In localities where the encroachment of mountain and water make the village area very scant, two rows of houses are occasionally formed, but in no instance whatever is any evidence given in these Koloshian settlements of special arrangement of dwellings, or of any set position for the house of the chief man of the village: he may live either in the centre or at the extreme end of the row. Each house usually shelters several families, in one sense of the term; these are related to each other and under the tacitly acknowledged control of some elder, to whom the building is reputed to belong, and who is a person of greater or less importance in the tribe or village according to the amount of his property or cunning of his intellect. Before some of these Siwash mansions a rude porch or platform is erected, upon which, in fair weather, a miscellaneous group of natives will squat in assembly, conversing, if squaws, or gambling, if men. The houses themselves are usually square upon their foundations, and vary much in size, some of them being a hundred feet square, while most of them are between fifty and sixty feet, the smaller rancheries being less than twenty. The gable end, and the entrance right under its plumb, always faces the street and beach-view; the roof slopes down at a low pitch or angle on each side, with a projecting shelter erected right over the hole left in the roof-centre, intended for the escape of smoke—no chimneys were ever built. This shelter, or shutter, is movable, and is shifted by the Indian just as the wind and rain may drive; the floor is oblong or nearly square, and, in the older and better constructed examples, is partly sunk in the earth, _i.e._, the ground has been excavated to a depth of six or eight feet in a square area, directly in the centre, with one or two large earthen steps or terraces left running around the sides of the cellar. A small square of bare dirt is left in the exact centre, again, of this hole, while the rest of the floor is covered with split planks of cedar; the earthen steps which environ the lower floor are in turn faced and covered with cedar-slabs, and these serve not only for sleeping and lounging places, but also for the stowage, in part, of all sorts of boxes and packages of property and food belonging to the family; the balance of these treasures usually hangs suspended, in all manner of ingenious contrivances, from the heavy beams and roof-poles overhead. The rancheries which are built to-day by Alaskan Indians nearly all stand on the surface of the ground without any excavation—a decided degeneracy.