10 
FOREST AND STREAM 
From Laverdiere’s Oeuvres de Champlain 
Defeat of the Iroquois on Lake Champlain-Note Canoes-The Early Artist Was 
Unfamiliar With Their Construction. 
with gum is an item of weight not to be 
overlooked. As length increases, weight 
goes up, but there is always a difference of 
from ten to twenty pounds and more in 
favor of the bark as against the canvas 
canoe. 
Does this advantage hold as to durabil¬ 
ity? Certainly not. The bark canoe is a 
frail craft in comparison. The birch cov¬ 
ering gets old, rots in the wet, and dries 
and cracks as well. The weak spots, where 
the water soon comes in, have to be 
gummed carefully and constantly, and every 
patch under the water line impedes speed. 
That is the difference between the bark 
and the canvas. You give a paddle heave 
in a bark, and the canoe stops as soon as 
the power does. The canvas, if smoothly 
painted or varnished, will shoot ahead with 
scarcely diminished speed. This, in a long 
day’s work, counts for much. 
As to construction, see that the bottom of 
the canoe is composed of one piece of 
birch. The joining of other pieces should 
be on the sides above water, and the fewer 
strips used, the better the canoe, if the right 
kind of bark has been selected. There is 
good bark and bad bark, and it takes an 
expert to tell the difference. Let an expert 
do this for you, if you can’t yourself. 
The cedar ribs—they are all hand-made 
and not finished like those in the store 
canoe—should be rather close together, and 
firmly set. The lining should be of thin 
cedar, smoothly shaved, and neatly set un¬ 
der the ribs, so that the pieces will not 
work loose, as they are apt to do otherwise. 
The Indian binds the gunwale of his 
canoe, and fastens it together with the split 
roots of larch. “Wauttap,” he pronounces 
it, even though he may not spell it that 
way. It wraps like rattan and looks like 
it. In former days he used 
wooden pegs to fasten the ribs, 
but wire nails are now often sub¬ 
stituted. It has been a long time 
since I have seen a canoe made 
without nails. In the construction 
of the canoe the Indian builder— 
and his skill makes him a famous 
man if his industry is in propor¬ 
tion—stakes out a frame on the 
ground, and follows the lines closely. In 
fact his method does not differ much from 
that of the shipbuilder, but on a very much 
smaller scale. I have wondered many times 
why the enterprising managers of our 
sportsmen’s shows never secured some good 
Indian canoe builder and kept him at work 
during the exhibition. It would be an easy 
matter to arrange this and inexpensive. 
ARK canoes—the big five and six 
fathom Hudson Bay freighters ex¬ 
cepted—are mostly shallower than the 
canvas variety. This means that they 
should be flatter and broader, but the 
rule does not hold. The round bot¬ 
tomed ones roll too easily, and are not 
to be handled carelessly. In buying, try 
to get a wide flat canoe, the sides of which 
roll in somewhat towards the top. I would 
not recommend anything less than twelve 
feet, and fifteen feet is better, even for 
light use. The smallest canoe I recall in 
actual use was eight feet in length. It 
was used as a relay by a woods courier, who 
had a long route, with many small lakes 
to traverse, and resembled an enlarged 
spoon. The ten foot canoe is not uncom¬ 
mon, but it is also a one man proposition. 
After all, old Nessmuk, with his “Sairy 
Gamp” and successors, had them beaten 
for lightness. 
The canvas canoe fifteen feet long weighs 
generally about sixty to sixty-five pounds. 
In response to an insistent demand from 
the wilderness clan, manufacturers are now 
turning out a fifty-pound fifteen foot canoe, 
and a well known maker writes that he 
will guarantee to make me a twelve foot 
canvas canoe, eleven or twelve inches in 
depth, thirty-three inches wide, to weigh 
not over forty pounds. This canoe is not 
a freak, but a substantial craft, to stand 
ordinary rough woods use. The lightest 
canvas canoe of which I have knowledge 
was eleven feet in length, eleven inches 
deep/ thirty-two inches wide and weighed 
thirty-six pounds. 
HY the struggle to reduce weight? 
Anybody who has done wilderness 
portaging will answer that ques¬ 
tion off hand. The longer canoe is best 
in swift water—the cockle shell has no 
place here—but in beating through the un¬ 
broken bush a long canoe is a nuisance to 
the man carrying one. After you have 
bumped into a few windfalls or have been 
caught between two saplings and have had 
to back out, you will understand why. 
If you do buy a birch bark canoe, treat 
it tenderly. Do not try to walk in it as 
you would in the stiffer canvas craft. Do 
not let it bump too hard against stones, 
or scrape over boulders or obstructions on 
the bottom. 'What to do with it in the 
winter is a problem. In the extreme cold 
climate of the north they will sometimes 
freeze and crack from end to end. The 
Indian and the trapper avoid this proba¬ 
bility by leaving canoes out in the snow 
all winter. They come through this treat¬ 
ment apparently without damage. 
When you get a really fine bark canoe 
you have something that expresses all the 
poetry and romance of the North American 
wilderness. Soon it will be the only tangi¬ 
ble, primeval relic left, for the Indians 
themselves are not building as many as 
before. Not only is good bark getting 
scarcer, but Indians have fallen for the 
white man’s substitute, and you will see 
canvas canoes used by them clear to Hud¬ 
son Bay and beyond. In fact the Great 
Company itself and the railroad construc¬ 
tion gangs and lumber companies as well 
no longer depend on the bark. The can¬ 
vas canoe, which is only the red man’s orig¬ 
inal invention, made stronger and more 
durable, is heir to future woods’ travel. 
I might add a word in conclusion as to 
different tribal styles as expressed in bark 
canoes, but these are non-essentials now. 
A learned writer called attention about a 
year ago in Forest and Stream to the pecu¬ 
liar high turn and roll of the Mic Mac 
canoe and promised something more on 
the subject, so I will leave it to him. Every 
school boy is familiar with the lines in 
which Longfellow describes the building of 
a canoe by Hiawatha, but is it generally 
known that Hiawatha was not a mythical 
personage, and that New York State can 
claim him for her own? About the time 
Europe was entering the period of New 
Learning there seems also to have been a 
Renaissance among the Indians of Amer¬ 
ica. A young Indian whose advanced ideas 
were not taken kindly by the stand patters 
of his own tribe, the Onondagas, farther 
west, came to the Mohawks, and was 
adopted into membership. He it was who 
formed the coalition which resulted in the 
League of Five Nations—after¬ 
ward the Six Nations—the dread¬ 
ed Iroquois. He was the original 
Geo. W. Progressive of his time, 
and his real name was Hayonh- 
wah’ta. We know him as Hiawa¬ 
tha, and central New York rather 
than the shores of Lake Superior 
was his home. Curiously enough 
there is at Cooperstown a monu- 
(Continued on page 40.) 
