The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shelters, Shacks and Shanties, by D.C. Beard

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Title: Shelters, Shacks and Shanties

Author: D.C. Beard

Release Date: March 5, 2009 [EBook #28255]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Shelters,
Shacks, and Shanties

[Illustration: Hunter's cabin showing how projecting logs may be
utilized.]

Shelters,
Shacks, and Shanties

By
D. C. BEARD

With Illustrations by the Author

NEW YORK
Charles Scribner's Sons
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published September, 1914

DEDICATED TO
DANIEL BARTLETT BEARD
BECAUSE OF HIS
LOVE OF THE BIG OUTDOORS

FOREWORD

As this book is written for boys of all ages, it has been divided under
two general heads, "The Tomahawk Camps" and "The Axe Camps," that is,
camps which may be built with no tool but a hatchet, and camps that will
need the aid of an axe.

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. But as one of the members of the Camp-Fire Club of
America, as one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, and as the
founder of the Boy Pioneers of America, it would not be proper for the
author to admit for one moment that there can be such a thing as a camp
without a _camp-fire_, and for that reason the tree folks and the "missing
link" whose remains were found in Java, and to whom the scientists gave
the awe-inspiring name of Pithecanthropus erectus, cannot be counted as
campers, because _they did not know how to build a camp-fire_; neither can