DUGOUT CANOE FOUND AT HESS POINT

By Harriet Klein Allen

Note: Highlighting the importance of preserving notes or documents of historical value, Priest Lake pioneer Harriet Allen donated her personal papers to the MAC Museum in Spokane prior to her death in 1988. The following recollection is found there, written in pencil in an old essay book:

(About 1936 or 1937), a roaring storm during the night slashed at the beach and the waves rolled farther up than for many years. A long sandy and rock base for an old boathouse for our one-cylinder inboard launch had become a fine playground for the children. When the wind died down next day, we could see an outline of an old log dugout canoe.

Mr. J.E. McBurney, an historian as well as an artist, came down to look with his wife, Alice, who had infinite patience for doing "fiddly" jobs and said we must work carefully and see what it is. So we took the children’s little sand shovel, tablespoons and a whisk broom and dug very carefully. As the shape and length emerged, it was very wet and heavy, as it had been buried under water and sand for a long time.

We got the whole end and sides out intact for about ten feet and then one side was broken and apparently gone. But the other side and bottom went on until we had a shape about 22 feet long. Gradually as it dried out, we put poles under it and got it above the high water line.

Mr. McBurney felt it had been used in the 1870s because of a type of nail holding a patch which had been put on. We don’t know when and how it was washed up but it was covered in 1903 when the Chants started to build this cabin (lot 23 now).

Dick Rogers and I talked about taking it into the Eastern Washington State Museum in Spokane but they really didn’t have room. People came to see it and, in the usual tourist fashion, took fragments.

We had not idea it would dry so fast and break up, but then hunters or fishermen used some of it in a bonfire one fall so we carried it up and put it in a shelter Grandpa Slee built about 1903. If we had known how to preserve the old dugout by constant moisture or pore-filling varnish, we could have saved it.