Today’s lesson: Canoes and the Canadian frontier.
We spent the good part of the day doing boat chores. Toward mid afternoon we decided to take a walk and check out the Canoe Museum.
The museum began at the beginning, as we know it anyway. The Canadians refer to their native population as First Nation or aboriginals. No offense to anyone but I will refer to them as natives. Only because I am a poor typist and native is easier for me to type.
Being from Minnesota I figured all canoes looked like the Ojibwa canoe. Shows what I know. This map shows the bow shape of various canoes depending upon where they lived in Canada.
The Ojibwa canoe was made of a frame of white cedar, maple, beech and ash with a cover of white birch bark stitched together with spruce roots and coated with a mixture of spruce gum mixed with bear grease and charcoal.
This one is styled like a Kayak and has a flat bottom. Gwich’in tribe.
It didn’t take long for the first Europeans who came to Canada in 1603 to realize how unfit their vessels were for travel on the “turbulent rivers and heart stopping rapids” of the country. But the canoe was a perfect design.
Luckily for them, the natives shared not only their
knowledge of canoe building but also of the canoe routes. This is a hand drawn map from 1810 drawn by a native Canadian for the Hudson’s Bay Company.
What started it all. Beaver skin hats.
The natives did the trapping. But it was the Voyageurs who did the traveling and the trading. Bringing back the furs to Hudson Bay. Which ultimately went to England where they used the soft undercoat of the beaver to make a felted man’s hat.
The Voyageurs had no time to stop to hunt or fish so half their cargo was their food. I’m sure you’re wondering what they ate? Well, it was pemmican. And here’s the recipe:
Buffalo meat cut into flakes or thin strips
Dry and then pounded to a pulp
Put pulp on a large piece of hide
Add boiling buffalo fat
Add Saskatoon berries (optional)
Then sew up bag and seal with tallow
Like me, you probably are wondering how it tasted. Well it was described as this, “take the scrapings from the driest outside corner of a very stale piece of cold roast beef. Add to it lumps of rancid fat, then garnish with long human hairs and short hairs of dogs and you have a fair imitation of common pemmican”. Maybe the Saskatoon berries would help? Just a thought.
The Voyageurs traded many things but one of the most famous are the Hudson Bay blankets. The value of the blanket was determined by it’s size and weight.The stitching on them designated the size and
weight of the blanket without having to unfold it. The stitches did not designate how many beaver skins it was worth. Beaver skins varied in quality. The higher the quality, the more it was worth in trade for blankets.Carvings from caribou bone.
The ones with the whiskers are really something.
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