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."
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.