Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/146

 in their sports. When the spring or pond is at a distance from the town, they dig a ditch from it that supplies them with water."

The village consisted of seventeen joint-tenement houses and a councilhouse, arranged around a central open space, and surrounded with a palisade. Here the Algonkin lodge, unlike that of the Ojibwas, is a long, round-roofed house, apparently from fifty to eighty feet in length, covered with movable matting in the place of bark, and large enough to accommodate several families. The suggestion of this author, that "the buildings were mostly those of chiefs and men of rank," embodies the precise error which has repeated itself from first to last with respect to the houses of American aborigines. Because the houses at Pomeiock were large, they were the residences of chiefs; and because the House of the Nuns at Uxmal was of palatial extent, it was the exclusive residence of an Indian potentate—conclusions opposed to the whole theory of Indian life and institutions. Indian chiefs, the continent over, were housed with the people, and no better, as a rule, than the poorest of them.

"Some of their towns," says the same author, "are not enclosed with a palisade and are much more pleasant; Secotan, for example, here drawn from nature. The houses are more scattered and a greater degree of comfort and cultivation is observable, with gardens in which tobacco (E) is cultivated, woods filled with deer, and fields of corn. In the fields they erect a stage (F), in which a sentry is stationed to guard against the depredations of birds and thieves. Their corn they plant in rows (H), for it grows, so large, with thick stalk and broad leaves, that one plant would stint the other and it would never arrive at maturity. They have also a curious place (C) where they convene with their neighbors at their feasts, as more fully shown on Plate 20, and from which they go to the feast (D) On the opposite side is their place of prayer (B), and near to it the sepulchre of their chiefs (A). * * * They have gardens for melons (I), and a place (K) where they build their sacred fires. At a little distance from the town is the pond (L) from which they obtain their water."

The houses of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia proper, as described