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Shelters, Shacks and Shanties
Shelters, Shacks and Shanties
The smallest boys can build some of the simple shelters and the older boys can build the more difficult ones. The reader may, if he likes, begin with the first of the book, build his way through it, and graduate by building the log houses; in doing this he will be closely following the history of the human race, because ever since our arboreal ancestors with prehensile toes scampered among the branches of the pre-glacial forests and built nestlike shelters in the trees, men have made themselves shacks for a temporary refuge.
Book Excerpt
in the Eastern States--Pennsylvania, for instance--the Iroquois Indians were making primitive camps and using every available overhanging cliff for that purpose.
To-day any one may use a pointed stick on the floor of one of these half caves and unearth, as I have done, numerous potsherds, mussel shells, bone awls, flint arrow-heads, split bones of large game animals, and the burnt wood of centuries of camp-fires which tell the tale of the first lean-to shelter used by camping man in America.
Half Caves
The projecting ledges of bluestone that have horizontal seams form half caves from the falling apart of the lower layers of the cliff caused by rain and ice and often aided by the fine roots of the black birch, rock oak, and other plants, until nature has worked long enough as a quarry-man and produced half caves large enough to shelter a stooping man (Figs. 8, 9, and 10).
Although not always necessary, it is sometimes best to make a shelter for the open face of such a cave, even if
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Gutenberg.org has copies of this e-book for download with the pictures. While some of the ideas are helpful, the pictures themselves are not so much step-by-step as just an occasional drawing of framing. Still, the designs are pretty exhaustive, and I learned a few things.
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If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then this otherwise well written and informative book has been robbed of several 100 thousand. While the deletion of the book's original illustrations in a novel is of minor importance, this practice in the case of an instructional book such as this one is devastating in it's impact on the usefulness of the volume.
The remainder of the manual presented here is an extended preview of the work the author intended, suitable for the casual historian or as incentive for the serious student of the field to locate a true, complete version of the work.
The remainder of the manual presented here is an extended preview of the work the author intended, suitable for the casual historian or as incentive for the serious student of the field to locate a true, complete version of the work.
05/13/2009
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