The houses of the western Oregon Indians were of the communal type, from 40 to 60 feet long and 20 feet wide, constructed of large cedar planks and roofed with bark or boards. The interior walls of these great lodges, scattered in clusters along the coast, the Columbia, and the lower Willamette, were tiered with bunks. Along the middle of the floor ran a firepit, the smoke escaping through a gap left along the ridgepole of the roof. Men, women, children, and dogs mingled in the dusky interior. These houses were put together with lashings, and when fleas and other vermin became intolerable the houses were dismantled and the planks removed to a new location, supposedly leaving the fleas behind.
The Indians of river and coast were skilled in fashioning canoes. Each of these was made from a single log, their size varying from the small craft capable of sustaining only one person to the great war canoe in which as many as 60 warriors might safely put to sea. For these graceful vessels, cedar and spruce were usually preferred, though fir was also used.
The native bow, like the canoe, was beautifully and skillfully formed. It was generally made of yew or crab-apple wood. The string was a piece of dried seal-gut or deer-sinew, or consisted of twisted bark. The arrows, about a yard long, were made of arrow-wood or cedar. Household utensils included baskets of cedar root fiber or tough grasses often woven so closely as to be watertight, and stone mortars and pestles for pulverizing seeds and wild grains. The principal art displayed was in the carvings on house posts and canoe figureheads, and in the fashioning of woven mats and baskets. Basketry was a highly developed art, many examples of which, richly colored with intricate and pleasing designs, today grace museums or are offered for sale in Indian curio stores.
The culture of the northeastern Oregon tribes had undergone a definite change a few decades before the invasion of the whites. Through the introduction of the horse they had become a more or less nomadic people. The Snakes, Nez Perces, and Cayuses counted their wealth in horses, and because they were thus free to move about they evolved a culture based largely on the chase and warfare. Bucksh-'n ornamented with dyed porcupine quills formed their dress, their moccasins, and their shelters, and skins dressed with the fur intact made their robes and blanketsiGame, supplemented by roots and berries, was their food.
The Shoshonean culture of the southeast plateau was of a lower order, owing to the nature of the barren and forbidding country. The Klamath and Modoc culture, influenced by the same factors but modi
