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Huron Smith on sugar camp life

Huron Smith conducted ethnobotanical fieldwork among the Ojibwe during three trips, which lasted six weeks in duration. The first trip was made in June 1923 to the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in Vilas County. He visited the same region again later in the fall. During the spring of 1924, one trip was made to the Leech Lake Reservation, in Minnesota, where the Pillager Band of Ojibwa lives on Bear Island and the surrounding mainland. (Smith 333, 1932).
The sugar camps are rather permanent affairs, and the framework of the boiling house with its upright poles around the fired place to hold the kettles is left intact...In early April, the Ojibwe visit their camps, the men to repair the camps and the storage vats of hollowed logs, and to cut firewood, the women to see that the sap buckets and mokoks are scrupulously clean and watertight. If some can not be repaired, rolls of birchbark are there to make new ones. The whole family then moves to the camp and live in the large wigwam, while they make sugar for a month.
from
Huron Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians, Bulletin of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, Vol. 4, No. 3, p. 395, Plates 46-77 May 2, 1932. Link to document: http://www.mpm.edu/downloads/collections/research/ethnobotany/ojibwe/publication.pdf

Copyright <div class="stylized-text"> See Milwaukee Public Museum website for more information; http://www.mpm.edu/collections/research/ethnobotany/ojibwe/</div>

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