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 im 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 noue 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. Tle 
doors, which were the only openings, consisted of slabs of frozen turf 
about 24 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 
which 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 Chichinagamut, in this district, a hee 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 
