422 DWELLINGS. AGRICULTURE. 



equal to the confusion. For, as they dry their fish within 

 doors, they also gut them there, which, with their bones and 

 fragments thrown down at meals, and the addition of other 

 sorts of filth, lie everywhere in heaps, and are, I believe, 

 never carried away till it becomes troublesome, from their 

 size, to walk over them. In a word, their houses are as 

 filthy as hog-sties : everything in and about them stinking 

 of fish, train-oil, and smoke." 



The Wallawalla Indians* of Columbia dig a circular hole 

 in the ground about ten or twelve feet deep and from forty 

 to fifty feet in circumference, and cover it over with drift- 

 wood and mud. A hole is left on one side for a door, and a 

 notched pole serves as a ladder. Here twelve or fifteen 

 persons burrow through the winter, requiring very little fire, 

 as they generally eat their salmon raw, and the place is very 

 warm from the numbers collected together and the absence 

 of ventilation. In summer they use lodges made of rushes 

 or mats spread on poles. This tribe lives principally on 

 salmon, preferring it putrid. 



South of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and west of the Rocky 

 Mountains almost all the tribes seem to have grown more or 

 less maize. In the Carolinas and Virginia the Indians raised 

 large quantities, and " all relied on it as one of their fixed 

 means of subsistence, "f The Dela wares had extensive maize 

 fields at the time of the discovery of America. In 1527, 

 De Vaca saw it in small quantities in Florida, and De Soto, 

 twelve years later, found it abundant among the Muscogees, 

 Chactaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees. On one occasion his 

 army marched through fields of it for a distance of two 

 leagues. It is known to have been cultivated by the Iroquois 

 in 1610, and in small quantities by "the hunter communities 



* Kane's North American Indians, f Schooleraft, I.e. vol. i., p. 6. See 



p. 272 ; United States' Exploring Ex- also Richardson's Arctic Expedition, 

 pedition, vol. iv., p. 452. vol. ii., p. 51. 



