Haida Homes

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The Haidahs use as temporary dwellings in their frequent summer excursions for war and the hunt, simple lodges of poles, covered, among the poorer classes, by cedar mats, and among the rich by skin. Their permanent villages are usually built in strong natural positions, guarded by precipices, sometimes on rocks detached from the mainland, but connected with it by a narrow platform. Their town houses are built of light logs, or of thick split planks, usually of sufficient size to accommodate a large number of families. Poole mentions a house on Queen Charlotte Islands which formed a cube of fifty feet, ten feet of its height being dug in the ground, and which accommodated seven hundred Indians.

The buildings are often, however, raised above the ground on a platform supported by posts, sometimes carved into human or other figures. Some of these raised buildings seen by the earlier visitors were twenty-five or thirty feet from the ground, solidly and neatly constructed, an inclined log with notches serving as a ladder. These houses were found only in the southern part of the Haidah territory. The fronts were generally painted with figures of men and animals.

There were no windows or chimney; the floors were spread with cedar mats, on which the occupants slept in a circle round a central fire, whose smoke in its exit took its choice between the hole which served as a door and the wall-cracks. On the south-eastern boundary of this territory, Mackenzie found, in the villages, large buildings of similar but more careful construction, and with more elaborately carved posts but they were not dwellings, being used probably for religious purposes.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. Native Races of the Pacific States. Vol. 1, Appleton, 1874.

Hubert Howe Bancroft

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