130 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
ladders which they have for their houses,’ Coronado says in his relation, 
“are all ina manner movable and portable as ours be.”’ The ladders at 
the Mandan village were made of two limbs growing nearly parallel and 
severed below the junction, as shown in the figure, and set with the forked 
end upon the ground, and the ends against the scaffold. Depressions were 
sunk in the rails to receive the rounds, which were secured by rawhide 
strings. They were usually from ten to twelve feet long, and one or two 
at each scaffold. 
Situated thus picturesquely on a bluff, at an angle of the river, with 
houses of this peculiar model, and with such an array of scaffolds rising up 
among them, the village was strikingly conspicuous for some distance both 
above and below on the river, and presented a remarkable appearance. 
Afterwards, at the present Minnetaree and Mandan village, about sixty- 
five miles above on the east side of the Missouri, and also at the new 
Arickaree village on the west side, and quite near it, I had an opportunity 
to see houses precisely similar to those described in actual occupation by the 
Indians, with their interior arrangements and their mode of life. 
A reference, at least, should be made to the Maricopas and Mohaves of 
the Lower Colorado River, who, although village Indians of the pueblo type, 
still live in ordinary communal houses of the northern type, which are thus 
described by General Emory: ‘They (the Maricopas) occupy thatched cot- 
tages thirty or forty feet in diameter, made of twigs of cottonwood trees, inter- 
woven with straw of wheat, cornstalks, and cane.”* Those occupied by the 
Mohaves, as described by Captain Sitgreave, are similar in character.2 The 
Pimas of the Gila River, on the contrary, claim that their ancestors erected 
houses of adobe brick, and cultivated by irrigation. They point to the 
remains of ancient structures and of old acequias in the valley of the Gila, 
as Captain Crossman informs us, as the works of their forefathers. But 
now their condition is very similar to that of the Mohaves. The last-named 
writer remarks that ‘‘generally several married couples with their children 
live in one hut.” 
'Hakluyt, Coll. of Voyages, London ed., 1812, vol. 5, p. 498. 
2Notes, &c., New Mexico, p. 132. See also Bartlet’s Personal Narrative, p. 280. 
’Expedition, &c., Zuni and Colorado, p. 19. 
4Smithsonian Report for 1871, p. 415. 
