The Amerind of North America has generally been considered a shiftless and indolent being, but the preceding pages have shown, I think, that this estimate is an error, and the following chapters, together with the present one, will even more conclusively demolish that false assumption. The Amerind to be sure was not a white man, but it must not be forgotten that the constant holding of the white man’s nose to the grindstone is not so commendable as it is often said to be, for it is not choice with him but necessity born of his ways of living and his great numbers. Put him in comparatively small numbers on a vast continent rich and fertile and abounding in game, and it is not likely that he would shut himself up in a factory or in an office, where he is only a counting machine. The Amerind was as industrious as his environment demanded. Doubtless had his development not been interfered with by the Discovery, he might have arrived in time at the same condition of pressure that compels us to labour incessantly. Almost everywhere on this continent are discovered numerous evidences of Amerind industry and toil. From the brush shelter of the Pai Ute of Arizona to the vast stone structures, richly ornamented, of Yucatan, is an immense range, and within these limits are to be found about every kind of a refuge from the elements that mankind has been able to devise. Mud, boughs caves, wood, adobe, stone, ice, snow, wicker-work, wattling, skins, in fact, every material and every possible hole, existing in nature, have been utilised by the Amerind, and the materials have been given every variety of shape. In nothing, perhaps, has his struggle with environment, and the moulding effects of the environment, been more clearly exhibited than in the forms and materials of the dwellings he has been compelled to invent. Other evidences of his perseverance and exertion are discerned in great aqueducts, in long irrigating canals, in reservoirs, in huge earthworks, and enormous mounds that sometimes rival in magnitude the giant constructions of Egypt. The Amerind dwellings may be divided into three general classes,—temporary, portable, and fixed. The two classes, temporary and fixed, only are usually recognised by ethnologists, but it has seemed to me proper to add the third class, because of the wide use of the portable tipi, and other forms of tent. The temporary houses, those abandoned on moving camp and seldom occupied again, may be represented by the Pai Ute wikiup; the portable, carried from place to place for years, by the tipi of the Dakotas; the fixed, or those which are occupied either for an extended period or periodically, by the stone or adobe house of the Pueblos, or the wood house of the Iroquois, or the wood and earth house of the Eskimo.[170] [Illustration: PAI UTE WIKIUPS, NORTHERN ARIZONA From photograph by the Colorado River Expedition, 1872 ]