The tribes of the valley of the Columbia lived more or less in villages, but, like the tribes of California, were without horticulture and without pottery. But they found an abundant subsistence in the shell-fish of the coast, and in the myriads of fish in the Columbia and its tributaries. They also subsisted upon kamash and other bread roots of the prairies, which they cooked in ground ovens, and upon berries and game. They were expert boatmen and fishermen, manufactured water-tight baskets, implements of wood, stone, and bone, and used the bow and arrow. As another quite remarkable fact, they used plank in their houses, made by splitting logs with stone and elk-horn chisels. Like the Kŭtchĭn, they were in the Upper Status of savagery.
When Lewis and Clarke visited the Columbia River district (1805-1806) they found the Indian tribes living in houses of the plainest communal type, and some of them approaching in ground dimensions and in the number of their occupants the pueblo houses in New Mexico. They speak of a house of the Chopunish (Nez Percés) as follows: "This village of Tumachemootool is in fact only a single house one hundred and fifty feet long, built after the Chopunish fashion, with sticks, straw and dried grass. It contains twenty-four fires, about double that number of families, and might perhaps muster a hundred fighting men."[1] This would give five hundred people in a single house. The number of fires probably indicates the number of groups practicing communism in living among themselves, though for aught we know it may have been general in the entire household.
Another great house, Ncerchokioo, is thus described: "This large building is two hundred and twenty-six feet in front, entirely above ground, and may be considered a single house, because the whole is under one roof, otherwise it would seem more like a range of buildings, as it is divided into
- ↑ Travels, etc., l. c., p. 548.
