Last Trip of the Pokahantas
The Lake Bonnaparte Conversation Club News Letter reported that several people saw or salvaged pieces of the old wooden canoe which for a few years, at first with a wreath, and then with only, moss, mouldered and romatacised the bouldered shore of Round Island, until some of it was used to start a fire and the rest fell onto the ice and finally departed for the far shore when the ice went out. Some of us at Loon Island saw fragments which we recognized by their curve, as pieces of the canoe which had been with our family for generations.
Here are Dorothy Failing Warren and her father HerbertA. Failing in a picture taken by Vera Drury Failing on the Cranberry Lake Inlet, East branch of the Oswegatchie about 1921.

The canoe may have originally belonged to Dorothy's grandfather, Dr Charles Druiry of Natural Bridge who, like the Failings, then had a camp on the South East shore.
The canoe moved to Loon Island, which came to be called Failing's Island by most people, sometime after 1928 when H.A. Failing bought the island from the logger Gustaveson, for $500 dollars.
1933 MapLoon Island at top, Round Island at Left
What happend to the wooden canoe was that it was replaced by the alumnium canoe. Here Dorothy and Ernest Warren paddle a rented one up the Oswegatchie around 1961. It is likey that the other canoe from which the picture wa taken was is the second hand red gruman aluminum canoe which Herbert Lee Warren son of Dorothy and Ernest, bough with money from a paper route and a matching grant from Grandmother Warren, That canoe has never had or really needed a touch of new paint or a f any sort patch, Herb and I were unable to tear the bottom out of it by riding it down a dry falls one evening late on the middle branch
Dorothy Failing Warren, as seen in this picture taken on Round Island a few years ago, was about to paddle, or had recently paddled, a fiberglass kayak in the gulf of Alaska.

She had always been a hoarder, but Mama Dot volunteered to give up the old canoe to make room for a new plastic one back in the eighties, but Herb said that if she didn't want it, he did. Herb took it across the gunnels of the outboard for its last ride across the lake, and he put it up on that rock with a wreath on it as a memorial to someone, or something, to itself, or to whatever you think.
"Who walks in solitude

And inhabiteth the wood,

Choosing light, wave,

rock and bird..

Into that forester shall pass,

From these companions,

power and grace.

Clean shall he be, without,

within, '

R.W. Emerson, as inscribed by DFW on an album of Pictures she , Val, and I took of each other on a fishing hike in Colorado.

Canoe back to Bonaparte 1933

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