When an emergency canoe was ready to be assembled a smooth place was prepared; either an open bit of ground or the floor of the hunter's hut, if large enough, might be used. The outlines of the gunwales were fixed by a few stakes temporarily driven around it and then pulled up. The skins were then laid on the bed and the gunwale frame placed on them and weighted with stones. Then the skins were left to dry for awhile until they became somewhat stiff; the proper condition was indicated by the curling of the edges.
When the skin was sufficiently stiff, the gunwale frame was lifted and temporarily secured to the stakes redriven in the bed, the sides of the skin were turned up, the skin was gored, and sometimes the ends of the gunwales were sheered up slightly at the end stakes; this latter was not always done, for in some canoes the sheer was quite flat.
The skins were now trimmed to the sheer of the gunwales and the edges lashed to these members with rawhide, the gores also having been sewn. Next the stem-pieces were put into place and the stem heads lashed inside the apex formed by the ends of the gunwales. Some ribs were then bent and forced down on the stiff skin cover, the rib ends being worked into the holes prepared for them on the underside of the gunwales. These ribs usually stood approximately square to the curve, or rocker, of the bottom. Now the skin could be trimmed to the stem profiles and sewn. The stitching was usually done so as to be outside the stem-pieces, with an occasional turn going around inside them to help hold the structure in place. Some builders first put in the stems temporarily and then trimmed the skins to match; after this was done the stem-pieces were removed to allow easy sewing. When they were replaced and secured permanently, a few more stitches were added along the stems to secure the woodwork.
The next step was to sheath the canoe inside with the small poles; these were placed a few inches apart transversely and their ends worked under the most inboard of the ribs on the stem-pieces, then held in place, while the necessary adjustments were made, by a few temporary ribs. Then the ribs were forced into place, one by one, each prebent to the desired section, just as in birch-bark canoe construction. In this final shaping, the skin cover might have to be wetted again to soften the material and to allow stretching. The seams were then payed with gum or tallow, and the canoe was ready for launching.
The description is for canoes of minimum finish; builders often used split and shaped gunwales, split ribs, and splint sheathing if these could be prepared during the winter. The construction of a skin canoe was not a specialized process in which a hunter consistently built this one type; the selection was determined by natural conditions. If he were to come out of the woods too early in the spring to make the construction of a spruce-bark canoe easy, then he would resort to skin construction; the statements of old Malecite hunters leads to the conclusion that as emergency craft they used spruce-bark canoes most often.
Perhaps the most primitive of the skin boats built by the North American Indian was the so-called bull-boat of the Plains Indians. These were not canoes but coracles—bowl-shaped and suitable only for use on streams, where ferrying would be the main requirement. The boats were covered with buffalo-hides and their framework was usually made of the willow shoots found along the streams. The framework followed, to some extent at least, the basketwork principle, a circular gunwale or rim being used. The ribs were set in two groups, half at right angles to the other half in very irregular fashion. This construction formed a sort of rough grating in the bottom. The ribs were lashed together with rawhide and apparently the craft was built up on the skin as were the Malecite skin canoes. Battens in circular form were used on the sides to fair the cover. The form of the bull-boat varied somewhat among individual builders; sometimes it assumed almost a dish shape with shallow flaring sides, but more commonly the sides were nearly upright; the bottom was always flat, or nearly so. These bull-boats appear always to have been small. Judging by the examples preserved, a bull-boat 5 feet over the rim or gunwale, or made of more than one skin, was extremely rare, and most examples are nearer 4 feet and built on a single skin. Many were too small to carry a person; these were intended to be loaded with cargo to be kept dry and towed by a swimmer. When they were large enough to be paddled, the paddler worked over the "bow," as in a coracle. Probably all the Plains Indians living near streams once used the bull-boat, but existing records show only the Mandan, Omaha, Kansas, Hidatsa, and Assiniboin to have used it. The Blackfoot (Siksika) and Dakota are said to have used some kind of a skin boat in which their tepee poles were employed as a temporary frame, but nothing is recorded of their form.
The use of spruce bark as a building material in the Northwest and throughout the extreme northern range of the birch-bark canoe has been discussed in earlier chapters (pp. [155] to 158). In these areas, the emergency canoe was usually built of caribou skin. On the Alaskan coast seal skin may also have been used, but generally it was used for the permanent kayak-type canoe and not for a hastily built temporary craft. The caribou-skin canoe was also built as a permanent type, in either kayak form or somewhat on the model of the spruce-or birch-bark canoe of the area. However, although references to temporary craft covered with caribou skin exist in early accounts of the fur trade, there is no record of their form or details of their construction. Early in the present century some of the Indians of the Mackenzie River country built skin canoes much like the modern canvas-covered freight canoes. Also, some of these skin canoes were built so that they resembled York boats or the whaleboats of the white man. No observer has described the methods used to construct the emergency canoe of the Northwest; we do not know whether they resemble those used in the Indian bark canoe or in the Eskimo skin boat.