There are many small freak crafts invented each year, but none of them has any probabilities of being popularly used as substitutes for the old models.

Folding canoes, as a rule, are cranky, but the writer has found them most convenient when it was necessary to transport them long distances overland. They are not, however, the safest of crafts; necessarily they lack the buoyant wooden frame and lining of the ordinary canvas canoe, which enables it to float even when filled with water.

The author owes his life to the floating properties of his canvas canoe. On one occasion when it upset in a driving easterly storm the wind was off shore, and any attempt upon the canoeist's part to swim toward shore would have caused him to have been suffocated by the tops of the waves which the wind cut off, driving the water with stinging force into his face so constantly that, in order to breathe at all, he had to face the other way. He was at length rescued by a steamer, losing nothing but the sails and his shoes. Nevertheless, the same storm which capsized his little craft upset several larger boats and tore the sails from others.

The advantages of a good canoe are many for the young navigators: they can launch their own craft, pick it up when occasion demands and carry it overland. It is safe in experienced hands in any weather which is fit for out-door amusement. When you are "paddling your own canoe" you are facing to the front and can see what is ahead of you, which is much safer and more pleasant than travelling backward, like a crawfish.

The advance-guard of modern civilization is the lumberman, and following close on his heels comes the all-devouring saw-mill. This fierce creature has an abnormal appetite for logs, and it keeps an army of men, boys, and horses busy in supplying it with food. While it supplies us with lumber for the carpenter, builder, and cabinet-maker, it at the same time, in the most shameful way, fills the trout streams and rivers with great masses of sawdust, which kills and drives away the fish. But near the saw-mill there is always to be found material for a

Slab Canoe

These slabs are burned or thrown away by the mill-owners, and hence cost nothing; and as the saw-mill is in advance of population, you are most likely to run across one on a hunting or fishing trip.

Near one end, and on the flat side of the slab (Fig. 40), bore four holes, into which drive the four legs of a stool made of a section of a smaller slab (Fig. 41), and your boat is ready to launch. From a piece of board make a double or single paddle (Fig. 42), and you are equipped for a voyage. An old gentleman, who in his boyhood days on the frontier frequently used this simple style of canoe, says that the speed it makes will compare favorably with that of many a more pretentious vessel. See Fig. 43 for furnished boat.

The Dugout

Although not quite as delicate in model or construction as the graceful birch-bark canoe, the "dugout" of the Indians is a most wonderful piece of work, when we consider that it is carved from the solid trunk of a giant tree with the crudest of tools, and is the product of savage labor.

Few people now living have enjoyed the opportunity of seeing one built by the Indians, and, as the author is not numbered among that select few, he considers it a privilege to be able to quote the following interesting account given by Mr. J. H. Mallett, of Helena.

How to Build a Siwash Canoe

"While visiting one of the small towns along Puget Sound, I was greatly interested in the way the Indians built their canoes. It is really wonderful how these aborigines can, with the crudest means and with a few days' work, convert an unwieldy log into a trim and pretty canoe.

"One Monday morning I saw a buck building a fire at the base of a large cedar-tree, and he told me that this was the first step in the construction of a canoe that he intended to use upon the following Saturday. He kept the fire burning merrily all that day and far into the night, when a wind came up and completed the downfall of the monarch of the forest. The next day the man arose betimes, and, borrowing a cross-cut saw from a logger, cut the trunk of the tree in twain at a point some fifteen feet from where it had broken off, and then with a dull hatchet he hacked away until the log had assumed the shape of the desired canoe. In this work he was helped by his squaw. The old fellow then built a fire on the upper part of the log, guiding the course of the fire with daubs of clay, and in due course of time the interior of the canoe had been burned out. Half a day's work with the hatchet rendered the inside smooth and shapely.

"The canoe was now, I thought, complete, though it appeared to be dangerously narrow of beam. This the Indian soon remedied. He filled the shell two-thirds full of water, and into the fluid he dropped half a dozen stones that had been heating in the fire for nearly a day. The water at once attained a boiling point, and so softened the wood that the buck and squaw were enabled to draw out the sides and thus supply the necessary breadth of beam. Thwarts and slats were then placed in the canoe and the water and stones thrown out. When the steamed wood began to cool and contract, the thwarts held it back, and the sides held the thwarts, and there the canoe was complete, without a nail, joint, or crevice, for it was made of one piece of wood. The Siwash did not complete it as soon as he had promised, but it only took him eight days."

In the North-eastern part of our country, before the advent of the canvas canoe, beautiful and light birch-bark craft were used by the Indians, the voyagers, trappers, and white woodsmen. But in the South and in the North-west, the dugout takes the place of the birch-bark. Among the North-western Indians the dugouts are made from the trunks of immense cedar-trees and built with high, ornamental bows, which are brilliantly decorated with paint. On the eastern shore of Maryland and Virginia the dugout is made into a sail-boat called the buck-eye, or bug-eye. But all through the Southern States, from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico and in Mexico, the dugout is made of a hollowed log after the manner of an ordinary horse trough, and often it is as crude as the latter, but it can be made almost as beautiful and graceful as a birch-bark canoe.

How to Make a White Man's Dugout Canoe

To make one of these dugout canoes one must be big and strong enough to wield an axe, but if the readers are too young for this work, they are none too young to know how to make one, and their big brothers and father can do the work. Since the dugout occupies an important position in the history of our country, every boy scout should know how it is made.

Fig. 44 shows one of these canoes afloat; Fig. 45 shows a tall, straight tree suitable for our purpose, and it also shows how the tree is cut and the arrangement of the kerfs, or two notches, so that it will fall in the direction of the arrow in the diagram. You will notice along the ground are shown the ends of a number of small logs. These are the skids, or rollers, upon which the log will rest when the tree is cut and felled. The tree will fall in the direction in which the arrow is pointed if there is no wind. If you have never cut down a tree, be careful to take some lessons of a good woodsman before you attempt it.

When the log is trimmed off at both ends like Fig. 46, flatten the upper side with the axe. This is for the bottom of the canoe; the flat part should be about a foot and a half wide to extend from end to end of the log. Now, with some poles for pryers, turn your log over so that it will rest with the flat bottom on the skids, as in Fig. 46.

Next take a chalk-line and fasten it at the two ends of the log, as shown by the dotted line in Figs. 46, 47, 48, 49.

Snap the line so that it will make a straight mark as shown by the dotted line; then trim off the two ends for the bow and stern, as shown in Fig. 47. Next cut notches down to the dotted line, as illustrated in Fig. 48; then cut away from the bow down to the first notch, making a curved line, as shown in Fig. 49 (which is cut to second notch). Do the same with the stern, making duplicates of the bow and stern. The spaces between the notches amidships may now be split off by striking your axe along the chalk-line and then carefully driving in wooden wedges. When this is all done you will have Fig. 50. You can now turn the log over and trim off the edges of the bow and stern so that they will slope, as shown in Fig. 44, in a rounded curve; after which roll the canoe back again upon its bottom and with an adze and axe hollow out the inside, leaving some solid wood at both bow and stern—not that you need the wood for strength, but to save labor. When you have decided upon the thickness of the sides of your canoe, take some small, pointed instrument, like an awl, for instance, and make holes with it to the required depth at intervals along the sides and bottom of the canoe. Then take some small sticks (as long as the canoe sides are to be thick), make them to fit the holes, blacken their ends, and drive them into the holes.

As soon as you see one from the inside, you will know that you have made the shell thin enough. Use a jack-plane to smooth it off inside and out; then build a big fire and heat some stones. Next fill the canoe with water and keep dumping the hot stones in the water until the latter is almost or quite to boiling point. The hot water will soften the wood so that the sides will become flexible, and you can then fit in some braces at the bow, stern, and centre of the canoe. Make the centre brace or seat some inches wider than the log, so that when it is forced in place it will spread the canoe in the middle.