what's moosewood?

My first experience with many of the farming activities I love now - sugaring, training draft animals, spinning wool - was through Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Farmer Boy which she wrote about her husband's (Almanzo Wilder) childhood in upstate New York, not too far from where I live. The more I farm the more I realize that she did a really amazing job describing how things were done 150 years ago. I don't often question the methods she talks about in her books as I do with other fiction books describing skills from the past in a way that I believe is simplified or makes little sense to someone who has done it. (Except for training your oxen with carrots. I dunno if carrots were better back then or what, but mine never had an interest them at all. I had an old timer tell me that he fed cows potatoes in the winter, but the cows had to be pretty hungry to eat the potatoes and he had never heard of cows eating carrots, but that they might.)

This is Laura's description of tapping and gathering sap:

Father had a big yoke and Almanzo had a little yoke. From the ends of the yoke hung strips of moosewood bark with large iron hooks on them and a big wooden bucket swung from each hook.
In every maple tree Father had bored a small hole, and fitted a little wooden spout into it. Sweet maple sap was dripping from the spouts into small pails.
Going from tree to tree, Almanzo emptied the sap into big buckets. The weight hung from his shoulders, but he steadied the buckets with his hands to keep them from swinging. When they were full, he went to the great cauldron and emptied them into it.
The huge cauldron hung from a pole set between two trees. Father kept a bonfire blazing under it, to boil the sap.
Almanzo loved trudging through the frozen wild woods. He walked on snow that had never been walked on before, and only his own tracks followed behind him. Busily he emptied the little pails into the buckets, and whenever he was thirsty, the drank some of the thin sweet icy-cold sap.

Our spouts are made of metal and our big buckets are plastic, but I've often wished for a yoke to use while gathering sap. We use a pan with some dividers in it to boil our sap down, but many people still boil in a single pan.

I think it's cool that the basic set up for making syrup has not changed in at least 100 years. (oh, and google says moosewood is a striped maple.)