74 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
Among the Village Indians of New Mexico a more advanced form of 
house architecture appears, and their joint tenement character is even more 
pronounced. They live in large houses, two, three, and four stories high, 
constructed of adobe brick, and of stone imbedded in adobe mortar, and 
containing fifty, a hundred, two hundred, and in some eases five hundred 
apartments in a house. They are built in the terraced form, with fire- 
places and chimneys added since their discovery, the first story closed up 
solid, and is entered by ladders, which ascend to the platform-roof of the 
first story. These houses are fortresses, and were erected as strongholds to 
resist the attacks of the more barbarous tribes by whom they were perpetu- 
ally assailed. Each house was probably occupied by a number of house- 
hold groups, whose apartments were doubtless separated from each other 
by partition walls. In a subsequent chapter the character of these houses 
will be more fully shown. 
Our knowledge of the plan of life in these houses in the aboriginal 
period is still very imperfect. They still practice the old hospitality, 
own their lands in common, but with allotments to individuals and to fami- 
lies, and are governed by a eacique or sachem and certain other offi- 
cers annually elected. An American missionary to the Laguna Village 
Indians, Rev. Samuel Gorman, in an address before the Historical Society 
of New Mexico in 1869, remarks as follows: ‘‘ They generally marry very 
young, and the son-in-law becomes the servant of the father-in-law, and 
very often they all live together in one family for years, even if there be 
several sons-in-law; and this clannish mode of living is often, if not gen- 
erally, a fruitful source of evil among this people. Their women generally 
have control over the granary, and they are more provident than their Span- 
ish neighbors about the future. Ordinarily they try to have one year’s 
provisions on hand. It is only when they have two years of scarcity suc- 
ceeding each other that pueblos as a community suffer hunger.” The 
usages of these Indians have doubtless modified in the last two hundred 
years under Spanish influence; they have decreased in numbers, and the 
family group is probably smaller than formerly. But it is not too late 
to recover the aboriginal plan of life among them if the subject were 
1Address, p. 14. 
