NELSON] HOUSES IN VARIOUS LOCALITIES 251 



kind from the kashim to an ancient house and from there to another 

 house. It was further stated that in those days the people made their 

 houses larger, so that they could use their bows in them for repelling 

 an attack by the enemy. 



The village of Ukagamut, near Mount Robert Lincoln, contained 

 about twenty people. The huts were extremely small, owing to the scar 

 city of wood. The interiors were excessively filthy and permeated with 

 the stench of decaying animal matter. The smoke holes were covered 

 with slabs of ice, and the floors were several inches deep with an oozy 

 mass of refuse. The dried fish stored in the houses and used for food 

 was covered with blue and green mold, and the entire place was the 

 most miserable that I saw in that region. The inhabitants were suf 

 fering from skin diseases and from the attacks of an ailment resembling- 

 epilepsy. 



Tununuk was a summer village on Cape Vancouver at the time of my 

 visit in December, 1879. A few people were found wintering there. 

 Wood was scarce and the houses were small and filthy. 



South of this point wood was so scarce that in several villages there 

 was none for making elevated storehouses, and for that purpose small 

 huts were built of turf cut into slabs and laid up in walls, which were 

 frozen solid and covered with flat roofs of the same material. The 

 doors, which were the only openings, consisted of slabs of frozen turf 

 about 2 by 3 feet and 4 inches thick. At one village I saw about 

 twenty of these huts, all of which were 4 or 5 feet high and from 6 to 8 

 feet in diameter. 



In the second village south of Cape Vancouver the houses were 

 made of turf slabs laid up about the frail framework of small sticks 

 and brush and covered with earth. This had been wet and frozen so 

 that the walls were very firm, but the people stated that they would 

 leave them early in the spring, for as soon as warm weather began the 

 walls would melt and fall in. 



The smoke holes of the houses in all this district were covered with 

 slabs of ice, from which the heat inside continually caused water to 

 drop down the walls, rendering the floor a soft and sticky mass except 

 in the coldest weather. 



From Cape Vancouver to the Kuskokwim the land is very low, and 

 whenever the wind blows a gale in shore the coast villages are in dan 

 ger of being flooded. The day before my arrival at Chalitmut the sea 

 flowed inland and rose to a depth of three feet over the floor of the 

 kashim; the people who were caught inside made a hole in the roof, to 

 w r hich they crept and stayed for hours, until the water had subsided. 

 Every few years the ice sweeps away one or more villages in this district, 

 causing loss of life. 



At Chichifiagamut, in this district, a heavy rain fell during my stay, 

 and the water came into the kashim from the surrounding drainage so 

 that it was 18 inches deep in the tunnel-like entrance passage and had 



