CANOES
The Advantages of a Canoe--How to Make the Slab Canoe
and the Dugout--How to Make a Siwash and a White Man's
Dugout
THERE are many small freak crafts invented each year, but none of them
has any probabilities of being popularly used as substitutes for the
old models.
Folding canoes, as a rule, are cranky, but the writer has found them
most convenient when it was necessary to transport them long distances
overland. They are not, however, the safest of crafts; necessarily they
lack the buoyant wooden frame and lining of the ordinary canvas canoe,
which enables it to float even when filled with water.
The author owes his life to the floating properties of his canvas
canoe. On one occasion when it upset in a driving easterly storm the
wind was off shore, and any attempt upon the canoeist's part to swim
toward shore would have caused him to have been suffocated by the tops
of the waves which the wind cut off, driving the water with stinging
force into his face so constantly that, in order to breathe at all,
he had to face the other way. He was at length rescued by a steamer,
losing nothing but the sails and his shoes. Nevertheless, the same
storm which capsized his little craft upset several larger boats and
tore the sails from others.
The advantages of a good canoe are many for the young navigators: they
can launch their own craft, pick it up when occasion demands and carry
it overland. It is safe in experienced hands in any weather which is
fit for out-door amusement. When you are "paddling your own canoe" you
are facing to the front and can see what is ahead of you, which is much
safer and more pleasant than travelling backward, like a crawfish.
[Illustration: Fig. 40.]
The advance-guard of modern civilization is the lumberman, and
following close on his heels comes the all-devouring saw-mill. This
fierce creature has an abnormal appetite for logs, and it keeps an
army of men, boys, and horses busy in supplying it with food. While it
supplies us with lumber for the carpenter, builder, and cabinet-maker,
it at the same time, in the most shameful way, fills the trout streams
and rivers with great masses of sawdust, which kills and drives away
the fish. But near the saw-mill there is always to be found material
for a
Slab Canoe
which consists simply of one of those long slabs, the first cut from
some giant log (Fig. 43).
These slabs are burned or thrown away by the mill-owners, and hence
cost nothing; and as the saw-mill is in advance of population, you are
most likely to run across one on a hunting or fishing trip.
Near one end, and on the flat side of the slab (Fig. 40), bore four
holes, into which drive the four legs of a stool made of a section of a
smaller slab (Fig. 41), and your boat is ready to launch. From a piece
of board make a double or single paddle (Fig. 42), and you are equipped
for a voyage. An old gentleman, who in his boyhood days on the frontier
frequently used this simple style of canoe, says that the speed it
makes will compare favorably with that of many a more pretentious
vessel. See Fig. 43 for furnished boat.
The Dugout
Although not quite as delicate in model or construction as the graceful
birch-bark canoe, the "dugout" of the Indians is a most wonderful piece
of work, when we consider that it is carved from the solid trunk of
a giant tree with the crudest of tools, and is the product of savage
labor.
[Illustration: Fig. 41.]
Few people now living have enjoyed the opportunity of seeing one built
by the Indians, and, as the author is not numbered among that select
few, he considers it a privilege to be able to quote the following
interesting account given by Mr. J. H. Mallett, of Helena.
How to Build a Siwash Canoe
"While visiting one of the small towns along Puget Sound, I was greatly
interested in the way the Indians built their canoes. It is really
wonderful how these aborigines can, with the crudest means and with a
few days' work, convert an unwieldy log into a trim and pretty canoe.
[Illustration: Fig. 42.]
[Illustration: Fig. 43.--Slab canoe.]
"One Monday morning I saw a buck building a fire at the base of a
large cedar-tree, and he told me that this was the first step in the
construction of a canoe that he intended to use upon the following
Saturday. He kept the fire burning merrily all that day and far
into the night, when a wind came up and completed the downfall of
the monarch of the forest. The next day the man arose betimes, and,
borrowing a cross-cut saw from a logger, cut the trunk of the tree in
twain at a point some fifteen feet from where it had broken off, and
then with a dull hatchet he hacked away until the log had assumed the
shape of the desired canoe. In this work he was helped by his squaw.
The old fellow then built a fire on the upper part of the log, guiding
the course of the fire with daubs of clay, and in due course of time
the interior of the canoe had been burned out. Half a day's work with
the hatchet rendered the inside smooth and shapely.
"The canoe was now, I thought, complete, though it appeared to be
dangerously narrow of beam. This the Indian soon remedied. He filled
the shell two-thirds full of water, and into the fluid he dropped half
a dozen stones that had been heating in the fire for nearly a day. The
water at once attained a boiling point, and so softened the wood that
the buck and squaw were enabled to draw out the sides and thus supply
the necessary breadth of beam. Thwarts and slats were then placed in
the canoe and the water and stones thrown out. When the steamed wood
began to cool and contract, the thwarts held it back, and the sides
held the thwarts, and there the canoe was complete, without a nail,
joint, or crevice, for it was made of one piece of wood. The Siwash did
not complete it as soon as he had promised, but it only took him eight
days."
[Illustration: Fig. 44.--The dugout.]
In the North-eastern part of our country, before the advent of the
canvas canoe, beautiful and light birch-bark craft were used by the
Indians, the voyagers, trappers, and white woodsmen. But in the South
and in the North-west, the dugout takes the place of the birch-bark.
Among the North-western Indians the dugouts are made from the trunks
of immense cedar-trees and built with high, ornamental bows, which are
brilliantly decorated with paint. On the eastern shore of Maryland and
Virginia the dugout is made into a sail-boat called the buck-eye, or
bug-eye. But all through the Southern States, from the Ohio River to
the Gulf of Mexico and in Mexico, the dugout is made of a hollowed log
after the manner of an ordinary horse trough, and often it is as crude
as the latter, but it can be made almost as beautiful and graceful as a
birch-bark canoe.
How to Make a White Man's Dugout Canoe
To make one of these dugout canoes one must be big and strong enough
to wield an axe, but if the readers are too young for this work, they
are none too young to know how to make one, and their big brothers and
father can do the work. Since the dugout occupies an important position
in the history of our country, every boy scout should know how it is
made.
[Illustration: Fig. 45.]
[Illustration: Fig. 48.]
[Illustration: Fig. 49.]
[Illustration: Fig. 50.]
Fig. 44 shows one of these canoes afloat; Fig. 45 shows a tall,
straight tree suitable for our purpose, and it also shows how the
tree is cut and the arrangement of the kerfs, or two notches, so that
it will fall in the direction of the arrow in the diagram. You will
notice along the ground are shown the ends of a number of small logs.
These are the skids, or rollers, upon which the log will rest when the
tree is cut and felled. The tree will fall in the direction in which
the arrow is pointed if there is no wind. If you have never cut down
a tree, be careful to take some lessons of a good woodsman before you
attempt it.
When the log is trimmed off at both ends like Fig. 46, flatten the
upper side with the axe. This is for the bottom of the canoe; the flat
part should be about a foot and a half wide to extend from end to end
of the log. Now, with some poles for pryers, turn your log over so that
it will rest with the flat bottom on the skids, as in Fig. 46.
[Illustration: Fig. 46.]
[Illustration: Fig. 47.]
Next take a chalk-line and fasten it at the two ends of the log, as
shown by the dotted line in Figs. 46, 47, 48, 49.
Snap the line so that it will make a straight mark as shown by the
dotted line; then trim off the two ends for the bow and stern, as shown
in Fig. 47. Next cut notches down to the dotted line, as illustrated
in Fig. 48; then cut away from the bow down to the first notch, making
a curved line, as shown in Fig. 49 (which is cut to second notch). Do
the same with the stern, making duplicates of the bow and stern. The
spaces between the notches amidships may now be split off by striking
your axe along the chalk-line and then carefully driving in wooden
wedges. When this is all done you will have Fig. 50. You can now turn
the log over and trim off the edges of the bow and stern so that they
will slope, as shown in Fig. 44, in a rounded curve; after which roll
the canoe back again upon its bottom and with an adze and axe hollow
out the inside, leaving some solid wood at both bow and stern--not
that you need the wood for strength, but to save labor. When you have
decided upon the thickness of the sides of your canoe, take some small,
pointed instrument, like an awl, for instance, and make holes with it
to the required depth at intervals along the sides and bottom of the
canoe. Then take some small sticks (as long as the canoe sides are to
be thick), make them to fit the holes, blacken their ends, and drive
them into the holes.
As soon as you see one from the inside, you will know that you have
made the shell thin enough. Use a jack-plane to smooth it off inside
and out; then build a big fire and heat some stones. Next fill the
canoe with water and keep dumping the hot stones in the water until the
latter is almost or quite to boiling point. The hot water will soften
the wood so that the sides will become flexible, and you can then fit
in some braces at the bow, stern, and centre of the canoe. Make the
centre brace or seat some inches wider than the log, so that when it is
forced in place it will spread the canoe in the middle.