Part 10

This particular form of winter house, though in general like those built by other Eskimo, nevertheless differs in many respects from any described elsewhere. For instance, the Greenland house was an oblong flat-roofed building of turf and stones, with the passageway in the middle of one side instead of one end, and not underground. Still, the door and windows were all on one side, and the banquette or “brix” only on the side opposite the entrance. The windows were formerly made of seal entrails, and the passage, though not underground, was still lower than the floor of the house, so that it was necessary to step up at each end.[N132]

[Footnote N132: Egede, Greenland, p. 114; Crantz, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 139; Rink, Tales and Traditions, p. 7.]

A detailed description of the peculiar communal house of the East Greenlanders, of which, there is only one at each village, will be found in Capt. Holm’s paper in the Geografisk Tidskrift, vol. 8, pp. 87-89. This is the long house of West Greenland, still further elongated till it will accommodate “half a score of families, that is to say, 30 to 50 people.” John Davis (1586) describes the houses of the Greenlanders “neere the Sea side,” which were made with pieces of wood on both sides, and crossed over with poles and then covered over with earth.[N133]

[Footnote N133: Hakluyt, Voyages, etc. (1589), p. 788.]

At Iglulik the permanent houses were dome shaped, built of bones, with the interstices filled with turf, and had a short, low passage.[N134] No other descriptions of permanent houses are to be found until we reach the people of the Mackenzie region, who build houses of timbers, of rather a peculiar pattern, covered with turf, made in the form of a cross, of which three or all four of the arms are the sleeping rooms, the floor being raised into a low banquette.[N135] (See Fig. 13.) Petitot[N136] gives a very excellent detailed description of the houses of the Anderson River people. According to his account the passageway is built up of blocks of ice. He mentions one house with a single alcove like those at Point Barrow.[N137]

[Footnote N134: Lyon, Journal, p. 171.]

[Footnote N135: See Fig. 13, ground plan and section, copied from Petitot, Monographie, etc., p. XXIII.]

[Footnote N136: Monographie, etc., p. XXI.]

[Footnote N137: See also Franklin, 2d Exped., p. 121 (Mouth of the Mackenzie), and pp. 215 and 216 (Atkinson Island, Richardson. A ground plan and section closely resembling Petitot’s are given here); and Hooper, Tents, etc., p. 243 (Toker Point).]

We have no description of the houses at the villages between Point Barrow and Kotzebue Sound, but at the latter place was found the large triple house described by Dr. Simpson, and compared by him with that described by Richardson, though in some respects it more closely resembles those seen by Hooper.[N138] This house really has a fireplace in the middle, and in this approaches the houses of the southern Eskimo of Alaska. According to Dr. Simpson,[N139] “a modification of the last form, built of undressed timber, and sometimes of very small dimensions, with two recesses opposite each other, and raised a foot above the middle space, is very common on the shores of Kotzebue Sound,” but he does not make it plain whether houses like those used at Point Barrow are not used there also.

[Footnote N138: See ante.]

[Footnote N139: Op. cit., p. 258.]

This form of house is very like the large snow houses seen by Lieut. Ray at hunting camps on Kulugrua. Dr. Simpson describes less permanent structures which are used on the rivers, consisting of small trees split and laid “inclining inward in a pyramidal form towards a rude square frame in the center, supported by two or more upright posts. Upon these the smaller branches of the felled trees are placed, and the whole, except the aperture at the top and a small opening on one side, is covered with earth or only snow.”[N139b] These buildings, and especially the temporary ones described by Dr. Simpson, used on the Nunatak, probably gave rise to the statement we heard at Point Barrow that “the people south had no iglus and lived only in tents.” The houses at Norton Sound are quite different from the Point Barrow form. The floor, which is not planked, is 3 or 4 feet under ground, and the passage enters one side of the house, instead of coming up through the floor, and a small shed is built over the outer entrance to the passage. The fire is built in the middle of the house, under the aperture in the roof which serves for chimney and window, and there is seldom any banquette, but the two ends of the room are fenced off by logs laid on the ground, to serve as sleeping places, straw and spruce boughs being laid down and covered with grass mats.[N140]

[Footnote N139b: Op. cit., p. 258.]

[Footnote N140: Dall, Alaska, pp. 13 and 14, diagram on p. 13.]

The houses in the Kuskokwim region are quite similar to those just described, but are said to be built above ground in the interior, though thy are still covered with sods.[N141] There are no published accounts of the houses of the St. Lawrence islanders, but they are known to inhabit subterranean or partly underground earth-covered houses, built of wood, while the Asiatic Eskimo have abandoned the old underground houses, which were still in use at the end of the last century, and have adopted the double-skin tent of the Chukches.[N142] In addition to the cases quoted by Dall, Capt. Cook speaks of finding the natives of St. Lawrence Bay in 1778 living in partly underground earth-covered houses.[N143]

[Footnote N141: Petroff, Report, etc., p. 15.]

[Footnote N142: See Dall, Cont. to N. A. Ethn., vol. 1, p. 105. Mr. E. W. Nelson tells me, however, that the village at East Cape, Siberia, is composed of real iglus.]

[Footnote N143: Third Voyage, vol. 2, p. 450.]

_Arrangement in villages._--The village of Utkiavwĭñ occupies a narrow strip of ground along the edge of the cliffs of Cape Smyth, about 1,000 yards long, and extending some 150 yards inland. The houses are scattered among the hillocks without any attempt at regularity and at different distances from each other, sometimes alone, and sometimes in groups of two contiguous houses, which often have a common cache frame. Nuwŭk, from Dr. Simpson’s account[N144] and what we saw in our hurried visits, is scattered in the same way over the knolls of Point Barrow, but has its greatest extension in an east and west direction. From Simpson’s account (ibid.) double houses appear more common at Nuwŭk than at Utkiavwĭñ, and he even speaks of a few threefold ones. All the houses agree in facing south. This is undoubtedly to admit the greatest amount of light in winter, and seems to be a tolerably general custom, at least among the northern Eskimo.[N145]

[Footnote N144: Op. cit., p. 256.]

[Footnote N145: For example, I find it mentioned in Greenland by Kane, 1st Grinnell Exp., p. 40; at Iglulik by Parry, 2d Voy., p. 499; and at the mouth of the Mackenzie by Franklin, 2d Exp., p. 121, as well as by Dr. Simpson at Nuwŭk, op. cit., p. 256.]

The custom of having the dwelling face south appears to be a deeply rooted one, as even the tents in summer all face the same way.[N146]

[Footnote N146: Frobisher says the tents in Meta Incognita (in 1577) were “so pitched up, that the entrance into them, is alwaies South, or against the Sunne.” Hakluyt’s Voyages, etc., (1589) p. 628.]

The tents on the sandspit at Plover Bay all face west. The same was observed by the Krause brothers at East Cape.[N147] At Utkiavwĭñ there are twenty-six or twenty-seven inhabited houses. The uninhabited are mostly ruins and are chiefly at the southwest end of the village, though the breaking away of the cliffs at the other end has exposed the ruins of a few other old houses. Near these are also the ruins of the buildings destroyed by the ice catastrophe described above (p. 31). The mounds at the site of the United States signal station are also the ruins of old iglus. We were told that “long ago,” before they had any iron, five families who “talked like dogs” inhabited this village. They were called Isû´tkwamiun. Similar mounds are to be seen at Pernyû, near the present summer camp. About these we only learned that people lived there “long ago.” We also heard of ruined houses on the banks of Kulugrua.

[Footnote N147: Geographische Blätter, vol. 5, p. 27.]

Besides the dwellings there are in Utkiavwĭñ three and in Nuwŭk two of the larger buildings used for dancing, and as workrooms for the men, so often spoken of among other Eskimo.

Dr. Simpson states[N148] that they are nominally the property of some of the more wealthy men. We did not hear of this, nor did we ever hear the different buildings distinguished as “So-and-so’s,” as I am inclined to think would have been the case had the custom still prevailed. They are called kû´dyĭgi or kû´drĭgi (karrigi of Simpson), a word which corresponds, mutatis mutandis, with the Greenlandic kagsse, which means, first, a circle of hills round a small deep valley, and then a circle of people who sit close together (and then, curiously enough, a brothel). At Utkiavwĭñ they are situated about the middle of the village, one close to the bank and the others at the other edge of the village. They are built like the other houses, but are broader than long, with the ridgepole in the middle, so that the two slopes of the roof are equal, and are not covered with turf, like the dwellings, being only partially banked up with earth.

[Footnote N148: Op. cit., p. 259.]

The one visited by Lieut. Ray on the occasion of the “tree dance” was 16 by 20 feet and 7 feet high under the ridge, and held sixty people. In the fall and spring, when it is warm enough to sit in the kû´dyĭgi without fire and with the window open, it is used as a general lounging place or club room by the men. Those who have carpentering and similar work to do bring it there and others come simply to lounge and gossip and hear the latest news, as the hunters when they come in generally repair to the kû´dyĭgi as soon as they have put away their equipments.

They are so fond of this general resort that when nearly the whole village was encamped at Imêkpûñ in the spring of 1883, to be near the whaling ground, they extemporized a club house by arranging four timbers large enough for seats in a hollow square near the middle of the camp. The men take turns in catering for the club, each man’s wife furnishing and cooking the food for the assembled party when her husband’s turn comes. The club house, however, is not used as a sleeping place for the men of the village, as it is said to be in the territory south of Bering Strait,[N149] nor as a hotel for visitors, as in the Norton Sound region.[N150] Visitors are either entertained in some dwelling or build temporary snow huts for themselves.

[Footnote N149: Petroff, Report, etc., p. 128.]

[Footnote N150: Dall, Alaska, p. 16.]

The kû´dyĭgi is not used in the winter, probably on account of the difficulty of warming it, except on the occasions of the dances, festivals, or conjuring ceremonies. Crevices in the walls are then covered with blocks of snow, a slab of transparent ice is fitted into the window, and the house is lighted and heated with lamps. Buildings of this sort and used for essentially the same purposes have been observed among nearly all known Eskimo, except the Greenlanders, who, however, still retain the tradition of such structures.[N151] Even the Siberian Eskimo, who have abandoned the iglu, still retained the kû´dyĭgi until a recent date at least, as Hooper saw at Oong-wy-sac a performance in a “large tent, apparently erected for and devoted to public purposes (possibly as a council room as well as a theater, for in place of the usual inner apartments only a species of bench of raised earth ran round it).”[N152] These buildings are numerous and particularly large and much used south of Bering Strait, where they are also used as steam bath houses.[N153]

[Footnote N151: See Rink, Tales and Traditions, p. 8; also Geografisk Tidskrift, vol. 8, p. 141. Speaking of buildings of this sort, Dr. Rink says: “Men i Grønland kjendes de vel kun af Sagnet. Paa Øer Disko vil man have paavist Ruinen af en saadan Bygning, som besynderlig nok særlig sagdes at have været benyttet til Festligheder af erotisk Natur.” Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” passim; Lyon, Journal, p. 325 (Iglulik); Richardson, in Franklin’s 2d Exp., pp. 215-216 (Atkinson Island); Petitot, Monographie, etc., xxx; “_Kêchim_, ou maison des assemblées;” Beechey, Voyage, p. 268 (Point Hope); Dall, Alaska, p. 16 and elsewhere; Petroff, Rep. p. 128 and elsewhere.]

[Footnote N152: Tents, etc., p. 136.]

[Footnote N153: See references to Dall and Petroff, above.]

_Snow houses_ (_apúya_).--Houses of snow are used only temporarily, as for instance at the hunting grounds on the rivers, and occasionally by visitors at the village who prefer having their own quarters. For example, a man and his wife who had been living at Nuwŭk decided in the winter of 1882-’83 to come down and settle at Utkiavwĭñ, where the woman’s parents lived. Instead of going to one of the houses in the village, they built themselves a snow house in which they spent the winter. The man said he intended to build a wooden house the next season. These houses are not built on the dome or beehive shape so often described among the Eskimo of the middle region of Dr. Rink.[N154]

[Footnote N154: Parry, 2nd Voy., p. 160 and plate opposite; Franklin, 1st Exped. vol. 2, pp. 43-47, ground plan, p. 46; Boas, “Central Eskimo,” pp. 539-553; Kumlien, Contributions, etc., p. 31; Petitot, Monographie, etc., p. xvii (a full description with a ground plan and section on p. xix), and all the popular accounts of the Eskimo.]

The idea naturally suggests itself that this form of building is really a snow _tupek_ or tent, while the form used at Point Barrow is simply the iglu built of snow instead of wood. When built on level ground, as in the village, the snow house consists of an oblong room about 6 feet by 12, with walls made of blocks of snow, and high enough for a person to stand up inside. Beams or poles are laid across the top, and over these is stretched a roof of canvas. At the south end is a low narrow covered passage of snow about 10 feet long leading to a low door not over 2½ feet high, above which is the window, made, as before described, of seal entrail. The opening at the outer end of the passage is at the top, so that one climbs over a low wall of snow to enter the house.

At the right side of the passage, close to the house, is a small fireplace about 2½ feet square and built of slabs of snow, with a smoke hole in the top and a stick stuck across at the proper height to hang a pot on. When the first fire is built in such a fireplace there is considerable melting of the surface of the snow, but as soon as the fire is allowed to go out this freezes to a hard glaze of ice, which afterwards melts only to a trifling extent. Opposite to the door of the house, which is protected by a curtain of canvas, corresponding to the Greenlandic ubkuaĸ, “a skin which is hung up before the entrance of the house,”[N155] the floor is raised into a banquette about 18 inches high, on which are laid boards and skins. Cupboards are excavated under the banquette, or in the walls, and pegs are driven into the walls to hang things on. As such a house is only large enough for one family, there is only one lamp, which stands at the right-hand side of the house[N156].

[Footnote N155: Grønlandsk Ordbog, p. 404; Kane’s 1st Grinnell Exp., p. 40, calls it a “skin-covered door.” Compare, also, the skin or matting hung over the entrance of the houses at Norton Sound, Dall, Alaska, p. 13, and the bear-skin doors of the Nunatañmiun and other Kotzebue Sound natives, mentioned by Dr. Simpson, op. cit., p. 259.]

[Footnote N156: Compare Dr. Simpson’s description, op. cit., p. 259.]

At the hunting grounds, or on the road thither in the winter, a place is selected for the house where the snow is deeply drifted under the edge of some bank, so that most of the house can be made by excavation. When necessary, the walls are built up and roofed over with slabs of snow. Such a house is very speedily built. The first party that goes over the road to the hunting ground usually builds houses at the end of each day’s march, and these serve for the parties coming later, who have simply to clear out the drifted snow or perhaps make some slight repairs. On arriving at the hunting ground they establish themselves in larger and more comfortable houses of the same sort; generally for two families. Lieut. Ray, who visited these camps, has drawn the plan represented in Fig. 14. There is a banquette, _a_, at each end of the room, which is much broader than long (compare the form of house common at Kotzebue Sound, mentioned above, p. 78), but only one lamp, on a low shelf of snow, _b_, running across the back of the room and excavated below into a sort of cupboard. There are also similar cupboards, _c_, at different places in the walls, and a long tunnel, _f_, with the usual storerooms, _i_, and kitchen, _h_, from which a branch tunnel often leads to an adjoining house. The floor is marked _d_, the entrance to the tunnel _g_, and the door _e_. The house is lighted by the seal-gut windows of the iglu brought from the village.

On going into camp the railed sled is stuck points down into the snow and net-poles, or ice-picks, thrust through the rails, making a temporary cache frame,[N157] on which are hung bulky articles-- snowshoes and guns.[N158] Small storehouses of snow or ice are built to contain provisions. In the autumn, many such houses are built in the village, of slabs of clear fresh-water ice about 4 inches thick cemented together by freezing. These resemble the buildings of fresh-water ice at Iglulik, described by Capt. Lyon.[N159]

[Footnote N157: Compare the woodcut on p. 406, vol. 1, of Kane’s 2d Exp., where two sleds are represented as stuck up on end with their “upstanders” meeting to form a platform--Smith Sound.]

[Footnote N158: Firearms can not be carried into a warm room in cold weather, as the moisture in the air immediately condenses on the cold surface of the metal.]

[Footnote N159: Journal, p. 204; see also the plate opposite p. 358 of Parry’s 2d Voyage.]

Other temporary structures of snow, sometimes erected in the village, serve as workshops. One of these, which was built at the edge of the village in April, 1883, was an oblong building long enough to hold an umiak, giving sufficient room to get around it and work, and between 6 and 7 feet high. The walls were of blocks of snow and the roof of canvas stretched over poles. One end was left open, but covered by a canvas curtain, and a banquette of snow ran along each side. It was lighted by oblong slabs of clear ice set into the walls, and warmed by several lamps. Several men in succession used this house for repairing and rigging up their umiaks, and others who had whittling to do brought their work to the same place.

Such boat shops are sometimes built by digging a broad trench in a snowbank and roofing it with canvas. Women dig small holes in the snow, which they roof over with canvas and use for work-rooms in which to dress seal skins. In such cases there is probably some superstitious reason, which we failed to learn, for not doing the work in the iglu. The tools used in building the snow houses are the universal wooden snow-shovel and the ivory snow-knife, for cutting and trimming the blocks. At the present day saws are very much used for cutting the blocks, and also large iron knives (whalemen’s “boarding knives,” etc.) obtained from the ships.

_Tents_ (_tupĕk_).--During the summer all the natives live in tents, which are pitched on dry places upon the top of the cliffs or upon the gravel beach, usually in small camps of four or five tents each. A few families go no farther than the dry banks just southwest of the village, while the rest of the inhabitants who have not gone eastward trading or to the rivers hunting reindeer are strung along the coast. The first camp below Utkiavwĭñ is just beyond the double lagoon of Nunava, about 4 miles away, and the rest at intervals of 2 or 3 miles, usually at some little inlet or stream at places called Sê´kqluka, Nakĕ´drixo, Kuosu´gru, Nună´ktuau, Ĭpersua, Wă´lăkpa (Refuge Inlet, according to Capt. Maguire’s map, Parl. Rep. for 1854, opp. p. 186), Er´nĭvwĭñ, Sĭ´ñaru, and Sa´kămna. It is these summer camps seen from passing ships which have given rise to the accounts of numerous villages along this coast. There is usually a small camp on the beach at Sĭ´nnyû and one at Imê´kpûñ, while a few go to Pernyû even early in the season.

As the sea opens the people from the lower camps travel up the coast and concentrate at Pernyû, where they meet the Nuwuñmiun, the Nunatañmiun traders, and the whalemen, and are joined later in the season by the trading parties returning from the east, all of whom stop for a few days at Pernyû. On returning to the village also, in September, the tents are pitched in dry places among the houses and occupied till the latter are dry enough to live in. Tents are used in the autumnal deer hunts, before snow enough falls to build snow houses. In the spring of 1883, when the land floe was very heavy and rough off Utkiavwĭñ, all who were going whaling in the Utkiavwĭñ boats went into camp with their families in tents pitched on the crown of the beach at Imêkpûñ, whence a path led off to the open water.

The tents are nowadays always made of cloth, either sailcloth obtained from wrecks or drilling, which is purchased from the ships. The latter is preferred as it makes a lighter tent and both dark blue and white are used. Reindeer or seal skins were used for tents as lately as 1854. Elson saw tents of sealskin lined with reindeer skin at Refuge Inlet,[N160] and Hooper mentions sealskin tents at Cape Smyth and Point Barrow.[N161] Dr. Simpson gives a description of the skin tents at Point Barrow.[N162] Indeed, it is probable that canvas tents were not common until after the great “wreck seasons” of 1871 and 1876, when so many whaleships were lost. The Nunatañmiun at Pernyû had tents of deerskin, and I remember also seeing one sealskin tent at the same place, which, it is my impression, belonged to a man from Utkiavwĭñ. Deerskin tents are used by the Anderson River natives,[N163] while sealskins are still in use in Greenland and the east generally.[N164] The natives south of Kotzebue Sound do not use tents, but have summer houses erected above ground and described as “generally log structures roofed with skins and open in front.”[N165] That they have not always been ignorant of tents is shown by the use of the word “topek” for a dwelling at Norton Sound.[N166]

[Footnote N160: Beechey’s Voyage, p. 315.]

[Footnote N161: Tents, etc., pp. 216, 225.]

[Footnote N162: Op. cit., p. 260.]

[Footnote N163: MacFarlane MSS. and Petitot, Monographie, etc., p. xx, “des tentes coniques (_tuppeρk_) en peaux de renne.”]