Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/141

 seven distinct apartments, each thirty feet square, by means of broad boards set up on end from the floor (o the roof The apartments are separated from each other by a passage or alley four feet wide, extending-through the whole depth of the house, and the only entrance is from the alley through a small hole about twenty inches wide and not more than three feet high. The roof is formed of rafters and round poles laid on horizontally. The whole is covered with a double roof of bark of white cedar." The apartments, as in the previous case of the tires, may be supposed to indicate the number of groups into which the great household was subdivided for the practice of communism.

Elsewhere, speaking of the houses of the Clahclellahs, they remark:

"These houses are uncommonly large; one of them measured one hundred and sixty by forty feet, and the frames are constructed in the usual manner. * * * Most of the houses are built of boards and covered with bark, though some of the more inferior kind are constructed wholly of cedar bark, kept smooth and flat by small splinters fixed crosswise through the bark, at the distance of twelve or fourteen inches apart."

The houses of the coast tribes (Clatsops and Chinooks) are also described. "The hoases in this neighborhood are all large wooden buildings, ranging in length from twenty to sixty feet, and from fourteen to twenty in width. They are constructed in the following manner: two posts of split timber or more, agreeable to the number of partitions, are sunk in the ground, above which they rise to the height of fourteen or eighteen feet. They are hollowed at the top, so as to receive the end of a round beam or pole (ridge-pole) stretching from one to the other, and forming the upper point of the roof for the whole extent of the building. On each side of this range is placed another, which forms the eaves of the house, and is about five feet high; and as the building is often sunk to the depth of four or five feet, the eaves come very near the surface of the earth. Smaller pieces of timber are now extended by pairs, in the form of rafters, from the lower to the upper beams, where they are attached at both ends with cords of cedar bark. On these rafters two or three ranges of small poles are placed horizontally, and secured in the same way with strings of cedar bark. The