Wounded Fox
Curious about Wooden Canoes
There are records of the indigenous peoples of North America building round coracle like boats using willow branches and a single buffalo hide. I am not sure how frequently the tribes built them into longer canoe shapes (using multiple hides), but the fur traders who picked up this technique certainly did. Several mountain man groups around the country have built these longer boats as demonstration pieces, and I am intrigued.
To the fur trappers and explorers boats like this were made quickly and discarded when no longer needed. To them, 2 or more raw hides were inexpensive and relatively available. Rawhide gets soft and stretchy when it gets wet, and gets hard and tightens when it dries. Not an ideal characteristic for a boat building material, but it is workable. You just need to periodically dry your boat out on longer trips. Also, if you have pine resin, you can seal the seams between hides, and presumably with enough I imagine you could waterproof the outside of the hide.
I was watching videos of the modern skin on frame canoes by Cape Falcon Kayaks, and I liked the idea of marrying that general technique with fresh green willow, real rawhide lace to tie the ribs and stringers together, and the simple mortice joints between the ribs and the gunnels. While their system relies on carefully measured and spaced ribs to achieve a mathematically perfect canoe shape, I am pretty sure the mountain men would have done it by eye. Working just from bent willow gunnels and a bent willow keel to guide you, I imagine just a bit of practice would make it possible to get a reasonable shape.
I have run into a couple of accounts of people online who have built rawhide canoes (in the forums for people who love Tolkien's Middle Earth) but has anyone here ever tried something like this?
To the fur trappers and explorers boats like this were made quickly and discarded when no longer needed. To them, 2 or more raw hides were inexpensive and relatively available. Rawhide gets soft and stretchy when it gets wet, and gets hard and tightens when it dries. Not an ideal characteristic for a boat building material, but it is workable. You just need to periodically dry your boat out on longer trips. Also, if you have pine resin, you can seal the seams between hides, and presumably with enough I imagine you could waterproof the outside of the hide.
I was watching videos of the modern skin on frame canoes by Cape Falcon Kayaks, and I liked the idea of marrying that general technique with fresh green willow, real rawhide lace to tie the ribs and stringers together, and the simple mortice joints between the ribs and the gunnels. While their system relies on carefully measured and spaced ribs to achieve a mathematically perfect canoe shape, I am pretty sure the mountain men would have done it by eye. Working just from bent willow gunnels and a bent willow keel to guide you, I imagine just a bit of practice would make it possible to get a reasonable shape.
I have run into a couple of accounts of people online who have built rawhide canoes (in the forums for people who love Tolkien's Middle Earth) but has anyone here ever tried something like this?
