Demonstrating a maple sugar bush and springtime sap gathering, this colourful lithograph, take from Thomas Conant's Upper Canada Sketches in the late 19th century, illustrates natives with local settlers from the back country gathering and preparing sap for maple sugar. Today the provice of Quebec supplies more than 50 percent of the world's supply of maple sugar [C.J. Humber Collection]

The people of the First Nations had an age-old collecting technique. As the warming days of early spring brought sap rising in the maple woods, they cut a diagonal slash in each lower trunk and inserted a hollow reed through which the sap dripped into a small bark container. These were subsequently taken to bigger bark or log containers where fire-heated stones were dropped into them until the sap had boiled down to a dark, sweet syrup often referred to as "sweet water," especially when used in the cooking of venison. Further boiling produced maple sugar. European settlers basically kept to this pattern, merely replacing bark vessels with either wood or metal pails and large cast-iron kettles hung by chains over boiling fires.

Indeed, for many subsequent generations throughout both French and English Canada, the "maple moon" month or the "sugaring off" period would remain a special occasion on the country calendar. Then, in the melting days and freezing nights from March into April (depending on local weather), rural families would gather at their shanties in the sugar bush to collect and boil the sap - and to make maple taffy or maple candy for young and old alike by pouring syrup with the consistency of melted wax out onto a clean, white snowbank.