“Chimney, as among the true Born Irish,is a little hole in the top of the
House” placed directly above the fire pit where the cooking was done.
Houses like this were built up and down the East Coast. As with Irish
houses, the English visitors remarked, building was relatively simple and
quick, taking just a few days of labor and lasting for about ten years. After
that time, the family probably needed to find a new neighborhood, as it
would have used up all the convenient firewood and might also have out-
grown the house or separated from the relatives with whom the house was
shared. Also, despite the smoke, the furs or thatch would have been
invaded by rodents and other pests.
Generally, Indian houses were not scattered across the landscape as
they were among the colonists; the East Coast Indians from the Gulf of
Mexico to Newfoundland were townspeople. Although later British
colonists insisted that Indians were nomads (and so not really attached to
the land the colonists wanted to appropriate), their eyes told them other-
wise. As the pamphlet commissioned by Lord Baltimore for the use of
colonists in 1635 admitted, “They live for the most parts in Townes, like
Countrey Villages in England.” Earlier, in 1539, the country of the Florida
Indians was described as “greatly inhabited with many great towns and
many sown fields which reached from one to the other.” On the site of
modern East St. Louis before the arrival of the Spaniards, the city we call
Cahokia had a population of “upwards of 20,000.” Unlike the Great Plains
nomads whom the white men would meet centuries later, East Coast
Indians were settled farmers and villagers.
Villages were usually surrounded by a pale or stockade of upright logs,
as we can see in a drawing made in 1585 by John White. Indian villages
struck some observers as miniature counterparts of the city-states of
medieval Italy and were as frequently drawn to war by their governments.
The author of A Relation of Marylanddescribed the government of the
Indian societies known to the English as “Monarchiacall, he that governs in
chiefe, is called the Werowance, and is assisted by some that consult with
him of the common affaires, who are called Wisoes: They have no Lawes,
but the Law of Nature and discretion.”
Discretion exercised a powerful restraint on Indian statecraft. The
power of the werowance (or, as most whites called him, from the
The Native Americans 15