[Pioneers in Canada by Sir Harry Johnston]@TWC D-Link book
Pioneers in Canada

CHAPTER VII
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Horses are sometimes used to collect and bring in buffalo, but this method is less effectual than the other; besides, it frightens the herds and soon causes them to withdraw to a great distance.

When horses are used the buffalo are absolutely driven into the pound, but when the other method is pursued they are in a manner enticed to their destruction." A somewhat similar method was adopted by the northern Kris and Athapascans for the capture of reindeer.
As regards means of transport, the use of dogs as draught animals was by no means confined to the Eskimo: they were used in wintertime to draw sledges over the snow or ice by nearly all the northern Indian tribes, and by the people of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific coast.
After the Amerindians of the prairies and plains received horses (indirectly through the Spaniards of Mexico)[12] they sometimes employed the smaller and poorer kind of ponies as pack animals; but for the most part throughout the summer season of the Canadian Dominion--from May to October--transport and travel by canoe was the favourite method.
[Footnote 12: See p.

150.] There were four very well marked types of canoe or boat in British North America.

There was the already-described Eskimo _kayak_, made of leather stretched over a framework of wood or bone; the Amerindians of the Dominion, south of the Eskimo and east of the Rocky Mountains, used the familiar "birch-bark" canoe;[13] the peoples of the Pacific coast belt possessed something more like a boat, made out of a hollowed tree trunk and built up with planks; and the tribes of the Upper Mississippi used round coracles.

Here are descriptions of all three kinds of Amerindian canoe from the pens of eighteenth-century pioneers: The birch-bark canoe used on the Great Lakes was about thirty-three feet long by four and a half feet broad, and formed of the smooth rind or bark of the birch tree fastened outside a wooden framework.


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