The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Howard Irving Chapelle
Figure 8
The most important aids to the Indian in canoe construction were his patience, knowledge of the working qualities of materials, his manual skill with the crude cutting, scraping, and boring instruments known to him, and of course fire; time was, perforce, of less importance. The canoe builder had to learn by experience and close observation how to work the material available. The wood-working tools of the stone age were relatively inefficient, but with care and skill could be used with remarkable precision and neatness.
Felling of trees was accomplished by use of a stone axe, hatchet, or adze, combined with the use of fire. The method almost universally employed by primitive people was followed. The tree was first girdled by striking it with the stone tool to loosen and raise the wood fibers and remove the soft green bark. Above this girdle the trunk was daubed all around with wet earth, or preferably clay. A large, hot fire was then built around the base of the tree and, after the loose fibers were burned away and the wood well charred, the char was removed by blows from the stone tool. The process was repeated until the trunk was cut through enough for the tree to fall. The fallen trunk could be cut into sections by employing the same methods, mud being laid on each side of the "cut" to prevent the fire from spreading along the trunk. Fire could also be used to cut down poles and small trees, to cut them into sections, and to sharpen the ends into points to form crude wedges or stakes.
Stone tools were formed by chipping flint, jasper, or other forms of quartz, such as chalcedony, into flakes with sharp edges. This was done by striking the nodule of stone a sharp blow with another stone held in the hand or mounted in a handle of hide or wood to form a stone hammer. The flakes were then shaped by pressing the edges with a horn point—say, part of a deer antler—to force a chip from the flake. The chipping tool was sometimes fitted with a hide or wood handle set at right angles to the tool, so that its head could be hit with a stone or horn hammer. The flake being worked upon, if small, was often held in the hand, which was protected from the slipping of a chipping tool by a pad of rawhide. Heat was not used in chipping, and some Indians took care to keep the flake damp while working it, occasionally burying the flake for a while in moist soil. The cutting edge of a stone tool could be ground by abrasion on a hard piece of granite or on sandstone, but the final degree of sharpness depended upon the qualities of the stone being used as a tool. Slate could be used in tools in spite of its brittleness. In general, stone tools were unsuitable for chopping or whittling wood.
Figure 9
Splitting was done by starting the split at the upper, or small end, of a balk of timber with a maul and a stone wedge or the blade of a stone axe, hatchet, or knife. The stone knives used for this work were not finished tools with wood handles, but rather, as the blade was often damaged in use, selected flakes fitted with hide pads that served as a handle. The tool was usually driven into the wood with blows from a wooden club or maul, the brittle stone tool being protected from damage by a pad of rawhide secured to the top, or head, of the tool. Once the split was started, it could be continued by driving more wedges, or pointed sticks, into the split; this process was continued until the whole balk was divided. White cedar was split into quarters by this method and then the heartwood was split away, the latter being used for canoe structural members. From short balks of the length of the longest rib or perhaps a little more, were split battens equal in thickness to two ribs and in width also equal to two, so that by splitting one batten two ways four finished ribs were produced. The broad faces of the ribs were as nearly parallel to the bark side of the wood as possible, as the ribs would bend satisfactorily toward or away from the bark side only. Black spruce, however, was split in line with the wood rays, from the heart outward toward the bark, so that one of the rib's narrow edges faced the bark side; only in this direction would the wood split readily and only when made this way would the ribs bend without great breakage.
Figure 10
Long pieces for sheathing and for the gunwale members were split from white cedar or black spruce. The splitting of such long pieces as these required not only proper selection of clear wood, but also careful manipulation of wood and tools in the operation. Splitting of this kind—say, for ribs in the finish cut—was usually done by first splitting out a batten large enough to form two members. To split it again, a stone knife was tapped into the end grain to start the split at the desired point, which, as has been noted, was always at the upper end of the stick, not at the root end. Once the split was opened, it was continued by use of a sharp-pointed stick and the stone knife; if the split showed a tendency to run off the grain as it opened, it could be controlled by bending the batten, or one of the halves, away from the direction the split was taking. The first rough split usually served to show the worker the splitting characteristics of a piece of wood. This method of finishing frame members in bark canoes accounts for the uneven surfaces that often mark some parts, a wavy grain producing a wave in the surface of the wood when it was finished. If it were desired to produce a partially split piece of wood, such as some tribal groups used for the stems, or in order to allow greater curvature at the ends of the gunwale, the splitting was stopped at the desired point and a tight lashing of rawhide or bark was placed there to form a stop.
The tapering of frames, gunwales, and thwarts and the shaping of paddles were accomplished by splitting away surplus wood along the thin edges and by abrasion and scraping on all edges. Stone scrapers were widely employed; shell could be employed in some areas. Rubbing with an abrasive such as soft sandstone was used when the wood became thoroughly dry; hardwood could often be polished by rubbing it with a large piece of wood, or by use of fine sand held in a rawhide pad. By these means the sharp edges could be rounded off and the final shaping accomplished. Some stone knives could be used to cut wood slowly, saw fashion, and this process appears to to have been used to form the thwart ends that in many canoes were tenoned into the gunwales. A stone knife used saw fashion would also cut a bent sapling easily, though slowly. To cut and trim bark a stone knife was employed; to peel bark from a tree, a hatchet, axe, or chisel could be used.
Figure 11
Drilling was done by means of a bone awl made from a splinter of the shank-bone of a deer; the blade of this awl had a roughly triangular cross-section. The splinter was held in a wooden handle or in a rawhide grip. The awl was used not only to make holes in wood, but also as the punch to make holes for "sewing" in bark. Large holes were drilled by means of the bow-drill, in which a stone drill-point was rotated back and forth by the bow-string. Some Indians rotated the drill between the palms of their hands, or by a string with handgrips at each end. The top of the drill was steadied by a block held in the worker's mouth, the top rotating in a hole in the underside of the block. With the bow-drill, however, the block was held in one hand.
Figure 12
Peeling the bark from roots and splitting them was done by use of the thumbnail, a stone knife, or a clamshell. Biting was also resorted to. The end of a root could also be split by first pounding it with a stone, using a log or another stone as an anvil, to open the fibers at one end. Splitting a root was usually done by biting to start the split. Once this was done, half was held in the mouth and the other half between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. Then the two parts were gradually pulled apart with the right hand, while the thumbnail of the left was used to guide the split. If the split showed a tendency to "run off," bending the root away from the direction of the run while continuing the splitting usually served to change the course of the split. If a root was hard to split, the stone knife came into play instead of the thumbnail. When the split reached arm's length, the ends were shifted in hand and mouth and the operation continued.
The use of hot water as an aid in bending wood was well known to some tribal groups before the white man came. Water was placed in a wooden trough, or in a bark basin, and heated to boiling by dropping hot