NATIVE TRIBES. 43

recorded that when these were absent the inside of these long communal houses
“suggested a stable with a double row of stalls, and a wide passage in the

middle.”
DETAILS OF CONSTRUCTION.

The methods employed demanded a degree of ingenuity which excited the
admiration of early explorers. No form of pulley was known, so the great
weights were raised entirely by leverage plus man power. “The massive roof-
beams were of a length and weight which taxed both these resources. For
instance, the horizontal roof-beams noted in Chief Maquinna’s house at Friendly
Cove, Vancouver Island, measured 100 feet in length, with butt ends 5 feet in
diameter; and the posts on which they were supported were 15 feet in circum-

PLATE XI.

em ee ea

Courtesy of Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.

Interior of a Kwakiutl house, showing a carved inside house-pole supporting
a roof-beam.

ference. “To quote Captain Cook: “ these supporting pillars and those sustaining
the intermediate beams were sculptured with human faces deformed in size and
ugly of features.” Paintings measuring, perhaps, 20 by 30 feet often decorated
the fronts of these houses. “They depicted the owner’s crest or his tribal emblem
and are believed to have preceded the use of totem-poles. (Plate XX.)

Exterior carvings were also common and represented “ wealth.” Thus, in
a long story which recounts the conquest of a section of the Kwakiutl tribe by
a renowned ‘[’simshian warrior from the Skeena River, it is told how the con-
queror was so determined to add to his possessions the elaborate carving on the
posts supporting the outside of the house of the Chief he had surprised and killed,
that “he filled his canoe with all the carvings it would carry and took all the