 

 of the savage, to aid in the successful prosecution of more 

 savage war. 



In the Adirondack region, at the close of the revolutionary 

 war, there were many white hunters .and trappers who 

 used the birch canoe in their voyages by lake or river. 

 Few of these white trappers were able to build their own 

 canoes, and as the Indians slowly disappeared from our 

 northern wilderness, the white hunters were gradually 

 thrown more and more upon their own resources for water 

 craft. They commenced by building provisional canoes 

 from huge sheets of bark of the spruce tree. From a per- 

 sonal experience with this variety of craft, I cannot re- 

 commend it. The fresh spruce gum covers the inside in 

 a disagreeably sticky way — your only satisfaction being 

 that it is " pitched both without and within with pitch," 

 in a manner which might have satisfied Noah. It is also 

 frail and perhaps unsafe, its frame, of course, being as per- 

 manent as the boat itself. 



The canoe, however, was the desideratum in a country 

 like the Adirondack, where the traveler by water can 

 scarcely proceed a dozen or half a dozen miles without 

 carrying his boat and baggage over several miles of port- 

 ages, and after many trials and years of patient labor, the 

 Adirondack guides have produced, in their- light boat- 

 canoes, one of the most graceful, elegant and portable of 

 boats. Nevertheless the ordinary Adirondack boat, ten 

 or twelve feet in length, weighs from sixty to ninety 

 pounds, and in addition to the other baggage forms a 

 heavy weight to be carried on the shoulders of one man 



