﻿NO. 7 SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, I926 183 



one claimed these lowly creatures as their animal protector, nor repre- 

 sented them among their crests. It was, moreover, an unpardonable 

 offense against the amenities to have on one's pole more totems or 

 crests than one was entitled to. 



It is customary among the Tlingit and Tsimshian Indians to erect 

 their totem poles several feet in front of their dwellings or in line 

 several feet to the right or left of the house. At old Tongass village 

 the writer found in front of the ruins of one of the largest houses in 

 the village a number of poles which had been erected in honor of 

 several maiden aunts of the former occupant of the house. The Haida 

 at Kasaan built their totem poles in contact with the front of the 

 house itself, a hole two or three feet square cut through the base of 

 the pole serving as entrance to the house, ingress being possible only 

 by crawling. 



Occasionally a niche about one foot square was cut at the hollowed 

 back of the pole some 15 feet above the ground. Into this recessed 

 niche was placed a carved or painted box containing the cremated 

 remains of the former head of the house in whose honor the pole 

 had been erected. Several of such grave boxes were seen by the writer 

 in the poles at Kasaan and at Village Island, another abandoned 

 village. 



The houses at Kasaan were placed in an irregular long row facing 

 the shelving beach. The totem poles at the front of the houses are 

 almost at the water's edge at high tide. The action of the salt water 

 on the base of the pole undoubtedly served as a preservative of the 

 wood as all the poles thus situated are still free from decay at their 

 base while those farther removed from the beach are much rotted and 

 decayed at the base. 



The frame work of the house and the roof usually rest uj^on four 

 posts commonly hollowed out at the back. Upon these house posts rest 

 two enormous unhewn log plates sometimes each more than 50 feet 

 long. These unhewn plates extend horizontally the entire length of 

 the building without any other support than that of the end posts. 

 These huge plates, the purlines, the hewn cedar planks for the side 

 walls, " shakes " for the roof, and the logs for the posts and carved 

 columns must be gathered from the forest with great labor, sometimes 

 being brought from a considerable distance. They were towed to the 

 village site where they were hauled up on skids. Forests of southeast 

 Alaska are quite irregular, the large cedar and the spruces growing 

 only in certain favored places where soil deposits are thick enough 

 above the rock substratum to support their growth. Southeast Alaska 

 will never prove a satisfactory place for farming operations as no- 



