85 
shelter for ten or fifteen years would satisfy their needs; to expend 
time and labour on buildings that would outlast this periofl was 
useless. Conditions were different on the Pacific coast. There the 
natives made seasonal migrations indeed, but the greater part of the 
year tliey lived in fixed localities, which they occupied generation 
after generation, unless dislodged by wars or other calamities.^ On 
this coast, then, we find not only rude shelters of brush or mats, but 
permanent houses of solid lumber intended to last a man’s whole life- 
time. Similarly, in the Arctic and around the shores of the Labrador 
peninsula, the Eskimo had fixed sealing grounds to which they 
returned after each summer’s fishing and hunting inland: and in 
those places, in prehistoric times at least, they erected permanent 
homes, of driftwood in the Mackenzie delta, of stone and 
bones of whale in the eastern Arctic where driftwood was scarce or 
lacking.- 
It was not only the constant migrations that prevented the 
construction of durable buildings, whether in brick or in stone, com- 
parable with those that survive in the Old World, or in the jungles 
of Central America. The use of brick was unknown to the aborigines, 
although many tribes made crude pottery from the local clay; and 
the rocks that predominated throughout the Dominion were too 
hard for the individual Indian to hew into shape with a stone ax 
and a stone hammer. It is true that the megalithic monuments 
scattered from western Europe to Polynesia were erected for the 
most part before the age of iron, and that many of these monuments 
are constructed of hard, igneous rocks. It is true also that the 
Indians of Central America and Peru often incorporated hard rocks 
in their temples and fortifications, and that they utilized only stone 
tools to quarry and dress them. But the peoples who executed these 
works seem to have been populous agricultural communities with 
strong, centralized governments that had considerable resources of 
labour at their command. There wei'e no communities in Canada 
that had reached this level of development, not even the maize- 
growing Iroquoians. The Eskimo who erecterl the stone huts in the 
1 Ttio rliiiatf’ is milder on tlie Pacific coast, tl’C forests lieavier, and tlie village.® were genei'ally 
less populous than those of the Irociuoians in Ontario. Hence there was never any scarcity of fuel. 
In the interior of British Columbia, however, the Carrier Indians moved their winter settlements 
yearly, or ai fretjuent inlervala, owing to the exhraistion of woo<l in the vicinity, ^lorice, A. Cl.: 
“Notes mi the Northern Denes”: Trans. Can. Inst., vol. iv, ji. 1S4 (Toronto, 1892). 
- Nootka limiters oceasionally built shelters of stone in the incuntains of \'aneouver island, when 
outside the timber (Sjiroat : Oi>. cit., ]>. 241); lint no traces of these shelters are known. 
