Reconsider about using full-length, clear, red cedar boards at $100 each per 1x6. For a standard tandem canoe, you'll need two 1x6 full-length boards per side, or four 1x6s for the entire canoe; that's $400. There's a better and much cheaper way to get the boards you need.
If you use a combination of 8' and 10' boards for your 16' canoe, you can visit small sawmills within driving distance and get roughsawn, air-dried boards for less than 1/4 of that $100 price. Plus, if you don't use 16' or 18' boards (only available in Western Red Cedar, Sitka Spruce, Redwood, and a few other western woods), a whole new world of wood species becomes available to you, depending on what the mill cuts. White cedar, basswood, pine, butternut, and other appropriate species for strips might be available. If the boards of the species you find has a few small knots, that's not a significant problem. A 1/2" diameter knot will only affect two 1/4" strips, and you can probably use some short strips anyway so just break the strip at the knot and mill the rest of the strip. If you're lucky enough to get perfectly clear boards, you'll need only eight or nine 1x6 boards, each board a little over half the length of the canoe. For instance, four 8' boards and four 10' boards will be perfect for a canoe up to 17' long. If you're building a 15' Ranger canoe, you can get by with all 8' boards.
If you try non full-length boards, you'll find everything about handling, ripping, and milling the strips much simplified. And you will be surprised that shorter boards make the stripping much easier, particularly when closing up the bottom "football" and working toward the ends of the canoe. If you stagger joints, and match the color and grain of adjoining strips, and make a neat butt joint, you won't even notice the inconspicuous joints. And when spectators view a well-done cedarstrip, the overall WOW factor is so great that they definitely will not notice little lines marking the joints.
To put the $400 for one canoe's boards into perspective, I just purchased 26 1x6 white cedar, air-dried, roughsawn boards in lengths from 8' 4" to just over 10' from a small sawmill about 2 hours from my home. Two of us, using a very well-equipped shop with power feeds on saws and routers, took those roughhewn boards and in one long day ended up with enough very precise 7/8" x 1/4" cove-and-bead strips for two 16' canoes and one 18' 6" canoe. Total cash outlay was under $250 for three canoes. You decide if you really want and need full-length strips.
If you're in Chicago, you'll have to drive a ways to find small sawmills in the farm country of southern Wisconsin, but it's an option worth considering.
The finest cedarstrip canoe I've ever seen was built by my son-in-law in my shop from roughsawn 8' white cedar boards. I took it to a wooden canoe show for him when he finished it and turned down a $5,000 offer to purchase it from a well-to-do gentleman who was smitten by the quality and beauty of the canoe.
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