16 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



pieces, upon which wattles of willow withes are made, and the whole 

 is covered with willows. I have known such a communal house 

 to be built large enough to accommodate from seventy-five to one 

 hundred and twenty-five persons — all the members of a little tribe — 

 while at other times the same tribes have been found occupying the 

 rude dwellings above mentioned. Nor have I been able to discover 

 their reasons for changing from one to the other. This has been 

 observed : that the communal houses are but rarely used. 



Many of the Indians of California build houses made of wind- 

 riven slabs and poles inclined against a central ridge-pole and banked 

 with earth, sometimes but part way up the sides of the inclined pole, 

 sometimes quite over the top. At one end of such a dwelling an 

 aperture is left for the escape of smoke. The Navajos often build 

 similar lodges, except that they are conical in shape and have a 

 peculiar entrance — a kind of booth like a porte cochere. In the 

 eastern portion of the United States, as among the Iroquois, large 

 oblong house were made of poles and slabs. Many of these houses 

 were communal. Around Pyramid Lake, and in many other por- 

 tions of the country their dwellings were made of reeds, called in 

 the West tides. Sometimes these houses were made somewhat 

 symmetrically of poles, into which the tules were woven as a kind 

 of wattle. At other times they made fascines of the reeds and used 

 them in the construction of their houses, and I have had described 

 to me houses made of fascines and wattled tules on the shores of 

 Pyramid Lake and other lakes of the West, and ofttimes built out 

 over the water. In a large portion of the United States the climate 

 is arid, and naked sandstone rocks appear in great abundance, 

 while forests are very rare. In all of these regions the Indians built 

 of stone. Sometimes they walled up the front of a cave, or built a 

 house under an overhanging cliff, using the wall of rock behind as 

 a part of the dwelling. Sometimes, where rocks were friable, they 

 excavated chambers in the sides of the cliffs. The cliff dwellings 

 and cavate dwellings are found in great abundance in New Mexico, 

 Arizona, and some portions of Utah. Other dwellings have been 

 discovered in certain hills of Arizona that are natural truncated 

 cones. In such a case the summit of the hill is a volcanic breccia, 

 exceedingly friable, through which shafts were sunk into a more 

 friable breccia below. In this more friable rock extensive cham- 

 bers were excavated, and the entrance to these chambers was 

 through a shaft from above by means of a ladder. With the 



