116 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
in their sports. When the spring or pond is at a distance from the town, 
they dig a ditch from it that supplies them with water.”* 
The village consisted of seventeen joint-tenement houses and a council- 
house, arranged around a central open space, and surrounded with a pali- 
sade. Here the Algonkin lodge, unlike that of the Ojibwas, is a long, 
round-roofed house, apparently from fifty to eighty feet in length, covered 
with movable matting in the place of bark, and large enough to accom- 
modate several families. The suggestion of this author, that ‘the buildings 
were mostly those of chiefs and men of rank,” embodies the precise error 
which has repeated itself from first to last with respect to the houses of 
American aborigines. Because the houses at Pomeiock were large, they 
were the residences of chiefs; and because the House ‘of the Nuns at Uxmal 
was of palatial extent, it was the exclusive residence of an Indian poten- 
tate—conclusions opposed to the whole theory of Indian life and institutions. 
Indian chiefs, the continent over, were housed with the people, and no better, 
as a rule, than the poorest of them. 
“Some of their towns,” says the same author, ‘are not enclosed with 
a palisade and are much more pleasant; Secotan, for example, here drawn 
from nature.- The houses are more scattered and a greater degree of com- 
fort and cultivation is observable, with gardens in which tobacco (E) is 
cultivated, woods filled with deer, and fields of corn. In the fields they 
erect a stage (I), in which a sentry is stationed to guard against the dep- 
redations of birds and thieves. Their corn they plant in rows (H), for it 
grows so large, with thick stalk and broad leaves, that one plant would 
stint the other and it would never arrive at maturity. They have also a 
curious place (C) where they convene with their neighbors at their feasts, 
as more fully shown on Plate 20, and from which they go to the feast (D) 
On the opposite side is their place of prayer (B), and near to it the sepul- 
chre of their chiefs (A). * * * They have gardens for melons (1), 
anda place (K) where they build their sacred fires. At a little distance 
from the town is the pond (L) from which they obtain their water.”? 
The houses of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia proper, as described 
1Wyth’s Sketches of Virginia, first published by De Bry, 1690, Langly’s ed., 1841, Plate 21. 
2Sketches, etc., of Virginia, description of Plate 22. 
