ABORIGINAL LIFE OF THE SITKANS. 47 



Each house usually shelters several families, in one sense of the 

 term ; these are related to each other and under the tacitly ac- 

 knowledged control of some elder, to whom the building is reputed 

 to belong, and who is a person of greater or less importance in the 

 tribe or village according to the amount of his property or cunning 

 of his intellect. 



Before some of these Siwash mansions a rude porch or jolatform 

 is erected, upon which, in fair weather, a miscellaneous group of 

 natives will squat in assembly', conversing, if squaws, or gambling, if 

 men. The houses themselves are usually square upon their founda- 

 tions, and vary much in size, some of them being a hundred feet 

 square, while most of them are between fifty and sixty feet, the 

 smaller rancheries being less than twenty. The gable end, and the 

 entrance right under its plumb, always faces the street and beach- 

 view ; the roof slojDes down at a low pitch or angle on eacli side, 

 with a projecting shelter erected right over the hole left in the roof- 

 centre, intended for the escape of smoke — no chimneys were ever 

 built. This shelter, or shutter, is movable, and is shifted by the 

 Indian just as the wind and rain may drive ; the floor is oblong or 

 nearly square, and, in the older and better constructed examples, is 

 partly sunk in the earth, i.e., the ground has been excavated to a 

 depth of six or eight feet in a square area, directly in the centre, 

 with one or two large earthen steps or terraces left running around 

 the sides of the cellar. A small square of bare dirt is left in the 

 exact centre, again, of this hole, while the rest of the floor is cov- 

 ered with split planks of cedar ; the earthen steps which environ 

 the lower floor are in turn faced and covered with cedar-slabs, and 

 these serve not only for sleeping and lounging places, but also for 

 the stowage, in part, of all sorts of boxes and packages of joroperty 

 and food belonging to the family ; the balance of these treasures 

 usually hangs suspended, in all manner of ingenious contrivances, 

 from the heavy beams and roof-poles overhead. The rancheries 

 which are built to-day by Alaskan Indians nearly all stand on the 

 surface of the ground without any excavation — a decided degen- 

 eracy. 



The pattern of the Koloshian house is maintained with little 

 variation throughout the archij^elago, and has been handed down 

 from remote antiquity. When, after extended confabulation, a 

 number of Indians agree to build a house, several months are 

 passed first in the forest by them, where they are engaged in fell- 



