by George F. Snell, Jr.
The almost-lost art of building a true Ojibway canoe is here recorded and preserved for future boatbuilders.
Ever since my salad days, when I infested the West Side of St. Paul, Minnesota, I’ve wanted to build, or at least see built, a birchbark canoe. I wanted one then for the purpose of removing myself from under the irksome parental thumb; Joe McMahon and I intended, at the advanced age of seven, to canoe to Hudson Bay, via the Minnesota, Red and Nelson rivers, and live with the Eskimos. Our notions of construction were, unhappily, vague, being based on the ideas of Longfellow, as set forth in Hiawatha. So it came to this, that we peeled a few trees down on the bluff, and gradually forgot about the canoe. Or, at least, Joe did. I never quite have. The article that follows, then, is the fruition of a long-standing ambition. When I started working to get the material for this article, I soon found the thing assuming the proportions of the revival of a nearly lost art. it is not lost completely, since there still are Indians who remember the venerable technique of building birchbark canoes—a "wigwahs cheemahn", the Ojibways call it. There is another reason why very few birch bark canoes are built today. That is the scarcity of suitable canoe birches and white cedars, the lattet almost indispensable for the framing. It was not difficult to find an Indian who would agree to build a canoe fot me. I had only to ask of my friends among the Pine County, Minnesota Ojibways living in the settlement north of Highway 48 and near the St. Croix River. Fred St. John was the one who took the job, and I was happy about that. I knew him to be a marvelous workman with the pioneer’s tools involved; ax, saw, froe knife and drill.
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