I live in one of the areas of Montana that the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, traversed during the early 1800s (1803-1806). Beaverhead Rock, the formation that Sacagawea recognized as being close to the summer grounds of her nation, is one of the local landmarks.
Eighty percent of the Lewis and Clark expedition was accomplished by water. The explorers used various types of boats, barges, canoes and pirogues to accomplish the round trip journey, and I think the most fascinating of these are the dugout canoes that they carved during their travels.
The canoes were carved out of a single tree, using green cottonwood or Ponderosa pine because those woods are easy to shape when wet. The outside of the tree was kept wet, while small coal fires were set on the log to burn the wood away. As the wood burned, metal implements, such as axes and adzes were used to carve away the burned portions of the log, until it was hollowed out.
The completed dugout canoes averaged 30 feet long and 3 feet wide and weighed about a ton. They could carry a minimum of 800 pounds of cargo along with 7 men. The explorers also built larger canoes, 50-55 feet long, for travel on the Columbia river. These canoes could carry 2-3 tons of cargo along with 4-6 men. The larger canoes took 12 days to complete; some of the smaller canoes were built in 5 days.
The explorers carved 6 canoes from cottonwood trees at Fort Mandan
in what is now North Dakota before heading west. One of the canoes was abandoned near the Big Hole River in Montana and the rest put into storage when the expedition shifted from waterways to horseback in order to travel over the Rocky Mountains into Idaho.
Once they crossed the Rockies, the men made five new dugout canoes from Ponderosa pine. All of these canoes were wrecked or sold before they made it past Columbia Falls. On the return journey, the explorers retrieved the canoes they had stored in Montana and used them to travel to the Great Falls of the Missouri. During the journey they carved a total of 15 canoes. William Clark carved two canoes near Billings Montana that were so unstable that they had to be lashed together. I bet that after days of burning and scraping, they were pretty determined to use them in anyway possible.