MURDOCH.] SNOW HOUSES. 81 
usual inner apartments only a species of bench of raised earth ran 
round it).”!_ These buildings are numerous and particularly large and 
much used south of Bering Strait, where they are also used as steam 
bath houses.? 
Snow houses (apiya).—Houses of snow are used only temporarily, as 
for instance at the hunting grounds on the rivers, and occasionally by 
visitors at the village who prefer having their own quarters. For 
example, a man and his wife who had been living at Nuwitk decided in 
the winter of 1882~835 to come down and settle at Utkiavwin, where 
the woman’s parents lived. Instead of going to one of the houses in 
the village, they built themselves a snow house in which they spent 
the winter. The man said he intended to built a wooden house the 
nextseason. These houses are not built on the dome or beehive shape so 
often described among the Eskimo of the middle region of Dr. Rink.’ 
The idea naturally suggests itself that this form of building is 
really a snow ftupek or tent, while the form used at Point Barrow is 
simply the iglu built of snow instead of wood. When built on level 
ground, as in the village, the snow house consists of an oblong room 
about 6 feet by 12, with walls made of blocks of snow, and high enough 
for a person to stand up inside. Beams or poles are laid across the top, 
and over these is stretched a roof of canvas. At the south end is a 
low narrow covered passage of snow about 10 feet long leading to a 
low door not over 24 feet high, above which is the window, made, as 
before described, of seal entrail. The opening at the outer end of the 
passage is at the top, so that one climbs over a low wall of snow to 
enter the house. 
At the right side of the passage, close to the house, is a small fire- 
place about 24 feet square and built of slabs of snow, with a smoke hole 
in the top and a stick stuck across at the proper height to hang a pot 
on. When the first fire is built in such a fireplace there is considerable 
melting of the surface of the snow, but as soon as the fire is allowed 
to go out this freezes to a hard glaze of ice, which afterwards melts 
only to a trifling extent. Opposite to the door of the house, which is 
protected by a curtain of canvas, corresponding to the Greenlandic 
ubkuak, ‘“‘a skin which is hung up before the entrance of the house,” 
the floor is raised into a banquette about 18 inches high, on which are 
laid boards and skins. Cupboards are excavated under the banquette, 
or in the walls, and pegs are driven into the walls to hang things on. 
! Tents, etc., p. 136. 
2 See references to Dall and Petroff, above. 
3 Parry, 2nd Voy., p. 160 and plate opposite; Franklin, 1st Exped. vol. 2, pp. 43-47, ground plan, p. 46; 
Boas, ‘‘Central Eskimo,” pp. 539-553; Kumlien, Contributions, ete., p. 31; Petitot, Monographie, ete., 
p. xvii (a full description with a ground plan and section on p. xix), and all the popular accounts of 
the Eskimo. 
4Gronlandsk Ordbog, p. 404; Kane's 1st Grinnell Exp..p. 40, calls it a ‘‘skin-covered door.'' Com- 
pare, also, the skin or matting hung over the entrance of the houses at Norton Sound, Dall, Alaska, p. 
13, and the bear-skin doors of the Nunataimiun and other Kotzebue Sound natives, mentioned by Dr. 
Simpson, op. cit., p. 259. 
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