Water Craft Part II Final

67 November/December 2015 MUZZLELOADER

PART I OF THIS SERIES described construction and use of the birch bark canoe. Although there is evidence that an active trade in canoe-building materials (bark

and lashings) was carried on in Pre-Columbian America, the geographic extent of birch bark canoe construction was largely limited by the range of growth of the paper birch tree. To the south and north of birch tree territory, a variety of other watercraft types and materials were employed. In the Southeast, dugouts (commonly called pirogues by the French) were popular with tribes who had access to large trees. Images of pirogues used by the Timuca tribe of Northern Florida were first recorded by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues in 1563 (Fig. 1). Four centuries later, small dugouts were still being widely used by the Creeks and the Seminoles (Fig. 2). Unlike other types of dugouts in which successive cycles of controlled burning and scraping remove the waste wood from the interior, traditional Seminole canoes were carved entirely by hand after steel tools became available. Henry John Billie is reputed to be the last traditional dugout canoe

The bull boat, although crude, makeshift and unsightly, was the most versatile form of transportation for the nomadic First Americans who inhabited the Great Plains.

Watercraft of the First Americans Part II: Bull Boats, Plank Boats, Dugouts, and Rafts

by Fred Stutzenberger and Matthew Stutzenberger

Figure 1: The first recorded use of dugouts by the Timuca Tribe of Northern Florida was by de Morgues (Plate XXII).

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builder of the Seminole Tribe. He learned the art of canoe making from his father, uncle, and grandfather. Billie makes his dugouts from cypress logs up to forty feet long. Cypress is a soft, lightweight wood, readily available and easily workable with ax and adze.

For further information on the carving of Seminole dugouts, visit: [ h t t p : / / w w w. h i g h b e a m . c o m /doc/1P1-79516414.html]

My first experience with a dugout came shortly after World War II. Uncle Albert (Stutzenberger) had been working on his book. His fact-finding searches for background material had taken him (with me tagging along) to a Seminole village back in the swamps south of the Tamiami Trail. While he was negotiating with the village elders for information and scribbling in his binder, I watched a Seminole boy, maybe a couple of years older than I, poling a dugout. Standing in the middle of the dugout, he seemed so casual and confident as he guided it through the sawgrass and cypress boles. After I mentioned my fascination with the dugout to Uncle Al, he tried for years to find an authentic model Seminole dugout in the tourist traps around Miami. The closest he ever came was a little section of tree trunk carved into the shape of a birch bark canoe.

Still further south, the seafaring explorations of the Taino and Carib Indians throughout the Caribbean islands make the travels of their northern neighbors look like a Sunday paddle across the duck pond. The Caribbean tribes shaped their dugouts by repeated application of controlled fire followed by removal of the char with a shell as a scraping tool. Christopher Columbus observed many of these craft on his first voyage and described them in his Diario (logbook) as made of a single timber and capable of transporting up to 150 passengers.

The shaping of the huge dugouts took months of tedious work and resulted in round-bottomed vessels that would appear to be unstable if the earliest drawings of them (Fig. 3) are to be believed. A round-bottomed vessel would be prone to lateral tipping (rolling sideways). Tipping could be reduced by ballast stones (which of course would reduce its range and load-carrying capacity).

To the west, the Mayans of the Yucatan Peninsula were building more sophisticated and stable seafaring boats. Although their lower hulls were carved from a single huge log, the Mayans increased the freeboard by building up the sides with added wooden rails and flattened the bottoms to reduce tipping (Fig. 4). These improvements reduced the requirement for ballast and increased

Figure 2: Seminole dugouts, Everglades National Park, circa 1921, Historical Museum of South Florida, Miami.

Figure 3: The early drawings of the Caribbean dugouts by Benzoni appear rather fanciful. Surely the seating positions of the occupants would have rendered the round-bottomed craft pretty unstable.

Figure 4: The hulls of seafaring Mayan craft were much improved over those of the Taino and Carib neighbors to the east.


their effective load-carrying capacity. These improvements allowed the Mayans to explore and trade far beyond their shores (Fig. 5), perhaps even to distances exceeding a thousand nautical miles.

The improved design notwithstanding, it is a mystery why the Mayans did not employ sails in addition to paddles for propulsion. From the early 16th Century, the Spanish sailing galleons plied the

Caribbean back and forth, ferrying settlers and soldiers to the New World and draining its mineral riches back into Spain. If you believe the travel websites, sailing the Caribbean is a relatively pleasurable activity (with the exception of the occasional hurricane that could send a galleon to the bottom in short order). From the available archeological evidence, it is probable that the First Americans, even those adventurous enough to have crossed vast stretches of ocean, never exploited the principle of wind propulsion. Nor has the author seen any reference to a catamaran-like outrigger arrangement for additional stability.

That’s not to say that the First Americans were averse to the use of wind propulsion once they experienced its advantage. For example, an unusual laminated composite canoe made of thin slats is on display at Canyon Ranch Health Resort, Tucson AZ. When the Santa Cruz River was flowing in the 1800s, the canoe was used by the Akimel O’odham (People of the River) to ferry agricultural

Figure 5: Improved canoes enabled the Mayans to establish a trading network from the Yucatan Peninsula to Puerto Rico.

Figure 5a (Below & Right): This laminated canoe, owned by Canyon Ranch Health Resort, has had much use and many repairs. It still retains the socket for a mast that was probably lashed to the thwart above. Although it was used by First Americans to haul agricultural produce, it is uncertain whether it was built by them or by the Spanish or Americans.

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produce from their tribal land to the San Agustin Mission. The Santa Cruz has dried up, but the arid climate has preserved this canoe despite its long use and many repairs. The mast socket is still firmly attached under one of the thwarts (Fig. 5a). Perhaps readers might add some information regarding this unusual canoe.

In contrast to the Mayans, the Plains Tribes had little use for large canoes that would need to be transported across long stretches of prairie or mountain ranges, with few streams that were navigable or even flowing for much of the year. During the fur trade era, the trading centers serving the inland tribes of North America were generally located along waterways, many of which were shallow and seasonally intermittent (Fig. 6). The Plains Tribes adapted to these uncertain conditions by developing the bullboat with a covering of buffalo bull hide.

William Clark described them in his journal:

“Two sticks of 1-1/4 inch diameter are tied together so as to form a round hoop of the size you wish the canoe to be, or as large as the skin will cover. Two of those hoops are made, one for the top or brim, and the other for the bottom. Then sticks of the same diameter are crossed at right angles and fastened with a thong to each hoop, and also where each stick crosses the other. Then the skin, when green [fresh, that is, not tanned] is drawn tight over the frame and fastened with thongs to the brim, or outer hoop, so as to form a perfect basin.”

Bullboats were circular with an average diameter of four to five feet and a depth of about 15 inches. The freshly skinned bull hide stretched over the frame was allowed to dry, shrinking it tightly down upon the frame. The resultant rawhide greatly reinforced the shape of the vessel.

The hair was left on the outside to decrease the tendency of the round vessel to spin. To an experienced bullboat operator, the hair also served as a “flow indicator” of the vessel relative to the current. The tail was left on the hide to serve as a towrope for a swimmer hitching a ride across a stream, as a point of attachment between two boats to form a convoy and as a mooring hawser when the boat was beached (Fig. 7).

Due to its circular shape, the bullboat lacked the directional stability of a spindle-shaped vessel. Paddling by alternating from one “side” or the other was futile. Therefore, the bullboat had to be “pull-paddled” from any area of its circumference that was chosen to be the “front” (Fig. 8). The traditional bullboat paddle was carved from cottonwood. The blade had a series of hourglass-shaped perforations through which a small amount of water could pass, just

Figure 6: There was hardly a trading post in North America that was not located within a few miles of water navigable for at least part of the year.

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enough to stabilize the direction of the blade under the force of the thrust and keep it from twisting against resistance. One distinctive mark on the blade denoted ownership while others heralded the battle honors of the woman’s husband, Bullboats were always made by the women except in rare cases when a war party constructed one to carry their wounded.

A variant of the bullboat (called a mandeha) was developed by the Omahas. The mandeha was framed

with red willow branches into an elongated form with a distinct bow and stern with sides that were topped with gunwales similar to those of the bark canoe. The paddlers sat forward near the bow and a steersman was seated in the stern. Whether a bullboat or a mandeha, the simple and durable hide-over-frame craft fit the lifestyle of the Indians living along the Missouri River and its tributaries. It could transport about half a ton yet weighed only thirty pounds. While not truly disposable, it

Figure 7: This sketch by George Catlin in 1833 shows Mandan women beaching bull boats on the Missouri River near Fort Clark. Note the buffalo tail on the boat in the foreground.

could be built in a day and abandoned with no great loss if the need arose. Raiding parties often built bullboats to transport themselves down river for the purpose of stealing horses. After landing a safe distance from their target, the bullboats were abandoned on the assumption that a successful raid would provide them with equine transport on the way home.

The Mandan and the Hidatsa were the masters of the bullboat. Every household had several. They were used to drift or tow loads of meat and firewood from up or down-river to their permanent villages on the Upper Missouri. Bullboats were stored upside down above the smoke holes of the earth lodges, with just enough draft to allow free exit of smoke while keeping out the rain. The Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery were amazed at how adroitly the Mandan women handled the bullboats on the turbulent river, often with several passengers propelled by one paddling in front from a kneeling position.

The First Americans inhabiting the Great Basin had limited access to the vast buffalo herds on the plains. The Paiutes (a closely associated group of tribes inhabiting what are now parts of Idaho, Nevada and Arizona), resorted to the hard-stem bulrush (also known as tule or black root) as buoyant material for building what is commonly known as the “tule canoe-raft” (Fig. 9). Tule grows abundantly in wetlands or areas where there is seasonal flooding. The long stems are filled with spongy tissue containing millions of tiny air cells that make the tule a buoyant material for constructing watercraft to travel across marshes, lakes and ocean bays.

The canoe-raft was constructed around a 12-14 foot long core of willow saplings that provided shape and rigidity to the bundled tule stems. The bundles were lashed together using cattail cordage and grape vines split long-ways to yield flexible withes. To provide greater stability when crossing large open stretches of rough water, several canoe-rafts were lashed together with willow strips and woven dogbane cordage. Tule rafts were relatively disposable since the stems rotted quite rapidly if not dried out after use. The willow sapling core was re-used for several years, but received an annual replacement of the tule covering. For an excellent photographic documentation of the construction of a tule canoe-raft, visit

Figure 8: Bullboats had neither front nor back. They could be paddled from any point around their circumference by using a backward pulling motion much as a swimmer uses the crawl stroke to propel himself through the water.

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Dino and Susan Labiste’s website: [http://www.primitiveways.com/Tule_boat1.html]

The Chumash people of Southern California constructed sturdy plank boats called tomols (Fig. 10). A tomol was usually between eight to 30 feet long, and could carry from three to ten passengers. The tomol appears to be unique among the First Americans in that it was constructed without an inner frame. The flat bottom of the tomol was formed from a single board. Tomols were built using driftwood or preferably redwood from which planks were split out using axes and wedges. The heavy one-piece floor had three or four rows of planks added to build up the sides. Each plank was glued into place with yop, a melted mixture of pine pitch and hardened asphalt from local tar pits. After the yop dried, holes were drilled in each plank for lashing with cords made from hemp. Then the holes and seams were caulked with a liberal application of hot yop. The sides of the tomol were rough-sanded with slabs of sandstone and finish-sanded with dried sharkskin before painting and decorating with tribal symbols representing animal spirits. Chumash tomols were used largely for fishing and trading in coastal waters. Despite

careful construction, the expansion and contraction of the rough-hewn boards caused some leaking particularly in rough seas. One of the passengers (usually a young boy) was designated as a bailer to scoop out the seawater. For more information on the tomol, visit the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History website: [http://www.sbnature.org/research/anthro/chumash/daily.htm]

By 1850, the Chumash and other California tribes were so reduced in population and in their traditional activities that the tomols were abandoned and the skills in making them were all but lost. In 1913, an elderly Chumash man, Fernando Librado, made a tomol as he had remembered them as a young boy. The famous field ethnologist and linguist, John P. Harrington, made detailed scale drawings of Librado’s tomol to record its construction. Librado’s tomol boat is still on exhibit in the Indian Hall at the Museum of Natural History in Santa Barbara, California. Using Librado’s tomol as a model and working from Harringtons’s notes, several more Chumash tomols have recently been built.

In Part III of this series, we will turn our attention to the watercraft of

the Pacific Coast tribes from Northern California into the Arctic Circle. Temperature (and its effect on growing season) is such an important factor limiting tree growth that USDA Plant Hardiness Zones 1 and 2 are devoid of large trees. (Pederson et al. 7). Therefore the Aleut, Inuit and Yupik peoples (formerly called Eskimos) employed a wide variety of materials (driftwood, shipwrecks, whale bone, seal skin) to build watercraft that were used in fishing, whaling, trade and warfare.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the expert assistance of Allison Colborne, Librarian, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Laboratory of Anthropology, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, Santa Fe. Thanks to Dr. Tony Vuturo, CRHR Board of Directors, for permission to photograph this canoe. Thanks also to John Cummings for impeccable editorial assistance.

ReferencesAdair, S. News from Indian Country. Hayward, WI :

Indian Country Communications, Inc. Mar. 15, 2000. Adney, Edwin T. and Howard I. Chapell. The Bark

Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964.

Benzoni, M. Girolamo. La Historia del Mondo Neuvo. P. & F. Tini, Publishers, Venice 1563. Translated and Reprinted by the Academia Nacional de la Historia , Spain, 1987.

De Morgues, Jacque le Moyne. Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americai provincia Gallis acciderunt. Frankfort, Germany: Theodor de Bry, in Part II of his Great voyages. 1591.

Dunn, Oliver, C. and J.E. Kelley, Jr. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492-1493. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1989.

Peck, Douglas T. “Prehistoric Seafaring Exploration by the Taino and Carib Indians in the Antilles and the Maya from Northern Yucatan.” ??, 2008.

Pederson, Neil, Edward Cook, Gordon Jacoby, Dorothy Peteet and Kevin Griffin. “The Influence of Winter Temperatures on the Annual Radial Growth of Six Northern Range Margin Tree Species.” Dendrochronologia 22:7-29. Amsterdam: Elsevier B.V., 2004.

Ryden, Stig. “Did the Indians in Chili Know the Use of Sails in Pre-Columbian Times?” Journal of Anthropology, 12(2), 1956.

Roberts, Kenneth G. and Philip Shackleton. The Canoe. A History of the Craft from Panama to the Arctic. Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1983.

Stewart, Kenneth G. “The Canoe.” Dictionary of American History, 3rd Edition, Stanley Kutler, ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976.

Stutzenberger, Albert. American Historical Spoons; the American Story in Spoons. Rutland, VT: C.E. Tuttle Co., 1971.

Waldman, Carl and Molly Braun. Atlas of the North American Indian. New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985.

Wheeler, O.D. The Trail of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1904. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904.

Figure 9: The people of the Great Basin used what was more of a raft than a canoe. It depended largely on the intrinsic buoyancy of its materials than on the displacement of a sealed hull.

Figure 10: The Chumash people along the Southern California coast constructed their boats entirely of boards lashed together and caulked with hot asphaltum the seeped from La Brea Tar Pits located in what is now Los Angeles.

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Water Craft Part II Final