Types of canoes on Puget SoundWaterman, T. T. (Thomas Talbot)
History
Types of canoes on Puget Sound
Waterman, T. T. (Thomas Talbot)
Canoes and canoeing; Indians of North America -- Boats; Indians of North America -- History
So much for the general resemblance. The facts of distribution make the
idea of relationship much more plausible. It is worthy of remark that in
California south of Humboldt bay there are no dugout canoes at all.
Northward, however, dugouts are in use among all tribes as far as Puget
sound. Moreover, in the case of some, at least, of the intervening
tribes the shovel-nose or square-ended type of dugout occurs. This is
true of the tribes about Klamath lake, for instance, as shown by a
specimen of their canoes collected by Dr Barrett, now in the Museum of
the University of California. Information on this point is
unsatisfactory, for in this intervening area few observers have taken
the pains to note in detail what kinds of canoes were used. This is true
of much of Oregon, even on the coast. Vancouver says of the Indians of
Port Orford that “their canoes, calculated to carry about eight people,
were rudely wrought out of a single tree; their shape much resembled a
butche1’s tray, and seemed very unfit for a sea voyage or any distant
expedition.”[17] This seems almost certainly to indicate that he saw
craft of a shovel-nose type. We can find few other statements on this
matter in the literature. On Columbia river, as shown by the statements
of Boas,[18] on the coast of Washington as illustrated by the
photographs of Curtis,[19] on Puget sound and northward to an unknown
distance, as observed by the present writers, shovel-nose canoes are in
general use. The bare facts, as we have them, seem to be most readily
explained on the assumption that one type of dugout canoe, of wide
distribution on the North Pacific, has spread also as far south as the
Yurok and neighboring tribes in northern California. The increased
complexity of the design as found among the Yurok and their neighbors,
as shown especially in the ornamentation, is possibly explainable by the
fact that these tribes exhibit a distinctly higher culture in many
respects than do their neighbors to the south, the east, or the north.
For some reason, in the region about the mouth of Klamath river a
secondary center of high culture has developed. It is not unlikely that
this has produced the peculiar traits of their canoe.
It is noticeable also that there seems to be a _gradual_ modification of
all types of canoes as we move southward toward California. On Puget
sound, five canoes out of six show a lift in the gunwales toward bow and
stern. On the coast south of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, as shown by
the photographs of Curtis,[20] canoes other than the shovel-nose have an
abrupt “raise” at the prow, but amidships and at the stern they are
“flush,” the gunwales forming a straight horizontal line. Apparently
this arrangement might be considered as an approach to the California
type of canoe, where the gunwales are perfectly flat, without any lift
at either end.
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