1896.] Anthropology. 431 



denied that any such structures were used by Indians, in the East. 

 They insisted that these wigwams were confined to the plains and to 

 the prairies and treeless countries, and did not exist, or were not found, 

 and had never been used in the timbered countries— that in the tim- 

 bered country Indian houses were made of wooden logs with upright 

 sides and a flat or sloping roof. While I knew that many of these 

 were made among the Iroquois of the East, and that this form was 

 adopted in making the long houses (as they were called), I doubted 

 whether they were so built among the nomadic and wandering tribes 

 of Pennsylvania and the West Ohio, Indiana, etc. Can you give me 

 any enlightenment thereon ? If so, I will be obliged." 



While it is not improbable that the shape of " wigwams," like burial 

 customs varied considerably among the forest Indians, and while any 

 camper out feels that a shelter often temporary, framed in the woods 

 with available boughs, would vary in shape according to circumstances 

 and suggest variation in more permanent structures, no one need hope 

 to speak with final authority upon this subject, who has not ransacked 

 the records of explorers, the narratives of individuals captured by 

 Indians, the relations of the Jesuits, and the significant sketches of 

 travellers in the last two centuries. 



Dr. Daniel G. Brinton informs me that certain of the Brazilian 

 forest Indians use the tepee form, and speaking of the Lenni Lenape, 

 and quoting Nelson's History of New Jersey, writes : " William Penn 

 describes the dwellings of the Delaware Indians as * houses of mats, 

 or barks of trees, set on poles, hardly higher than a man.' Pastorius 

 states that ' young trees would be bent towards a common centre and 

 the branches interlaced and fastened together as a frame work, and 

 covered with bark.' Wassenaer says, ' they would construct a circu- 

 lar matted hut, with either angular or rounded top, thatched or lined 

 with mats, a rent hole in the top serving for the escape of smoke.' 

 This last description is strictly that of a tepee and shows that the 

 angular pointed hut was in use by the Mohigan and Lenape Indians. 

 Wassenaers' History is printed in Vol. Ill New York Documentary 



The above quotation from Penn, however, if given correctly in 

 Watsons' Annals of Philadelphia Vol. II. p., 163 reads distinctly 

 against the tepee form. " Their houses were made of mats or barks of 

 trees set on poles, in the fashion of an English barn, but out of the 

 power of the winds for they are hardly higher than a man." And we 

 find a rectangular structure again ascribed to the work of a^band of 

 Lenapes squatting in the suburbs of Philadelphia about 1770-80, in 



