At the Sault Ste Marie, on the river connecting Lake Superior and
Huron, Henry spent part of the spring of 1763-4, and engaged with a
few French Canadians and Indians in making maple sugar, the season for
which--April--was now at hand.
A temporary house for eight persons was built in a convenient part of
the maple woods, distant about three miles from the fort. The men
then gathered the bark of white birch trees, and made out of it
vessels to hold the sap which was to flow from the incisions they cut
in the bark of the maple trees. Into these cuts they introduced wooden
spouts or ducts, and under them were placed the birch-bark vessels.
When these were filled, the sweet liquid was poured into larger
buckets, and the buckets were emptied into bags of elkskin containing
perhaps a hundred gallons. Boilers (probably of metal, introduced by
the French) were next set up in the camp over fires kept burning day
and night, and the maple sap thus boiled became, by concentration,
maple sugar.
The women attended to all the business of sugar manufacture, while the
men cut wood and went out hunting and fishing to secure food for the
community; though, as a matter of fact, sugar and syrup were their
main sustenance during all this absence from home. "I have known
Indians", wrote Henry, "to live for a time wholly on maple sugar and
syrup and become fat.
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