Note 322 — Chapter III · COLUMBIANS.

The Skagit tribe being exposed to attacks from the north, combine dwellings and fort, and build themselves 'enclosures, four hundred feet long, and capable of containing many families, which are constructed of pickets made of thick planks, about thirty feet high. The pickets are firmly fixed into the ground, the spaces between them being only sufficient to point a musket through.... The interior of the enclosure is divided into lodges,' p. 511. At Port Discovery the lodges were 'no more than a few rudely-cut slabs, covered in part by coarse mats,' p. 319. Wilkes' Nar., in U. S. Ex. Ex., vol. iv., pp. 319-20, 511, 517. The Clallams also have a fort of pickets one hundred and fifty feet square, roofed over and divided into compartments for families. 'There were about two hundred of the tribe in the fort at the time of my arrival.' 'The lodges are built of cedar like the Chinook lodges, but much larger, some of them being sixty or seventy feet long.' Kane's Wand., pp. 210, 219, 227-9. 'Their houses are of considerable size, often fifty to one hundred feet in length, and strongly built.' Rept. Ind. Aff., 1854, pp. 242-3. 'The planks forming the roof run the whole length of the building, being guttered to carry off the water, and sloping slightly to one end.' Stevens, in Pac. R. R. Rept., vol. i., pp. 429-30. Well built lodges of timber and plank on Whidbey Island. Thornton's Ogn. and Cal., vol. i., p. 300. At New Dungeness, 'composed of nothing more than a few mats thrown over cross sticks;' and on Puget Sound 'constructed something after the fashion of a soldier's tent, by two cross sticks about five feet high, connected at each end by a ridge-pole from one to the other, over some of which was thrown a coarse kind of mat; over others a few loose branches of trees, shrubs or grass.' Vancouver's Voy., vol. i., pp. 225, 262. The Queniults sometimes, but not always, whitewash the interior of their lodges with pipe-clay, and then paint figures of fishes and animals in red and black on the white surface. See description and cuts of exterior and interior of Indian lodge in Swan's N. W. Coast, pp. 266-7, 330, 338; Crane's Top. Mem., p. 65; Cornwallis' New El Dorado, p. 98; Clark's Lights and Shadows, p. 225.