The Men Who Made Canoes (February 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 2)

The Men Who Made Canoes

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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February 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 2


The interests that impel a man to dig into the shadowed corners of the past can be obscure, and what he finds there may not always seem worth the effort. Yet light can come from unlikely places, especially when it falls on a primitive society that kept no records and never bothered to try to explain itself. Simply to know how stone-age people made the things they used can put those people in a new perspective. Suddenly in place of an untutored savage we can see a man, with emotions and intelligence like our own, painfully doing his best to cope with a hostile world. Seeing him so, we see our kinship with him, and history’s mysterious continuity begins to mean more.

Thus: In 1887 a young Ohioan named Edwin Tappan Adney went to the New Brunswick woods on vacation and discovered that what he wanted more than anything else was to learn all that could be learned about that most characteristic of all Indian artifacts, the birch-bark canoe. How did the Indians devise this craft? How did they make it, back in the days before the white man’s ideas and techniques ever reached them? How did they get and transmit their skills? What, in short, has the birch-bark canoe to tell us about the people who invented and perfected it?

Adney spent most of his remaining sixty years finding out. He moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen, learned to speak a number of Indian tongues, visited canoe-making peoples all across the north country, made sketches and notes, built canoes himself the way the Indians did, and became probably the greatest authority on this subject that ever lived. He never completed his studies, but he left a huge mass of papers, models, and sketches, and fortunately all of this material was finally deposited with the Mariners Museum at Newport News, Virginia. The museum authorities then did the best thing imaginable and called in Howard I. Chapelle, curator of transportation at the Smithsonian, and Chapelle put together a book, using Adney’s fabulous research material and his own vast knowledge of ship design. The result: The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America , which sounds as if it might be dry as dust but which instead is wholly fascinating.

To begin with, the birch-bark canoe itself was fabulous. It was light, fast, fragile but easily repaired, as odorous of the north woods as a bed made of balsam boughs; it could float in the shallowest water but it could carry a heavy load, it could be picked up and carried from one waterway to another without wearing anybody out, it served both the lone hunter and the prowling war party, it managed to be delicate and tough at the same time, and it passed into romance before Americans even began to suspect that the north country was romantic.

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