Willie, the wood is the cheapest kind of shelving grade white pine. You can see in the picture two vertical bars of oak by my dog. They stiffen that side where I found the board flexing badly as I started to install the seat. The pith from the very center of the tree ran through the board there and weakened it severely. I used it anyway, because I had too much effort invested in the boards by then, and I wanted to know just how strong it really has to be. In those photo's I had a single coat of varnish on the outside.

If you haven't done the carving of the dugout's shape yet, put it off a little till you can get the library to see some of the designs they used with narrow pine logs. I'm going to try a couple of URL's since I'm not sue which one will take. This is the "dough dish" design that may work best with your log. This was the page at the archives   and this is the actual .jpg

I googled "dugout canoe" and "native american" using the quotes. Interesting, I also just tried googling in their image files, and they have 696 "dugout canoe" images! I quit about 280 pictures into the list, but I saw some interesting links and photo's.

Jeff Smith