In this months volume 14, issue 2, of WILDERNESS WAY MAGAZINE
there is a pretty good article on using Dutch
Elm diseased tree bark to make canoes/boats.
It's quite detailed and has a POC for questions.
Looks like bocou work.
Oracle

If it was easy everyone would do it.

I'll have to check out that article if I can find a copy of that magazine. Sometimes tough living in this Suburban paradise to find anything but Celebrity and fashion mags at the book stores.

I have read bits and pieces about elm bark canoe making on the Internet and found a few examples in musty books at the library. Does look like a lot of work. I keep trying to figure out how to take the time to fool with attempting one. I've read accounts of "bark canoes" being used in and around the Missouri river valley. Since paper birch doesn't grow here I assume they either had to import/trade for birch bark canoes from the North or make them here out of what materials they had available to them. I'm curious enough to expierament, but I'm putting this project on the back burner for this year due to lack of time. Might tackle it next year.

Gents,
I'm not the expert on this, but my reading on canoes found elm-bark being used sometimes in the east, maybe by Iroquois and others who didn't live in birch country. They were said to be less graceful and harder to deal with. Birch, as you know, is a northern tree, and most of the birch bark canoes were made by the Ojibwe and the natives of the north--Abenakis, maybe, and those ranging up into northern Quebec. The center for canoe making for the fur trade was near Montreal. McKenzie and others explored the far west, taking rolls of birch and pots of pitch along to repair them and going as far north and west as the arctic circle in the NW Territories. Birch canoes went as far west and north as Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabasca on a regular basis.
I'm just guessing, but I'll bet that any native watercraft used on the Missouri were either birch bark ones, or dugouts or bullboats. The traders sometimes used wooden bateaux or York boats, though probably not there.

Dick