Читать книгу Highways and Highway Transportation - George R. Chatburn - Страница 29

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—Travel from place to place was at first insignificant and what little there was was carried on by walking, horseback riding, or by boat. Settlement, which had begun on the ocean or at the head of ocean navigation on inlets or rivers, was eventually pushed farther inland. The rivers and other waterways being at hand were utilized; the birch-bark canoe, the dugout, and the plank boat, furnished the principal vehicles of transportation. The Indians were very expert in the manufacture and operation of light birch-bark canoes. Longfellow in “Hiawatha” gives a poetical description of this:

With his knife the tree he girdled;

Just beneath its lowest branches,

Just above the roots he cut it,

Till the sap came oozing outward;

Down the trunk from top to bottom,

Sheer he cleft the bark asunder,

With a wooden wedge he raised it

Stripped it from the trunk unbroken.

Then he explains how the framework is made of cedar:

Like two bows he framed and shaped them,

Like two bended bows together.

After which they were tied together and the bark fastened to the frame by fibrous roots of the larch, then Hiawatha

Took the resin of the fir tree

Smeared therewith each seam and fissure,

Made each crevice safe from water.

The aborigine paddled this frail bark so skillfully that the noise of rowing was scarcely audible or the waves visible. And when he came to the headwaters of the stream he was able to raise the light craft above his head and follow the dim trail across the lower lying hills to the stream beyond the water-shed leading in the opposite direction.

The white man, profiting by the Red Man’s experience learned to build these boats, as well as heavier ones of logs and timber for transporting goods, and utilized the same trails to push his civilization farther into the unknown.