THE ABORIGINES. 79 



fifty years ago near his stone wall. His father, Isaac 

 Lincoln, reported the same "find " having been made fifty 

 years before that. Although some digging there by the 

 writer was unrewarded by so much as a clam shell, the tra- 

 dition is very reliable. 



Just how closely these discoveries comport with the tes- 

 timony of eyewitnesses of our New England Indian dwell- 

 ings may be seen by the following account from Daniel 

 Gookin in 1674. Gookin was the first Indian commis- 

 sioner in America, appointed by the government, and he 

 was thorough in his investigations : — 



Their houses, or wigwams, are built with small poles fixed in 

 the ground, bent and fastened together with barks of trees oval or 

 arbourwise on the top. The best sort of their houses are covered 

 very neatly, tight, and warm with barks of trees, slipped from 

 their bodies at such seasons when the sap is up ; and made into 

 great flakes with pressures of weighty timber, when they are green ; 

 and so becoming dry, they will retain a form suitable for the 

 use they prepare them for. 



The meaner sort of wigwams are covered with mats, they make 

 of a kind of bulrush, which are also indifferent tight and warm, 

 but not so good as the former. These houses they make of sev- 

 eral sizes, according to their activity and ability, some twenty, 

 some forty feet long, and broad. Some I have seen of sixty or a 

 hundred feet long, and thirty feet broad. In the smaller sort they 

 make a fire in the centre of the house, and have a lower hole on 

 the top of the house, to let out the smoke. They keep the door 

 into the wigwams always shut, by a mat falling thereon,, as people 

 go in and out. This they do to prevent air coming in, which will 

 cause much smoke in every windy weather. If the smoke beat 

 down at the lower hole, they hang a little mat in the way of a 

 skreen on the top of the house, which they can with a cord 

 turn to the windward side, which prevents the smoke. In the 

 greater houses they make two, three, or four fires, at a distance 

 one from another, for the better accommodation of the people be- 

 longing to it. I have often lodged in their wigwams ; and have 

 found them as warm as the best English houses. In the wigwams. 



