The surest and easiest method of making a friction fire is by use of the bow-drill. Two sticks, two tools, and some tinder are needed.
The two sticks are the drill and the fire-board, or fire-block. The books generally tell us that these must be of different kinds of wood. This is a mistake. I have uniformly gotten the best results with two pieces of the same kind--all the better, indeed, if they are parts of the same stick.
What Kind of Wood
This is a very important question, as woods that are too hard, too soft, too wet, too oily, too gummy, or too resinous will not produce fire. The wood should be soft enough to wear away, else it produces no punk, and hard enough to wear slowly, or the heat is not enough to light the punk, and, of course, it should be highly inflammable. Those that I have had the best luck with are balsam fir, cottonwood roots, tamarack, European larch, red cedar, white cedar, Oregon cedar, basswood, cypress, and sometimes second-growth white pine. It should always be a dry, sound stick, brash, but not in the least punky.
In each part of the country there seems to be a kind of wood well suited for fire-making. The Eastern Indians used cedar; the Northern Indians, cedar or balsam fir; the plains Indians used cottonwood or sage-brush roots.
Perhaps the most reliable of all is dry and seasoned balsam fir; either the species in the North woods or in the Rockies will do. It gives a fine big spark or coal in about seven seconds.
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When in the grinding the dust that runs out of the notch is coarse and brown, it means that the wood is too soft; when it is very fine and scanty it means that the wood is too hard.
The rubbing-sticks for fire-making