The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Fences

Fences


THIS is undoubtedly one of the first of our North American fences, the palisade surrounding an early Indian village. It clearly shows the heavy supporting posts, and the overlapping, indirect entrance. In case of enemy attack this entrance way could quickly be blocked by heavy cross-logs. The tops of the palisades were charred by fire to point them, to make them harder to get over, and to prevent their decay. The lines of several of these ancient Indian palisades can still be traced in the Huron villages in Simcoe County, in Ontario, Canada, as well as at Fort Ste. Marie, where they were unearthed in excavations carried out by the Royal Ontario Museum. The French enclosed their forts with stockades, for defensive purposes, in the Indian manner, sometimes setting them in earthworks, or dry stone walls.

AN EARLY Indian buffalo pound on the far Western Canadian prairies. It was a form of funnel-shaped stockaded or fenced trap, into whose open end the great beasts were herded by the shouting, gesticulating, war-whooping biaves, and thence driven inward to the narrow end where they were quickly dispatched.

The fencing of the pound usually comprised stakes driven into the ground at irregular intervals. Altogether it was an exciting and highly dangerous pastime, but one of the utmost importance, as the buffalo meat was a staple Indian diet. With dried buffalo chips the Indians built fires for cooking and warmth. The hide served for clothing, for tepee shelter, for robes, for blanketing, and for endless other uses, including the travois, that odd vehicle without wheels, devised for dragging loads behind horses.

A DEER pound, as pictured in Champlain's Voyages and Discoveries, published in 1619. It is probably the "earliest pictorial representation of a Canadian fence ... its details are obviously erroneous . . . the Indians are too large in proportion to the animals, the trees and the fence . . . the engraver has made the fence much too finished ... it suggests picketing, sawn and dovetailed together ... in reality it must have been constructed of rough logs, possibly with branches interwoven among the uprights."

The beaters were apparently using large bones to strike some hollow or flat object, such as a shell or piece of hardwood, to frighten the deer, wolves, foxes and rabbits into the pound, where they were being met at the bottleneck exit by four Indians armed with spears.