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Birch Bark Canoe Project Bill Buxton |
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Birch Bark Canoe Project Bill Buxton |
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In the winter of 2007/8 my family history and my interest in the history of Canada morphed into a plan to do a canoe trip in northern Saskatchewan, visiting the communities of La Ronge, Stanley Mission, and Pelican Narrows. There was some family history that led to this particular destination.
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The planned route is shown on the map to the left. It starts at
La Ronge, Saskatchewan, crosses Lac La Ronge, to Wapawekka Lake, down
the Deschambault River to Deschambault Lake, across to Pelican Lake, up
to Pelican Narrows, on to Wood Lake, across Frog Portage, then up the
Churchill River, past Stanley Mission, to Otter Lake, finishing at the
village of Missinipe . |
In 1939 and 1940, my father (also William Buxton) spent time in northern Saskatchewan as a teacher in a community called Pelican Narrows. There he helped establish an early non-residential school (that is, a school based right in the community, where they could go to school while live with their parents and remain exposed to their culture). The school was the idea of a remarkable man, Dr. Ahab Spence, who was the pastor at Stanley Mission. It was Canon Spence who recruited my father, who at the time was studying at Emmanuel College in Saskatoon.
The school only operated in the summer, since in those days, the majority of the community spend autumn through spring spread out in the north at their family hunting and trapping camps. The community only came together as a whole during the summer. Thus, this arrangement enabled the kids to stay with their families, learn traditional skills, yet still get schooling. Yes, that meant a long gap between school sessions, with inevitable consequences - one of the many difficult trade-offs that arose in the encounter between First Nations and European cultures in the north.
 Pelican Narrows in 1939. The square fronted white building on the left is the old Revillon Freres trading post where the school was established. The building to the right was where the post manager had lived. This was to be my father's residence. However, when he entered, he promptly fell through the rotten floor boards. After a few nights camping out, he secured the use of a shack used by the Forestry Service. Photo: Downes, P.G. (1943). Sleeping Island. New York: Coward-McCann. |
 The Hudson's Bay Company trading post at Pelican Narrows in 1939. This photo was also taken by P.G. Downes on his trip in 1939. Downes was the first person to photograph this part of the north in colour. He and my father met at this time. Their card games at Pelican Narrows, among other things, are descrbed in Downes' book. |
 The Revillon Freres trading post where the school was established. You can see the situation of the building in the photo by Downes, above. Photo: W.W. Buxton. (1939). |
 My father in 1939, outside the Hudson Bay trading post - the same one seen in the photo above. Given how he is dressed, this had to be a Sunday. |
The second thing about this trip was that I decided that it had to be done by traditional birch bark canoe. Now this is something that I have a fair bit of book learning about ( billbuxton.com/climbing.html#furTrade). On the other hand, at the time of the decision, I neither had a birch-bark canoe, nor had ever been in one. So, the next step in the plan was to find a builder who would tolerate me as an apprentice, and would let me help him build one that would be suitable for this particular trip. The result of this is that I spent as much time as I could (too little) in the summer of 2008 working with a builder in Northern Ontario, Tom Byers (more below).
The story of making that canoe makes up the start of the pages that follow. This was followed by having Tom build a second canoe in the summer of 2009 (this time with little help from me). The fact was, for safety reasons as well as company, I wanted to do the trip with more than one canoe. And, I wanted all of the canoes to be bark. So I bit the bullet and had the second one built. What the heck - how can you put a price on a dream?
As for the trip itself, it was scheduled for the month of August, 2009 - a time picked to meet three objectives:
But, as one of the gang said, "Life happens," and sure enough it did. Close to departure, the 89 year old father of one of the team got ill, which precipitated 2 of the team having to drop out. Finding two experienced and compatible paddlers who could take a month off on a moment's noticewas an unsurmountable problem - and actually one that I didn't totally want to solve, given the team-mates, so the trip was been postponed for a year. I have instructed my father that he now has to live at least one more year or he will ruin the trip. He didn't complain too much, which reinforces the notion that not only does life happen, it goes on, and we make the best of it. So, in the meantime, the time opened up in the summer of 2009 was spent on shorter trips closer to home, thereby breaking in the canoes, and spending time working on white-water skills: all of which will make things all the better for the trip next year anyhow. Ahhhhh - the glass is half full after all!
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"In training" for the Churchill
River with my son, Blair (who is my canoe-mate on the trip).
Dumping in rapids is one thing in an unloaded plastic canoe, filled with
air bags, in warm water. It is a whole other thing in a loaded
bark canoe. They say practice makes perfect. On the other
hand, Voltaire said that the perfect was the enemy of the good.
The objective in this exercise is to purge any hero mentality, and
couple skill development - most importantly learning one's own
limitations. But is it ever fun! |
One of the first things that I did in my search for a builder was contact James Raffan and Jeremy Ward at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough. James is the museum's director and a prolific writer on canoes, travel and the fur trade. We had previously corresponded about his books, among other things. Jeremy is the museum's curator as well as a well known builder. It is he who keeps the craft alive at the museum, as well as look after the collection. Through them, I found a builder in Northern Ontario named Tom Byers. (For Tom's web site, click here; for an article about him, click here.)
Tom and I spoke on the phone in June of 2008 and came to an agreement whereby he would build me a canoe, and that I would spend as much time up north with him helping. I wanted to learn as much as I could, and also wanted to know enough to be able to maintain and repair the canoe - especially when out in the wild.
The next step was to figure out what I wanted. The basic constraints were clear - defined by the chosen route. I needed a boat that was suited for traveling on open water, yet not a dog when traveling on moving water. We settled on a 17' canoe with moderate rocker, and a not too-flat bottom. That was the starting point. Since the beauty of the canoe is in the lines, the question then came down to specifics. Hence, we both buried ourselves in the bible of traditional canoe craft:
Adney, Edwin Tappan & Chapelle, Howard, I. (1964). The Bark and Skin Boats of North America. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
What we settled on was the design used by the Attikamekw (who Adney referred to as Tête de Boule in his book), of Québec, found on pages 109 - 110 in Adney:
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Adney & Tappan (1964), p. 109 |
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Adney & Tappan (1964), p. 110 |
Having made these decisions, the only thing left was for Tom to head out in the bush and start collecting materials - in perhaps the worst mosquito season in memory.
The canoe, which was started around the end of July 2008, and finished in early October, is shown in the photo below.
At least Insofar as I was able to do so on my three trips up to Northern Ontario to help, I tried my best to document the construction process. The results can be accessed via the links below.
The following pages document the project. I will add to them as things progress. Each will be a collection of photos with captions explaining what is going on. You can jump to any page by hitting the link below, or step from page to page by clicking on their "next" and "previous" links.
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