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How did the tulip tree help settle America?

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By Chelsie Vandaveer

June 11, 2002

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When Europeans came to settle North America, they found most modes of transportation—horses, oxen, and wagons—useless. Forests covered the land from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The easiest and best routes inland were the streams. Most were not navigable by boat and explorers adopted the eastern native transportation, the dugout.

Indians Making a Dugout Canoe, from "Admiranda Narratio...", Published by Theodore de Bry Framed Giclee Print Theodor de Bry
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Linnaeus named the tree, Liriodendron tulipifera, "lily-tree bearing tulips". The Lenni Lenape (Delaware tribe) called it, muxulhemenshi, "tree from which canoes are made". Dugouts were made from a number of trees, but the tulip tree was one of the quickest to yield a craft.

Tulip tree wood did not last long exposed to water; these dugouts were generally a single use craft. The sheer size of tulip trees provided natives, then settlers and explorers with large canoes that could haul loads and maintain a shallow draft. The wood was workable with only fire and adzes.

Cabin and Historical Village at the Daniel Boone Homestead, Defiance, Missouri, USA Photographic Print Walter Bibikow
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Legends say that when Daniel Boone saw the smoke rising from a neighboring cabin, he moved on. In reality, when Kentucky became the fifteenth state in 1792, Daniel Boone and the settlers of Boonesborough had no clear title other than having settled and cleared the land. Litigation arose and the community lost.

In 1799, the community felled a tulip tree and fashioned a 60-foot dugout. Thirty-five people left Kentucky, household goods and families traveled in the hollowed tree; the men drove the livestock overland. In St. Louis, the Spanish welcomed Daniel Boone's group to the territory. Granted land on the banks of the Missouri River, the outcasts founded the first major American settlement of the West.

Daniel Boone's Missouri Home website has pictures, tours and events information. The Historic Daniel Boone Home and Boonesfield Village are part of the Lindenwood University system, St. Charles, Missouri. To learn more about the Historic Daniel Boone Home and Boonesfield Village, click on the link:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/7109/

Roanoke Revisited, part of the Heritage Education Program of the National Park Service has an information page on native canoes. To learn more about these craft, click on the link:

http://www.nps.gov/fora/indcanoes.htm

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One of America's loveliest native trees!

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Zone 3 to 9

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