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Read Ebook: Shelters Shacks and Shanties by Beard Daniel Carter
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Ebook has 38 lines and 17934 words, and 1 pages
ery summer for the last twenty-two years in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. The saddle-bag may be built by boys with the two rooms ten by ten and a gallery six feet wide, or the two rooms six by six and a gallery five feet wide; the plan may be seen on the sketch below the house .
Where you only expect to use the house in the summer months, a two-pen or saddle-bag can be used with comfort even in the Northern States, but in the winter-time in such States as Michigan and part of New York, the gallery would be filled up with drifting snow.
NATIVE NAMES FOR THE PARTS OF A KANUCK LOG CABIN, AND HOW TO BUILD ONE
IF the writer forgets himself once in a while and uses words not familiar to his boy readers, he hopes they will forgive him and put all such slips down as the result of leaving boys' company once in a while and associating with men. The reader knows that men dearly love big, ungainly words and that just as soon as boys do something worth while the men get busy hunting up some top-heavy name for it.
When one is talking of foreign things, however, it is well to give the foreign names for those things, and, since the next house to be described is not a real American one but a native of Canada, the Canadian names are given for its parts. While in northern Quebec, making notes for the Kanuck, the writer enlisted the interest of a fellow member of the Camp-Fire Club of America, Doctor Alexander Lambert, and through him secured the names of all parts of the Canadian shack.
The author is not a French-Canadian, and, although, like most of his readers, he studied French at school, what he learned of that great language is now securely locked up in one of the safe-deposit vaults of his brain and the key lost.
Local Names of Parts of Cabin
Fig. 242. Fig. 243. Fig. 244. Fig. 245. Fig. 246. Fig. 247.
Fig. 248. Fig. 249.
The perspective drawings show views of the cabin we call the Kanuck. The pen is built exactly as it is built in the houses already described. The windows are placed where the builder desires, as is also the doorway, but when the side-plate logs, that is
Les Traverses
or top side logs, are put in place, then the traverses logs are laid across the pen from one side-plate to the other, their ends resting on top of the side-plates over the traverses logs, the two purlins
Les Poudres
Couverture
The roof is made of small logs flattened on the under-side or left in their rounded form and laid from the ridge logs down, extending over the eaves six or more inches.
Les P?ches
The roof logs are then held in place by poles pegged with wooden pegs to the roof .
Roofing Material
The roof is now covered with a thick layer of browse, hay, straw, dry leaves, or dry grass, and on top of this moist blue clay, yellow clay, hard-pan, or simple mud is spread and trampled down hard, forcing the thatch underneath into all the cracks and crannies and forming a firm covering of clay several inches thick.
Fireplace
Clay Roof
A clay roof should be as flat as possible with only pitch enough to shed the water; a shingle roof should have a rise of at least one foot high to four feet wide and a thatched roof should have a rise of 45?, that is, the rise of a line drawn from corner to corner of a square.
Fig. 247 shows a gable filled with upright logs and Fig. 248 shows a tar paper roof and a gable covered with tar paper.
Since Kanucks are cold-climate houses, they frequently have novel means of keeping them warm; one way that I have frequently seen used is to surround them with a log fence shown in Fig. 249, and pack the space between with stable manure or dirt and rotten leaves.
HOW TO MAKE A POLE HOUSE AND HOW TO MAKE A UNIQUE BUT THOROUGHLY AMERICAN TOTEM LOG HOUSE
American Totem Log House
But if you really want something unique, build a log house on the general plan shown by Figs. 251 and 252; then carve the ends of all the extending logs to represent the heads of reptiles, beasts, or birds; also carve the posts which support the end logs on the front gallery, porch, or veranda in the form of totem-poles. You may add further to the quaint effect by placing small totem-posts where your steps begin on the walk and adding a tall totem-pole for your family totem or the totem of your clan. Fig. 252 shows how to arrange and cut your logs for the pens. The dining-room is supposed to be behind the half partition next to the kitchen; the other half of this room being open, with the front room, it makes a large living-room. The stairs lead up to the sleeping-rooms overhead; the latter are made by dividing the space with partitions to suit your convenience.
Before Building
Take your jack-knife and a number of little sticks to represent the logs of your cabin; call an inch a foot or a half inch a foot as will suit your convenience and measure all the sticks on this scale, using inches or parts of inches for feet. Then sit down on the ground or on the floor and experiment in building a toy house or miniature model until you make one which is satisfactory. Next glue the little logs of the pen together; but make the roof so that it may be taken off and put on like the lid to a box; keep your model to use in place of an architect's drawing; the backwoods workmen will understand it better than they will a set of plans and sections on paper. Fig. 251 is a very simple plan and only put here as a suggestion. You can put the kitchen at the back of the house instead of on one side of it or make any changes which suit your fancy; the pen of the house may be ten by twelve or twenty by thirty feet, a camp or a dwelling; the main point is to finish your house up with totems as shown by Fig. 253, and then tell the other fellows where you got the idea.
Fig. 250. Fig. 251. Fig. 252. Fig. 253. Fig. 254. Fig. 255.
Peeled Logs
Totems
Totem-Poles
When you carve out the totem-poles , the log had better be put on an elongated sawbuck arrangement which will hold it free from the ground and allow one to turn it over as the work may require. Fig. 259 represents a peeled log. On this log one may sketch, with chalk, the various figures here represented, then begin by notching the log according to the notches which are necessary to carve out the totem. Figs. 260, 261, and 262 show different views of the same totem figures. Fig. 257 shows how to make a variation of the totem-pole. Paint your totem heads and figures red, blue, and yellow, and to suit your fancy; the more startling they are the better will they imitate the Indian totems. The weather will eventually tone them down to the harmonious colors of a Turkish rug.
Fig. 256. Fig. 257. Fig. 258. Fig. 259. Fig. 260. Fig. 261.
Fig. 262.
XLI
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