One of these British Columbian houses was measured, and found to be seventy feet long by twenty-five feet wide; the entrance in the gable end was cut through a plank five and a half feet wide, and nearly oval.  A board suspended on the outside answered for a door; on the other side of the broad plank was rudely carved a large painted figure of a man, between whose legs was the passage.  But other houses on the Pacific coast, visited by Cook or Vancouver, are said to have been large enough to accommodate seven hundred people.  These houses of the Pacific coast region were exceedingly filthy, sturgeon and salmon being strewn about in every direction.  The men inhabiting them were often disgusting in their behaviour, while the women are declared to have been “devoid of shame or decency”.

According to Mackenzie, such habitations swarmed with fleas, and even the ground round about them “was alive with this vermin”.  The Alexander Henrys, both uncle and nephew, complain of the flea plague (partly due to the multitude of dogs) in every Indian village or encampment.

The domestic implements of the Amerindians were few.  Pottery seems to have been unknown amongst the northern tribes to the east and north of the Mississippi valley, but earthen jars and vessels were made by the Dakota-Siou group in the valley of the Mississippi.  Amongst these agricultural Indians the hoe was made of a buffalo’s blade bone fastened to a crooked wooden handle.  The Ojibwes manufactured chisels out of beavers’ teeth.  The Eskimo and some of the neighbouring Amerindian tribes used oblong “kettles” of stone—­simply great blocks of stone chipped, rubbed, and hollowed out into receptacles, with handles at both ends. (It is suggested that they borrowed the idea of these stone vessels for cooking from the early Norse settlers of Greenland; see p. 18.)

The Amerindians of the regions west of the Rocky Mountains made kettles or cooking vessels out of blocks of “cedar” (Juniper) wood; east of the Rocky Mountains the birch-bark kettle was universal.  Of course these vessels of wood or bark could not be placed on the fire or embers to heat or boil the contents, as was possible with the “kettles” of stone or the cooking pots of clay.  So the people using them heated the water in which the food or the soup was boiled by making stones red-hot in the fire and then dropping them into the birch-bark or cedar-wood tubs.  Many of the northern Indians got into the way of eating their food raw because of the difficulty of making a fire away from home.

In regard to food, neither Amerindian nor Eskimo was squeamish.  They were almost omnivorous, and specially delighted in putrid or noisome substances from which a European would turn in loathing, and from the eating of which he might conceivably die.