798 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SOME INDIAN HOMES. 



By R. W. SHUFELDT, M. D. 



TTyHILE attached to a military expedition against the Sioux 

 VV in Wyoming in 1877, I saw those Indians construct at the 

 various camps we made what I take to be the most primitive form 

 of house built by human hands. It was simply a shelter, or tepee 

 as they called it, made with the green boughs cut from the cotton- 

 wood trees. Without any especial preparation of the ground, they 

 implanted the cut ends of the limbs in two parallel rows about eight 

 feet long and five feet apart. The tops were adroitly bent over the 

 inclosed space and fastened together along the middle line, thus 

 creating a semi-cylindrical shelter open at both ends. These tepees 

 were merely intended for two or three men to sleep in, all the 

 cooking and other arrangements being performed outside. 



In permanent summer camps these tepees are built in a sub- 

 hemispherical shape, the ground upon which they are erected be- 

 ing previously cleaned off, moderately scooped out, and the earth 

 thus obtained banked around the in-stuck ends of the boughs on 

 the inside of the structure. They are then trimmed up and prop- 

 erly covered outside with long prairie grass, so placed as to shed 

 the rain. Often, too, they threw an old buffalo-hide over the top 

 as an additional protection. 



In 1886 I observed the Navajos in northwestern New Mexico 

 building similar houses to the ones I have just described; but 

 those Indians also build a more durable structure in their hogan 

 a conical house of logs plastered with mud, and with a door at 

 the side. Navajos, too, are improving in their home-building, 

 more especially where they have taken up their abode in the 

 neighborhood of frontier military garrisons. All this I have ex- 

 plained in a paper read before the Anthropological Society of 

 Washington (March 17, 1891), and which appeared in the Proceed- 

 ings of the United States National Museum.* 



Many other Indians build these temporary shelter-houses, and 

 among them the Apaches of Arizona. In Fig. 1 of the present 

 paper they are well shown as they are constructed by those In- 

 dians in a summer camp. Here they have protected the top by 

 large pieces of old canvas, thus making one of them quite water- 

 proof. Corbusier, in the September number of the American 

 Antiquarian for 1886, well describes one of these shelters as 

 erected by the Apache-Mojaves. He says : " They live in circu- 

 lar brush huts (u-ivah') about five feet high, and from six to eight 



* Shufeldt, R. W. The Evolution of House-building among the Navajo Indians. Vol. 

 xv, pp. 279-282, Plates XLI-XLIII. Washington, 1892. 



