CHAPTER XXII The Birch Bark Canoe-The Elm Bark Canoe The Mississippi Dugout-The Canadian Sault Has Its Beginning-The Troubles of the X. Y. Company-The Fur Companies Remove from Grand Portage to Fort William-Description of Fort William-Territory of Michigan Established-The Mackinaw Company Founded-John Jacob Astor-The American Fur Company Incorporated-Astor Absorbs the Mackinaw Company-Forms the Southwest Company. WHAT a wonderful craft was the birch bark canoe! Can any one conceive of a vessel better adapted to the needs of the Indian, the missionary, the explorer, the early fur trader, and the coureur de bois than this simple conveyance? To meet the requirements of the times and the varied natural water courses it must traverse, such a craft must be staunch, possess great carrying capacity for its size and, at the same time, be so light that the men who propelled it when it was in the water were well able to carry it on their shoulders over the longest and most difficult portages; it must be so simple in construction that the Indian with his primitive tools, at an early time of stone, copper or bone, or the woodsman provided only with hatchet and knife, could readily repair, or if necessity required, build it from the beginning; and its constituent parts must be such that every item entering into its construction could be found in the forests bordering the water course it was destined to traverse. Meeting every such requirement fully and efficiently as could no other conceivable craft, no wonder that the birch bark canoe has been enthusiastically written about and praised by nearly every writer, during the last two hundred and fifty years, who has seen its wonderful performances The Jesuit Father in the Relation of 1654, speaking of the journey of Radisson and Grossilier wrote: "They began a journey of over five hundred leagues under the guidance of those argonauts (the Indians) conveyed, not in great galloons or large oared barges, but in little gondolas of bark.” William Cullen Bryant, in Letters of a Traveler, written in 1846, said: The birch bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.-When I looked at its delicate ribs, mere shavings of white cedar, yet firm enough for the purpose the thin broad laths of the same wood with which these are inclosed and the broad sheets of birch bark, impervious to water, which sheathed the outside, all firmly sewed together by the tough slender roots of the fir tree; and when I considered its extreme lightness and the grade of its form, I could not but wonder at the ingenuity of those who had invented so beautiful a combination of ship-building and basket-work. There are now few birch bark canoes in use and a small number kept as relics; so scarce have they become, that, after making inquiries for three at the Sault, where in times past there were many made, and of men of mixed blood whose ancestors on one side at least, made the tools with which they built canoes, I was unable to find one man who had seen the building of a birch bark. Something like a quarter of a century ago I had the pleasure of seeing a canoe in the course of construction on the north shore of Lake Superior two hundred miles or so from the Sault. Sometime previous I had read Thoreau's description, written perhaps fifty years before, of an Old Town Indian constructing a birch bark in the Maine woods. Thoreau told of the camp of the Indian and his family; the Indian working at the canoe, doing most of the labor with a crooked knife-wahcomon-such as the fur traders sold the Indians a hundred years before; told of the Indian shaving and forming the ribs out of the straight grained, light but strong white cedar and splitting the same wood in sheets as thin as wafers to lay outside the ribs to form a backing for the bark. Ready at hand were long strips of cedar to be sewed on either side of the ends of the ribs to form gunwales, and under the tree were rolls of bark from the white or canoe birch ready to form the outer covering: a little distance away were two or three Indian children, the youngest perhaps five or six years old, busily engaged in digging and pulling from the ground the long, tough roots of the spruce; holding one end in the teeth, the root was evenly split from end to end. On Thoreau's attempt to split a root likewise, it immediately ran out, one side breaking off when but a few inches long. A short distance away an ancient woman, evidently the grandmother, was gathering pitch from pine trees to gum the seams of the bark, and near the wigwam, over an open fire, the mother of the children was cooking rabbit stew with dumplings. On the North Shore of Lake Superior I saw the process of making a birch bark canoe and the actors of the interesting scene duplicated Thoreau's description in a most astonishing manner. There was the Indian shaping the parts with a crooked knife, which answered the purpose of draw-shave, plane, saw and every tool necessary for the task. The only other tools seen were a large awl and a small axe. There were the thin shaved ribs of cedar in place, the center of the ribs held down by a timber weighted with stones, the outer ends bent inside and held |