I’m not sure if you know this, but there is a lot of water on our planet. If you haven’t noticed it, try travelling somewhere without the aid of current infrastructure (hint: this means go by foot, if your unsure of how to do so, read up on the idea a bit here) and see how far you get before your progress is impeded by that pesky wet stuff. Not being a species that gives up easy, humans created boats. In some areas we created small wooden boats with pointy ends that you may recognize: canoes.

Canoes came about in different places in different forms. The dugout canoe can be found, well, most places in the new world; the outrigger or double hulled canoe comes from Polynesia and the pacific in general, and North America delivered to the world the birch bark, skin-on-frame style most westerners would identify with a canoe. The North American version is what we will deal with here.

Along with their use to move people from one place to another, canoes were also work vessels before they becoming largely a pleasure vehicle. For hundreds of years, locals and then explorers, trappers and traders would use North America’s canoe on the continents first highway system, the rivers.