Читать книгу The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson - Emerson Hough - Страница 6

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Here is that fairy ship of the wilderness, the birch-bark canoe, the first craft of America, antedating even the arrival of the white man. It is the ship of risk and of adventure, belonging by right to him who goes far and travels light, who is careless of his home coming. It is a boat that now carries the voyager, and now is carried by him. It is a great-hearted craft. You shall take it upon your shoulders, and carry it a mile across the land trail, without needing to set it down; but when you place it on the water it in turn will carry you and your fellow, and yet another, and your household goods of the wilderness up to five times your weight.

Freakish as a woman, as easily unsettled, yet if you be master it shall take you over combing waves, and down yeasty rapids and against steady current, until finally you shall find yourself utterly apart from the familiar haunts of man, about you only the wilderness, the unadventured. This is the ship of the wilderness, the fairy ship, the ship of heroes. To-day it is passing away. With it goes great store of romance and adventure.

The red man taught the white man how to build and how to use this boat. He taught how to cut the long strips of toughest bark from the birch-tree, prying it off with sharpened pole or driven wooden wedge. He showed how to build the frame of the boat on the ground, or in a long hole dug in the ground, where stakes hold fast the curves of the gunwales, between which are later forced the steamed splints that serve as ribs and as protection for the fragile skin, soaked soft and pliable, which is presently laid on the frame of gunwale and rib and bottom splint. This covering of bark is sewn together with the thread of the forest, fiber of swamp conifers—“wautp,” the Indians of the North call this thread.

Then over the seams is run the melted pitch and resin taken from the woods. The edges of the bark skin are made fast at the gunwales, the sharply bent bows are guarded carefully from cracks where the straining comes, and the narrow thwarts, wide as your three fingers, are lashed in, serving as brace and as all the seat you shall find when weary from kneeling. The fresh bark is clean and sweet upon the new-made ship, the smell of the resin is clean. Each line of the boat is full of spirit and grace and beauty.

The builder turns it over, and where he finds a bubble in the pitching of a seam he bends down and puts his lips to it, sucking in his breath, to find if air comes through. So he tests it, well and thoroughly, mending and patching slowly and carefully, until at last it pleases him throughout. And then he places his new-made ship on the water, where it sits high and light, spinning and turning at its tether, never still for an instant, but shifting like a wild duck under the willows, responsive to the least breath of the passing airs. It is eager to go on. It will go far, in its life of a year or two. If it gets a wound from the rocks, or from the clumsiness of the tyro that drives it upon the beach instead of anchoring it free, then it is easily mended by a strip of bark and some forest pitch. When at last it loses its youth, and cracks or soaks in water so freely that it takes too long to dry it at the noonday pipe-smoking, then it is not so difficult to build another in the forest.

The canoe is as the ax and the rifle, an agent economical, capable of great results in return for small expenditure of energy. It is American. There was much to do, far to go. It was thus because America existed as it did.

No craft has been found easier of propulsion to one knowing the art of the paddle. The voyager makes his paddle about as long as his rifle, up to his chin in length. He paddles with the blade always on one side of the canoe. As the blade is withdrawn from the backward stroke, it is turned slightly in the water, so that the course of the bow is still held straight. If he would approach a landing sidewise with his boat, he makes his paddle describe short half curves, back and forth, and the little boat follows the paddle obediently. The advance of the canoe is light, silent, spirit-like. It is full of mystery, this boat. Yet it is kind to those who know it, as is the wilderness and as are all its creatures.

This is the boat of the northern traveler, the voyager of the upper ways. In the South, where the birch does not grow in proper dimensions, the bark of the elm has on occasion served to make a small craft. In different parts of the North, too, the birch canoe takes different shapes. In the northeast the Abenakis made it long and with little rake, with low bow and stern and with bottom swelling outward safely under the tumble-home,—this stable model serving for the strong streams of the forested regions of the North. Far to the west, where roll the great inland lakes, the Ojibways made their boats higher at bow and stern, wider of beam, shorter, rounder of bottom, all the better fitted for short and choppy waves.

Then, under the white fur traders’ tutelage, there were made great ships of birch-bark, the canot du Nord of the Hudson Bay trade, such as came down with rich burdens of furs when the brigades started down-stream to the markets; or yet the greater canot du maitre once used on the Great Lakes, a craft that needed a dozen to a dozen and a half paddles for its propulsion. Again, at the heads of the far off Northwestern streams there were canoes so small as to carry but a single person, propelled by a pair of sticks, one in each hand of the occupant, the points of these hand-sticks pushing against the bottom of the stream. But ever this ship of the wilderness was so contrived that its crew could drive it by water or carry it by land.

Thus were the portages mastered, thus did the man with small gear to hinder him get out from home, westward into the wilderness. Down stream or up stream, this boat went far. Paddle or sail or shodden pole served for the wanderer before the trails were made, and before the boats of the white settlers followed where the savage red men and scarcely less savage white adventurers had found the way.

There were other boats for the early traveler, and these were employed by those that had crossed the Alleghanies on foot and would fare farther westward. The dugout, made of the sycamore or sassafras log, ten to twenty feet in length, narrow, unstable, thick-skinned and a bit clumsy, was good enough for one pushing on down-stream, or prowling about in sluggish, silent bayous. This was the boat of the South in the early days. Soon the great flat-boat succeeded it for those that traveled with family goods or in large parties. The wooden boats came later, the flat-boat after the dugout, the keel-boat but following the far trail of the birch-bark to the upper ways, or perchance passing, slipping down-stream, the frail hide coracle of the hunter that had ventured unaccompanied far into unknown lands.

Above all things in these early days must compactness and lightness be studied. This American traveler was poor in the goods of this world; his possessions made small bulk. This ax made him bivouac or castle, or helped him make raft or canoe. This rifle gave him food and clothing. He walked westward to the westward flowing streams, and there this light craft, dancing, beckoning, alluring, invited him yet on and on, proffering him carriage for his scanty store, offering obedience to him who was the master of the wilderness, of its alluring secrets and its immeasurable resources.