8} bottom and a moderate sheer in the sides. The best
bateaux and Durhams were made with strong white oak bottoms and light
fir sides.

The bark canoe gave place to the boat, step by step, as civilized
intercourse advanced. It disappeared first from the great national
highway of the St Lawrence and the Lakes, where the French began using
bateaux and sailing craft as early as the seventeenth century. During
the eighteenth the boat gained steadily on the canoe, which was more
and more confined to the Indians. The local craft in chief civilized
use on both sides during the fight for Canada was the bateau; and the
best crews then and afterwards were the French-Canadian voyageurs.

But everywhere beyond the immediate spheres of French and British
influence the canoe was universal. The Great West then began at the
Lakes and the Mississippi, and was a land of wild adventure, rumour,
and extravagant surmise. The map that formed the frontispiece to the
standard authority of the time--Jefferys' _French Dominions in
America_--is full of geographical romance. Once in the Kaministikwia,
the map has no territorial divisions other than those between the {29}
different tribal hunting grounds, each one of which was watered by a
hundred streams and marked by the 'carrying places' where the canoes
had to be 'portaged.' There lived the 'Nation of the Bear' and the
'Nation of the Snake,' whose special totems of course were worked in
coloured quills on every war canoe; and there flowed many a river 'the
course of which is uncertain.' Along the great Assiniboine lay the
'Warrior's track from the River of the West,' and just where the
prairies ran out into the complete unknown there was the vista of a
second Eldorado in the hopeful suggestion that 'Hereabouts are supposed
to be the Mountains of Bright Stones mentioned in the Map of ye Indian
Ochagach.'

After the Conquest the tide of trade and settlement flowed faster and
faster west; and with the white man's trade and settlement came the
white man's boats. At last, in 1823, Sir George Simpson, the resident
governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, finding that canoe transport was
half as dear again as that done with boats, ordered that boats should
supersede canoes all over the main trade routes of the Company's vast
domain. This was the death-blow to the canoe as a real factor in
Canadian life. From that time on it has been receding {30} farther and
farther, from waterway to water