The principal difference between a white man's architecture and the
Indian's lies in the fact that the white man, with brick, stone, or frame
house in his mind, is possessed of a desire to build perpendicular
walls--walls which are hard to thatch and difficult to cover with turf,
especially in the far North, where there is no true sod such as we
understand in the middle country, where our grass grows thickly with
interlacing roots. Boys will do well to remember this and imitate the
Indian in making slanting walls for their shacks, shanties, and shelters
in the woods. If they have boards or stone or brick or logs with which to
build they may, with propriety, use a perpendicular wall. The Pima
Indians, according to Pliny Earle Goddard, associate curator of
anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History, thatch their
houses with arrow brush and not infrequently bank the sides of the shack
with dirt.