The winter house is very different. In the summer house there is plenty of
room and air; in the winter house space is precious. The framework of the
winter lodge is made of light poles tied together with narrow strips of
bark. It is an oblong, dome-shaped affair about twenty feet long and ten
wide. Some are nearly circular and about fifteen feet across. They are
hardly six feet high. Over this framework are fastened sheets of matting
made of cat-tail rushes. This matting is very light and thin, but a layer
or two of it keeps out a great deal of cold. There is but one doorway,
usually at the middle of the side. There are no platforms, but beds are
made, close to the ground, out of poles and branches. At the center is a
fireplace, over which hangs the pot in which food is boiled.
The Mandans used to build good houses almost circular in form. The floor
was sunk a foot or more below the surface of the ground. The framework was
made of large and strong timbers. The outside walls sloped inward and
upward from the ground to a height of about five feet. They were composed
of boards. The roof sloped from the top of the wall up to a central point;
it was made of poles, covered with willow matting and then with grass. The
whole house, wall and roof, was then covered over with a layer of earth a
foot and a half thick. When such a house contained a fire sending out
smoke, it must have looked like a smooth, regularly sloping little
volcano.
In California, where there are so many different sorts of climate and
surroundings, the Indian tribes differed much in their house building.
Where the climate was raw and foggy, down near the coast, they dug a pit
and erected a shelter of redwood poles about it. In the snow belt, the
house was conical in form and built of great slabs of bark. In warm low
valleys, large round or oblong houses were made of willow poles covered
with hay. At Clear Lake there were box-shaped houses; the walls were built
of vertical posts, with poles lashed horizontally across them; these were
not always placed close together, but so as to leave many little square
holes in the walls; the flat roof was made of poles covered with thatch.
In the great treeless plains of the Sacramento and San Joaquin they made
dome-shaped, earth-covered houses, the doorway in which was sometimes on
top, sometimes near the ground on the side. In the Kern and Tulare
valleys, where the weather is hot and almost rainless, the huts are made
of marsh rushes.
[Illustration.]