58 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
Tenbroeck we find a repetition of the Iroquois rule to set food before the 
guest when he first enters the house. 
With respect to the Village Indians of Mexico, Central and South 
America, our information is, in the main, limited to the hospitality extended 
to the Spaniards; but it is sufficient to show that it was a part of their plan 
of life, and, as it must be supposed, a repetition of their usages in respect 
to each other. In every part of America that they visited, the Spaniards, 
although often in numbers as a military force, were assigned quarters in 
Indian houses, emptied of their inhabitants for that purpose, and freely 
supplied with provisions. Thus at Zempoala ‘the lord came out, attended 
by ancient men, two persons of note supporting him by the arms, because 
it was the custom among them to come out in that manner when one great 
man received another. This meeting was with much courtesy and abund- 
ance of compliments, and people were already appointed to find the Span- 
iards quarters and furnish provisions.” When near Tlascala the Tlascal- 
lans “sent three hundred turkeys, two hundred baskets of cakes of teutli, 
which they call tamales, being about two hundred arrobas; that is, fifty 
hundred weight of bread, which was an extraordinary supply for the Span- 
iards, considering the distress they were in;”° and when at Tlascala, Cortes 
and his men “‘ were generously treated, and supplied with all necessaries.”? 
They ‘“‘entered Cholula and went to a house where they lodged altogether, 
and their Indians with them, although upon their guard, being for the present 
plentifully supplied with provisions.”* 
Although the Spaniards numbered 
about four hundred, and their allied Indians about a thousand, they found 
accommodations in a single joint tenement house of the aboriginal American 
model. Attention is called to this fact, because we shall find the Village — 
Indians, as a rule, living in large houses, each containing many apartments, 
and accommodating five hundred or more persons. The household of sev- 
eral families of the northern Indians reappears in the southern tribes in a 
much greater household of a hundred or more families in a single joint tene- 
ment house, but not unlikely broken up into several household groups. The 
pueblo consisted sometimes of one, sometimes of two or three, and some- 
times of a greater number of such houses. The plan of life within these 
1 Herreru’s History of America, ii, 212. 2Tb., ii, 261. 3Ib., 1, 279. 4Tb., ii, 311. 
