The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America

by Tappan Adney; Howard Irving Chapelle

Figure 46

General Details of Birch-Bark Canoe Construction, in a drawing by Adney. (From Harper's Young People, supplement, July 29, 1890.)

The eastern style of construction described here produced what might be called a wide-bottom canoe with some tumble-home above the turn of the bilge, but a different method of construction was used to produce canoes having a narrow bottom and flaring sides. These canoes were not set up on the building bed, in the first steps of shaping the hull, with the gunwale frame on the cover bark. Instead, a special building frame, mentioned earlier, was used. Each tribe using the building frame had its own style, but the variations were confined to minor matters or to proportion of width to length.

In general, the building frame is made of two squared battens, about 1¼ inch square for an 18-foot canoe. These, sometimes tapered slightly toward each end, are fitted with crosspieces with halved notches in each end to fit over the top of the battens. There may be as many as nine or as few as three of these crosspieces, with seven apparently a common number. Where ends of the long battens join they are beveled slightly on the inside face and notches are cut on the outside face to take the end lashings. Each crosspiece end is lashed around the long battens, a hole being made in each end of the crosspiece for this purpose. The lashings, commonly bark or rawhide thongs, are all temporary, as the building frame has to be dismantled to remove it from the canoe. Sometimes holes are drilled in the ends of the crosspieces, or in the long battens, and in them are stepped the posts used to fix the sheer of the gunwales.

The methods of construction, using the building frame, varied somewhat among the tribes. Since the gunwale was both longer and wider across than the building frame, the posts for sheering were set with outboard flare. However, some builders made the gunwales hogged by staking them out when green, and then set them above the building frame with vertical posts. These gunwales would not be fitted with thwarts nor would the thwart tenons always be cut at this stage. The bark was lashed to the gunwales while they were in the hogged position with the ends secured; the gunwales were then spread by inserting spreaders, or stays, between them, after which the thwarts were fitted. This method required knowledge of just how much hog should be given to the gunwales, and it must be stated that not all builders guessed right enough to produce a good-looking sheer. Judging the hogging required in the gunwales was complicated by the fact that most of these canoes had laminated ends in the gunwales at bow and stern, and a quick upturn there as well. This method of construction persisted, however, because the straight sides made easy the sewing of gores and side panels. In some Alaskan birch-bark canoes the building frame was, in fact, part of the hull structure and remained in the canoe. In these, the building frame was hogged and then flattened by the ribs in construction so as to smooth the bottom bark by placing it under tension. In some canoes the posts for sheering the canoe rested under the thwarts rather than under the gunwales. In most canoes the building frame was taken apart and removed from the canoe when the gunwale structure was complete and in place, sheered.

Where large sheets of bark were available, the setting up with the building frame or gunwale was made easier than where the bark had to be pieced out for both length and width. If large pieces of bark could be obtained there was little or no sewing on the bottom; only the gores or laps, and the panels, in the side required attention after the bark had been lashed to the gunwales. In such instances, the set-up did not require perpendicular sides, as the sides could be completed after the canoe was removed from the building bed and the building frame had been removed from the hull. There were many minor variations in the set-up and in the sequence of the sewing. In view of the slight opportunities that now exist for examining the old building methods and construction sequences, it is impossible to be certain that the one used by a tribe in recent times was that employed in prehistoric times by their ancestors.

Instead of a laminated stem-piece, a large root whittled to the desired cross section was sometimes used by builders among the Malecites and other eastern tribes. This was bent into the ends while green and to it was lashed the bark, so that the stem dried in place to the desired profile curve. No inner stem-piece was used by the Micmacs, who formed the end structure by placing a split-root batten on each outside face of the bark and passing the lashing around both. When a plank-on-edge was used to form the stem-piece, as mentioned earlier, no headboard was required, as the gunwales ends could be brought to the plank structure. In canoes having the complicated stem structure seen in the large fur-trade canoes and some others, the headboard became an integral part of the stem structure, rather than an independent unit, and was placed in the canoe during building with the stem-pieces.

There was much variation in the form of gunwale structure employed in bark canoes. A strip of bark was added all along the outwale by some tribes, so that between the gunwale members and for a short distance below the sewing the bark was doubled; the bottom of this strip was, in fact, a flap not secured and thus was much like the flaps at the ends of the Malecite canoe, but without covering the top of the main gunwales. The outwale and inwale cross sections of some canoes were almost round. The use of a single gunwale member is commonly followed by continuous lashing of the bark along it. On some northwestern canoes having continuous lashing, the ends of the ribs were made in sharp points that could penetrate between the turns of root sewing, under the gunwales. The ends of the ribs in some of these were secured more firmly by tying them to long battens placed between the ribs and the bark cover just below the gunwales. The northwestern canoes built in this manner had double gunwales, an outwale and an inwale, but no bevel or notch for the rib heads. The ends of the gunwales, inner and outer, were secured in many ways. Some, instead of being pegged and lashed, were simply tied together; others were fastened by a rather elaborate lashing through the bark and around the gunwales. Caps were sometimes allowed to overlap at the ends and were pinned together with pegs or lashed. In some canoes the outwales were lashed, rather than pegged, to the inwales, and for this and for the caps rawhide appears to have once been widely used. In some canoes the head of the stem-piece was bent inboard sharply and lashed to the ends of the inwales or outwales. In many canoes the gunwales, instead of stopping short of the stem-piece, ran to it and were lashed there.