According to the early reports, the ribs were placed some 6 to 10 inches apart in the bark cover, with the heads forced under the inwales against the bark, and were supported there by the outwales as well. No mention is made of any sheathing; Kalm refers to a piece of bark and some saplings or tree branches laid over the ribs to protect the bottom inboard. In the large Iroquois canoes it would have been possible and practical to employ a piece of bark inside the main bark cover, as noted on page 213; this inside piece needed to be only long enough to reach to the end thwarts, or abreast the crimps, and wide enough to cover the bottom and bilges up to 3 or 4 inches short of the inwales. With the ribs over this inner sheet, a stiff bottom would result. In a long canoe, split poles could be laid lengthwise inside the bottom of the canoe and fastened there by lashing them to a few ribs; these would serve to protect the bottom in loading and to stiffen the bark cover. However, in a small canoe the stiffness of elm bark when the rough outside layer was not fully scraped off would make sheathing of any kind unnecessary, and the bark mat inside the ribs, mentioned by Kalm, would be sufficient. The difficulty in reconstructing the building methods of the large Iroquois canoes on the same basis is that Kalm's description is of a rather small canoe; the information on the temporary canoes of the eastern Indians also deals with short craft. It is evident, however, that poles were not usually placed between the bark and the ribs, as in temporary skin canoes built by Indians. It is also apparent that splints were not used by the Iroquois for sheathing large canoes. The ends of the outwales in the Iroquois canoes seem to have been secured by snying them off on the outside face and holding these thin ends by the cord around the ends, as well as by the closure battens of the stems. In some eastern canoes, notably the elm-bark canoes of the St. Francis, the outwale ends projected slightly outboard of the stems and were lashed across them by a simple athwartship lashing which passed through the bark cover and under and over the lashing at the inwale ends. In a drawing of an Iroquois canoe made about 1849, the cord around the stems is shown together with the outside stem battens and lashing; the ends of the outwales are apparently under the cord and perhaps under the stem battens. The stem batten is in one piece sharply bent under the stems in ~U~-form. The end lashing shown seems to be in groups and the bottom, for a little distance inboard of the stems, is also shown as lashed. Three thwarts are shown. It may be that this drawing was made not from a full-size canoe but from a model, for the proportions are obviously incorrect. This possibility casts some doubt on the picture as evidence of the building practices, for in Indian-built models simplified construction details not used in actual canoe building are often found.