Western red cedar is strong and stiff but falls from twenty to thirty per cent below white oak in these factors. It is light, and the texture of the wood is rather coarse. The springwood and summerwood are distinct, the latter constituting one-half or less of the annual ring. The medullary rays are numerous and obscure. The wood’s color is dull brown, tinged with red. The thin sapwood is nearly white. The ease with which western red cedar may be worked led the Indians to use it in their most ambitious woodcraft. The gigantic totem poles which have excited the curiosity and admiration of travelers near the coast in Alaska and southward have nearly all been of this wood. Some of them are the largest single pieces of wood carving in the world. Trunks three or four feet in diameter and forty or fifty feet long have been hewed and whittled in weird, uncouth, and fantastic forms, decorated with eagle heads, bear mouths, and with various creatures of the forest or sea, or from the realms of imagination. Before the northern Pacific coast Indians procured tools from white men they executed their carving by means of bone, stone, shell, and wooden tools, assisted by fire. The making of canoes was in some ways a work more laborious for the Indians than the manufacture of totem poles. Their canoes were dugouts of all sizes, from the small trough which carried one or two persons, to the enormous canoe which carried fifty warriors with all their equipment. Such a canoe, now in the National Museum at Washington, D. C., is fifty-nine feet long, seven feet, three inches deep at the bow, five feet three inches at the stern, and three feet seven inches in the middle, and eight feet wide. It was made on Vancouver island, and is capable of carrying 100 persons. The capacity of the canoe is thirty-five tons. Civilized man has produced no vessel with lines more perfect than are seen in some of these canoes made by savages; but all the canoes are not alike: some are crude and clumsy. It is claimed that large cedar canoes of Indian manufacture were early carried from the Pacific coast by fur traders, and New York and Boston shipbuilders took them as models in constructing the celebrated clipper ships which formerly sailed between New York and San Francisco. The Indians formerly made much use of western red cedar bark which they twisted into ropes and cords, braided for mats, wove for cloth, used in making baskets, roofing wigwams, constructing fish nets and bird snares, ladders for climbing cliffs, and they even pulped the inner bark by pounding it in mortars, and mixed it with their food. White men have put western red cedar to many uses, as shingles, lumber, cooperage, poles, posts, piles, car siding and roofing, boat building from skiffs to ships, and general furniture and interior finish.