Excuse me, but Exapno Mapcase, t hanks for your post #10 - I learned a lot! Very interesting stuff. 
Thank you very much.
This also gives me an opportunity to correct a typo.
One of my two references was to Chaplain. I got it right the other time, but I want to emphasize that the correct name is Samuel de Champlain.
I once went on a long wilderness canoe trip with a person from Germany who had no comprehension what-so-ever of the size of the wilderness in northern Ontario.
We used 1:50,000 topographic maps. The first few days, the maps were coloured and more or less set out where the river was. Then after a few more days, as we dropped down through the Canadian Shield, the maps ceased to be coloured, bore only a vague resemblance to what the river was up to, and were titled “PROVISIONAL”. Essentially they had been drawn from aerial photo surveys and had not been corrected by surveyors on the ground.
Eventually we popped out onto the ocean, and one day we paddled out to an island. My paddling partner wanted to see where it was on the map, but there was no map for this place. With a straight face, I explained that at the start of the trip we had good maps, but as we moved further into the wilderness we only had bad provisional maps, and for places that had not yet been discovered we had no maps. She asked if we had just discovered this island, and with a complete disregard for the truth, I said yes. Of course people had been paddling that coast for about 10,000 years, but I didn’t have in me to point this out.
We eventually made our way back to civilization, and she returned to Germany, happy in the knowledge that she had discovered an island in the Arctic Ocean.
Metal in general only rarely exists in metallic form in nature - usually it is combined with other elements in the form of ores and must be smelted and refined in order to be useful.
Gold sometimes is found in the metallic form, as nuggets, but is too soft for tools. Copper is also sometimes found in uncombined form, called native copper, which the Indians sometimes hammered into arrowheads or other tools. But it was too rare in most places for general use.
In general, yes.
Pottery. Food could also be cooked in watertight baskets by dropping in red-hot stones that had been heated in a fire.
Of course, the most famous case of settlers who followed a poorly planned route and got into trouble is that of the Donner Party. The American Experience on PBS had a great program about them. A trasncript of the show and related information can be found here.
No, I didn’t even come close to saying that. During pre-Columbian times, Indians north of Mexico didn’t know how to extract metal from ore. Some Indians, particularly those living around the Great Lakes and Alaska, were able to find natural copper in it’s pure form and they made a variety of things out of them. Drill tips, arrow heads, supposedly even breastplates by simply hammering the copper they found. Generally speaking, their stone tools were superior to whatever metal ones they could fashion.
For the most part, yes. You’ll find that tomahawks are one of the items whites brought to trade with Indians. Even if an Indian had a little copper for a knife or a tomahawk the European steel was so much superior that it was in demand.
Clay makes for a fine cooking vessel. Also, you can use animal skins as cooking pots in a variety of ways. One, you can simply take an animal skin filled with water and start adding rocks that had been sitting in a fire. Alternatively, you can just put the animal skin itself over an open flame and boil the water. The skin won’t generally catch on fire.
Marc
The route wasn’t so bad. The timing, however… :eek:
The timing was largely due to the bad route. They took an unproved “short cut” that required a lot of additional labor to clear a passable route for their wagons. This and several other bad decisions delayed them so much that they were caught by the snows. If they had followed the normal route they almost certainly would have made it over the pass in time. (They were only a few days from safety when the snow caught them.)