check this out---http://www.nfb.ca/film/survival_in_the_bush

with just an ax these guys jump into a flooded forest from a canoe and left on their own--real stuff--not a set-up..

COOL!

Thank you for sharing.

That was excellent Canoedog, and thank you.
I forgot how good some of the older Film Board footage was.

Watching that was a strange blend of old faded memories of stuff my father and grandfathers taught me that was from just before my time, and some stuff that was new.

I remember a freighter canoe like the one they went in with from when I was a kid. I think ours had a two and a half horse Johnson motor.

I have never seen a fire plow set like that used.
Certainly something to be tried.

I was shown that deadfall trigger once when I was a kid.
It was hard to get the uprights to fit right.
I wish they had shown more of that.

You can't catch Sturgeon that way any more at any place I know of because they are too scarce, but I bet Angus would have made a net and set it if the Sturgeon had not been in feeding on the clams.

Angus did an absolutely wonderful job on the canoe.
I haven't seen a birch tree as big as what he was using in years.
The same with the size of the bark sheets for their lean to.

I have only heard of one person still making bark canoes and he is somewhere in La Vérendrye.
I saw one of his canoes and the bark was used with the brown side to the water.
I don't remember his name now or know if he still lives. He was getting pretty old the last time I heard him mentioned, and that was more than 20 years ago.
I think he was Cree.

Thank you again.
If you find any more like this please do post them.

That was pretty cool. Thanks for posting it.

I loved how he said, "Alright Mr. Cameraman it's time to go!" Then some guy walks out from behind the camera, but the camera still pans and follows them up the river as they leave. LOL

It was staged, but still pretty cool.

The part about the bears disturbed me a little.

The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) is a treasure trove of some great documentaries of every kind. When I was in school, I remember watching many of the films they now also have placed online and opened to the public on Wednesday. The last day or so, I have downloaded 23 videos from their website to my pc for later viewing.

There is a lot of outdoor related video that can be searched for here.

Nicodemus--ya the bear part was very 1950's..but it did show that you could really make a trap with nothing but an ax and kill a bear--and that was no set-up..flys and all..
Sherpadog--20 something downloads!!!..no wonder i can get the loggers dance cartoon to download---
the canoe making one is great--same with igloo..

The canoe and igloo videos are great....highly recommended for all!

BTW, my downloads are up to 27 now and should taper off any day or so....

I've made plenty of practice deadfall and snare traps, so I know the concept.

The bear being dead didn't bother me, but rather the fact that there was so much of the show that was set-up, it felt to me that there might have been no need to kill the bear at all. Worse it made me suspect that someone went out and hunted a bear just so that they could place it in the deadfall. We didn't see it happen, and they very well could have killed the bear in any other number of ways.

To be fair the bear could have been killed in the deadfall as presented, but from the first moment they fudged the facts everything that followed became suspect to me. And the film was full of set-ups from start to finish.

I hope the Bear cub escape was the same so that the cub was not slowly strangled by the "cameraman's belt" as it grew, if it survived on its own at all.

I still enjoyed a lot of it, but it wasn't just three men in the bush filming whatever the day brought, no matter what they said.

Not unless they were using the axe to shave with too.
3 weeks in the bush and not even a 5 o'clock shadow?
I think you can be sure there was a full camp of support staff near.
I don't think they had video cams then, so I bet it was all film with all the lighting and processing crew required for that too.

I think the parts about the bear were real enough, even though setting up a camera and letting her eat the fish seems to me like they were baiting her into camp.

The skills they demonstrated were quite real, but I don't think you could catch many fish like that anymore.
Not because the technique is flawed, there just are not that many fish left.
I can remember catching pike in the spring when they were spawning on flooded meadows and spearing the sucker fish when they ran. That is not effective any more because the runs are much smaller for them now too.

I bet they didn't let the cub get away with the belt either.
I didn't see Mr. Camera's pants falling down as they were loading the canoe.

Our attitudes were different then, and this film was meant to be shown to children as well as adults, so to please the kiddies the bear cub gets to roam free instead of being killed.

A cub on its own is pretty well doomed. It wouldn't likely get to starve though, there are the wolves and bobcats who would enjoy it as a meal.
I suspect it got shipped to a zoo instead, but thats hard to know.

The fire making was real. I just have not seen a fireplow made quite the way he did it.
Also, judging from the number of cuts away and back in that part of the film it took him a lot longer to get it going than they showed. (Likely a LOT longer.)
I intend to try doing it his way once to see how it goes before I judge though.

well whatever it was, it was 1954, and for it's day good stuff and more that likely the first of it's kind..notice how the guy said "bush" like it was some unknown,wild place.also note how the indian slipped the ax into his belt.i watched another one about Gray Owl and his pet beavers and he did the same thing with the ax in his belt in almost the same moves.. the Blackfly song and cartoon is also good..

Um, yeah, about the axe.
Slip a razor sharp axe into my belt and walk around with it?
No Thanks.
Yet a lot of the old timers did just that. You will notice that the handle on his axe was timber cruiser length. 30 inches or less, maybe as short as 24 on some.
Most felling and splitting axes have a 36 inch handle.

Short axe handles are more dangerous because you are inside the arc of the swing. If you miss a downward cut while standing the axe might take you in the shin or foot.
A 36 inch handle would place the bit of the axe about 12 inches in front of your toes instead, if you miss .

A classic book is The Survival of hte Birchbark canoe by John McPhee. The has been a small rennaissance in there contruction and use.
Yes, attitudes were different; a bear, fish, even big birchtrees.We can distance ourselves from those values, bemoan the loss, or work on replenishing them. Birchtrees are easy to cultivate. Plant one for a future generation of canoe builders.

Actually Chris, the problem isn't with planting the birch.
After a birch is cut they spout suckers like a basket willow does. You get a clump of birch instead of a single tree. Then they grow bushy and crooked instead of tall and straight unless they have to compete for light.

You need need a mature forest instead of second growth to grow a good birch tree. It takes about three generations to do it. (Three generations of the forest, not people.)
We need to be replanting forests, not just a few trees.

If you look at the tree Angus cut in the film you should notice not just how big around it was but how far up the trunk it was that diameter for. That tree had very little taper. Open grown trees are never like that.

For a canoe they needed the bark to be flexible instead of brittle, not too thin, not to thick, from a straight tree and big enough but not too big.
They can't have branches where they take the bark so the tree needs to have grown tall fast to reach the sun, and have been well shaded on the trunk so the lower branches died and fell off early.

The cedar is the same. I remember some of the old fellows that would stop when walking through the woods and clip every twig of a likely looking cedar as high as they could reach with the axe so that when it got big enough to use it would have no knots.
In summer that would be about 8 feet up, in winter it could be 14 feet or more depending on how deep the snow was.
By likely I mean growing in the right kind of place.
Where the trunk was shaded and it had to grow tall

I don't know if the attitude was really different than our clearcutting and strip mining style.
I suspect a lot of it was just that there were not enough natives to strip the resources like we do. A lot of native harvest methods were pretty destructive though.
Notice how Angus had no hesitation about stripping bark from trees just for the bark. If you did that today it would be considered a crime in most places.

Anyhow, I think I read that book about The Survival of the Birchbark Canoe quite a while ago. I seem to remember that in the book he was needing to drive very long distances just to find trees big enough.

I wish I could remember the name of the guy from La Verendrye.
There was a younger fellow who married a his daughter and got taught how to build. This son inlaw used to do new replicas and repairs to artifact canoes.

The son-in law wrote a book too, I just remembered that.

OK, Google is your friend. (La Verendrye, birch, canoe)

The younger guy's name was David Gidmark, the book he wrote was "Birchbark Canoe, The story of an apprenticeship with the Indians."
I have never had a chance to read it though.

According to his bio he would be 62 now. I met him and his wife back in the early eighties. It also says his wife's family was Algonquin, not Cree (my mistake).

He had one of his dad's canoes with him.
It was quite the nice item.
Like I said, the brown rind from next to the wood went to the outside of the canoe for smoothness and was scraped for decoration. The ribs were in between the gunwales and never capped because you want them able to be pushed up rather than split the bark if it shrinks over winter from drying out.

I do remember Mr Gidmark telling me a new birch canoe would cost about a thousand dollars a foot. So $16,00 for a 16 foot canoe, and that was in 1982, 83 or 84.

I still don't have the old guy's name though.

I almost got into the crew behind the scenes and technology of the day aspects in detail, but I figured most people would be bored by the whole thing so I kept it light. LOL

On the upside they may have used a spring wound camera with crystal sync, so it my only have been the sound equipment that needed batteries. You can also see in several shots that they used reflectors to pump up the volume of light instead of additional electric lighting.

Still, it wouldn't have been like Les Stroud and his backpack full of equipment. It's amazing how large a "Three minute" (100ft) roll of 16mm film is and how that compares to a 60 minute HD tape or whatever Les Uses. Then again, there's the issue of batteries...

Good point Nicodemus. I do go on a bit at times.
I don't know what the term for verbal diarrhea is when I do it on a keyboard.