Prompted by listening to one of the oral histories, Dr. Maida Barton Follini provided us with the following:
Below is the tepee made by my father, H. Allen Barton, following the instructions in Seton’s Book of Woodcraft. The covering was of canvas ordered from Sears & Roebuck, (not deer skins or bison skins as we did not have this original material!). The poles were cut by my father and brothers, David and Allen Barton, using straight young black birch trees from our woods. My brother and I slept out in this tepee one summer, (we made beds of sticks tied together and fastened to logs on each side, following Seton’s directions.) On top of that we put bags of straw for mattresses. The tepee was in our back lawn, and my father made a cooking fire place nearby using two logs for the sides, backing against a boulder, and making a grill out of extra curtain rods we did not need from the house. We cooked suppers out there, most of that summer – we were working on “coups’ of campcraft — and camp cooking.
