Grand Portage - The Canoe Warehouse
August 03, 2019
by Steve
Welcome to the Canoe Warehouse. And thanks for joining us on this tour of Grand Portage National Monument, where we are volunteering this summer. (If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can find links at the bottom of this page.
The park uses this warehouse to display the canoes used in the fur trade, as well as the woodworking skills from the 1790s that supported the depot.
Here's one of the interpreters working while standing under the large, 38-foot Montreal canoe. These canoes are the "semi-trucks" of the fur trade, used to take the trade goods, such as fabrics, metal tools, Italian beads, Brazilian tobacco, guns, etc., from Montreal to the Grand Portage depot. This canoe is capable of carrying 4 to 5 tons of men and material.
A Montreal canoe would carry: 57 crates and barrels, each weighing 90 lbs, for 5,400 lbs of cargo. In addition, the canoe would hold 2,700 lbs of men and supplies. Twelve to 14 or so men would paddle this canoe on the 1400-mile trip from Montreal, which would take them up to 8 weeks to complete.
Looking up into the inside of the canoe, you can see that there are no seats. The company isn't really as interested in the comfort of the paddlers (called voyageurs) as they are in carrying as much cargo as possible, so the voyageurs will sit on the cargo. The route these canoes take from Montreal follows the Ottawa river and eventually enters Lake Huron in Georgian Bay. It follows the shorelines of Lake Huron and Lake Superior to get to Grand Portage. There are around 36 portages between Montreal and Grand Portage,
At the same time as the large Montreal canoes leave Montreal, the smaller 24 - 26 foot North canoes leave the 100 or so inland trading posts, carrying all the furs that they have acquired over the winter. While the North canoes are much smaller than their Montreal counterparts, they still are capable of carrying 2 tons of men and materials. They are handled by a crew of around 6 men. They head out when the rivers are free of ice, and if all goes well they arrive in Grand Portage around 8 weeks later. The furs get carried down the Grand Portage trail and are then loaded onto the Montreal canoes for the trip to Montreal, and then on to London to be sold. The trade goods get carried up the trail to the Pigeon River to be loaded onto the North canoes to re-supply the trading posts. Notice that the canoes don't get portaged here, only the cargo.
We have some other birchbark canoes in the warehouse, including a canoe that was built on-site last summer by staff and volunteers, and this 100-year old Ojibwe ricing canoe. You can see that this is a shallow-draft canoe. Wild rice is a grass that grows in shallow waters. The only way to harvest it is to gently bend the grass over the side of the canoe and tap it. The ripe seeds will fall into the canoe. The Ojibwe have harvested wild rice this way for hundreds of years and continue to do so today. This canoe was donated to the park by a family that no longer needed it. You can see that the bark has been bleached white by the sun, so we know that it sat outside unprotected in the sun for many years. Birchbark is an amazing material, both waterproof and rot-resistant. It can last for a hundred years if not exposed to too much sun.
The park plans to build another canoe on site next summer, so we had the opportunity to harvest the birchbark for this. Birchbark harvesting can be done at one particular time of the year, which is usually mid-July. At that time, the bark will easily separate from the trunk once you have made a vertical cut through the bark. By making only a vertical cut, you can remove the bark, and the tree will grow new bark. The second-growth bark will look more like scar tissue, and can't be used for canoe building. But at least the tree is unharmed.
To help us better understand what it's like to paddle one of these 38-foot canoes, we got to take a fiberglass replica canoe out onto Lake Superior with 17 of us in it. We did this in mid-May, when the temperature was in the mid-40s with a hint of rain. But at least the lake was calm. All went well, although we noticed that all the permanent park staff stayed on the dock and waved good-bye to us! After canoeing for a few miles on the lake, none of us were ready to make the 1200 mile trip to Montreal, and we certainly were not interested in carrying 180-lb loads, as the voyageurs did. But we did have a little better appreciation for the hard work that they did.
In our next installment, we'll look at the Great Hall, where the company conducted business while here.
Previous installments: Overview, Ojibwe Village
Previous installments: Overview, Ojibwe Village
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