Each gunwale was formed either of two small saplings or of split poles, with the butts scarfed at the canoe's midlength. The canoe of an Iroquois war party would probably have gunwales of split saplings so that inwale and outwale for half the length of one side of the canoe would be from a single pole; this would allow the flat sides to be placed opposite one another, on each side of the edge of the bark, to form a firm gunwale structure. However, when a rather permanent craft was being built, the poles might be split twice, or quartered, to give pieces to make half of the gunwales of a canoe; these too might be worked nearly round before assembly. That the gunwale joints were scarfed is reasonably certain. The elm-bark canoes of the St. Francis Indians are known only from a model, as are the spruce-bark hunters' canoes of the Malecite, but the testimony of old St. Francis and Malecite builders support the evidence of the models; therefore it is probable that the use of scarfed gunwales was common in these canoes, and, hence, also in the canoes of the Iroquois, who dwelt nearby. The manner of scarfing is not certain. Probably the butts were snied off so that the lap would be flat face, as was usual in the Malecite spruce-bark canoes of this same class. The butts were secured together by lashings--apparently let into shallow grooves around the members. In a very hastily built canoe the butts might be merely lapped for a short distance, one butt above the other, and lashed; this, of course, would make a jog in the sheer, but do no harm, as the jog would occur in both inwale and outwale, and the bark would lay up between these and be trimmed to suit. The thwarts were described in old accounts as very small saplings, or tree branches, with their ends sharply reduced in thickness so that they were thin and pliable enough to be bent around the gunwales and brought inboard under the thwart, as done by some Kutenai in the West (see p. 169). The thwart ends might be lashed or, as in some eastern spruce-bark canoes, brought up through a hole in the thwarts to the top where it could be jammed or lashed. In the Iroquois canoe it seems probable that the thwart ends passed around the main gunwales only and were secured under the thwarts for, as noted, the evidence strongly suggests that the main gunwale members were preassembled, a procedure that requires the thwarts to be in place. In the small hunters' canoes, however, some eastern builders apparently put in a temporary spreader in place of a single thwart until the canoe was completed to the point where the outwales were in place, then the thwarts were added, the ends passing over and around both inwale and outwale and through the bark cover below, to the underside of the thwart.