Jack the Young Canoeman: An Eastern Boy's Voyage in a Chinook Canoe

by George Bird Grinnell

CLOSE TO SOME OF THE HOUSES STAND TALL CARVED POLES, CALLED TOTEM POLES—[Page 98]

"I see," said Jack, "that all their canoes are carved in front; and the prows remind one a little bit of the pictures of the old Viking ships; and then, again, of the still older boats that the Romans had, only, of course, they were all rowed with oars, while the Indians use paddles."

"Yes," said Fannin, "these canoes that we have here are not like any that I know of anywhere else in the world. They're all made out of a single stick of wood and are of all sizes. There's one up at the Bella-Bella village, north of here, that's said to be the biggest boat on the coast. It's one of the old war canoes, is eighty feet long, and so deep that a man standing in it can't be seen by one standing on the ground by its side. Such a canoe as that could only be made in the country where the white cedar grows, a wood that is light, easily worked and very durable. It's one of our biggest trees and sometimes grows to a height of three hundred feet, and runs up to ten, eleven, or twelve feet thick at the butt."

"Well," said Jack, "with a tree of size to work on I can easily see how a canoe even as big as the one you speak of might be made; but what an awful long time it must take to whittle it out! I should think that the generation that began such a boat could not hope to see it finished."

"Well," said Fannin, "it's not quite as bad as that, but it is slow work; and that is not surprising when you think that they have no tools to work with except the most primitive ones. After the cedar stick has been felled, and it has been found that no harm came to it in its fall, they go to work and shape the stick as well as they can with their axes, and then hollow it out by fire. In other words, they build a fire on the top and allow it to burn just so far in any direction, and so deep. After they have used the fire as far as they can to advantage, they take a little chipping tool, made of a blade of steel attached to a wooden handle, and chip the wood off in little flakes or slivers, reducing the whole to a proper thickness, say an inch or an inch and a half for a canoe thirty feet long. They have no models, and the eye is their only guide in shaping the canoes; but the lines are always correct, and as graceful as could be made by the most expert boat-builder. When they have shaped the canoe, its gunwales are slightly sprung apart so as to give some flare to the sides, and are held in position by narrow braces of timber stretching across the canoe and sewed to it by cedar twigs. They steam these twigs in the hot ashes so that they become pliable, and can be easily used for this sewing."

"This cedar must be as useful to these Indians as buffalo hides are to the plains' Indians," said Jack. "You pointed out to me some mats made of cedar bark, some hats and some rope, all of the same material. Now you tell me that the canoes are made of cedar and sewed together with cedar twigs."

"Yes," replied Fannin, "the cedar does a great deal for these people. I told you, too, that they built their houses of it."

"There are two different types of canoes on this coast," he continued, "one belonging to the South and having a square stern and a bottom that is almost flat, and the Northern canoe, which has a round bottom and an overhanging stern. The big canoe that I told you about at Bella-Bella is a Northern canoe. In old times these big canoes were used by the Northern Indians on their war journeys against their enemies to the South. They would come down, perhaps seventy or eighty men in a canoe, attack a village, plunder it, capture a lot of the people for slaves, and then take to their canoes again, paddling back to their homes. These Northern Indians were great hands to go off on war parties. They were a good deal more warlike than these people down here."

"This cedar that you talk about," asked Hugh. "Is there much of it to be had? I haven't seen anything yet that looked like the cedar that we see back East."

"No," said Fannin, "what you're thinking of is the red cedar, in some of its forms, I guess—the juniper. This is the white cedar, and looks as much as anything like a small tree that folks use for hedges back East, and call arbor vitæ; only I never saw any of those arbor vitæs grow anything near as big as the smallest of these cedars here. Like the Eastern cedar, however, this white cedar is very durable. I remember seeing in the woods once a fallen log, on which was growing a Douglas fir two and a half feet in diameter. The seed of the fir had fallen on the log and sprouted, and, as the fir grew, it sent down its roots to the ground on either side of the cedar log, so that at last it straddled it. The fir was about two and a half feet in diameter, and so it had been growing there a great many years, but the fallen cedar log was to all appearance as sound as if it had not been lying there a year. The cedar log was covered with moss and most of its limbs had rotted off, but when I scraped away the moss and sounded the stick and cut into it, I could not see that it was at all decayed."