TRAVEL AND TRANSPORTATION. 219

Mackenzie says that these canoes are small, pointed at both ends, flat
bottomed and covered in the fore-part!. He adds that they are so light that
the man whom one of them bears on the water can in his turn carry it over
land without any difficulty. He evidently refers to the smaller kind, the single
man’s canoe. Our illustration at the beginning of this chapter is evidence that
the larger, or family, canoes are somewhat more unwieldy. Their frame is made
of slats of birch wood steamed, bent and dried. It consists of transversal ribs
extending inwardly from side to side, of longitudinal bands crossing the ribs
at right angles, and of laths that run along the edges, both in and out, forming
the gunwales. To these are added five or six cross-bars which contribute to
the solidity of the crafts. The bark pieces are used inside out, and are sewed
together by means of the long, slender roots of the spruce (wattap), after
which the seams are calked with spruce gum.

The large canoes are about sixteen feet long and will carry three men
with their baggage, say six or eight hundred pounds. Each is provided with
a stock of spruce gum, some extra pieces of bark and a bundle of spruce
roots to repair damages on the way. The reader has not forgotten Franklin’s
“musquitoes’”. They are much in evidence all through the north, but especially
along the rivers. As their company is anything but pleasant, some tribes, like
the Yukon Dénés, will occasionally be found travelling with bowls of embers
in their canoes to keep them off. In ancient times, when the starting of a new
fire was quite an operation, this precaution was also intended to obviate the
tediousness attendent upon each repetition of the process. Some sort of twisted
strings of the inner bark of a few trees, which smouldered without getting
extinguished, was also made to serve a like purpose.

The paddles are perhaps six feet long, over one-third of which consists
of a lance-shaped blade about seven inches in its greatest width. The Dénés’
way of paddling is peculiar, inasmuch as, instead of using the edge of the
canoe as a partial fulcrum for the lever they have in their hands, they avoid
touching it at all, and do their paddling entirely on the outside.

The canoes of the Tscetsaut were originally made with the bark of the
yellow cedar (Thuya excelsa), and measured some eighteen feet in length.
Dr. Fr. Boas says that those Indians used sails of marmot skins*, a rather
remarkable statement in view of the late Dr. Brinton’s declaration that the
inventive faculties of the aboriginal Americans “had not reached to either
oars or Sails” to propel their embarcations®. Brinton seems right as regards
the Dénés, for I know of none of their tribes that possesses a truly native

1 Op. cit., vol. 1, p. 239. According to Petitot (Autour du Grand Lac des Esclaves, p. 268),
among the Dog-Ribs and the Hares these are covered in the rear part as well, the entire craft
being a copy of the Eskimo kayak (with different material), and accommodating but one person.

2 Tenth Ann. Report B. A. A.S., p. 44.

3 “The American Race”, p. 52.