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.