Patrick Gass Describes an Earth Lodge - Primary Source
This 1804 journal entry describes an earth lodge of the Arikara people.
Shelter is, of course, something every human being needs. People all over the world, and at all points in time, have come up with unique answers to this fundamental challenge. Shelter is not only important for survival, but it can teach you a lot about a group of people. Take the United States for example. We’ve all seen cookie-cutter neighborhoods in suburban areas. They have been common since the 1940s. Basically, they are entire neighborhoods where homes look almost identical. Same materials. Same design. Same landscaping. Like a cookie cutter.
Although you can make of this whatever you want, I believe this can reveal a few things about the culture in America. First, we are very concerned with efficiency. These homes are efficient to build because they are all the same. They are also efficient because they reflect the factory production method we believe in. We are a people who want to capitalize on the benefits of manufacturing. Another thing it teaches people about our society is that we are a sedentary people. In other words, we generally plan to come back to the same home every night.
In the same way cookie-cutter neighborhoods can teach us about American culture, you can look at the homes of any group of people to learn a little about their lives. It’s one way you can learn about people across time. Take the earth lodge for example. While earth lodges existed around the world at different points in history, they were common in Native American societies inhabiting the plains region as late as the 19th century. Earth lodges were relatively large homes constructed using a wooden structure topped with earth to insulate it. They were used by various tribes including the Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Kansas. Another tribe that lived in the earth lodge was the Arikara.
The Arikara were a people who lived on the Missouri River at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. You may know that Lewis, Clark, and several members of their expedition kept a daily journal. As a result, we have a good idea of what the Arikara village looked like. On October 10, 1804, the journals describe meeting with Arikara chiefs and also describe the village in general. One member, Patrick Gass, offers a detailed account of what the homes looked like. Gass must have been interested in these homes because he offers us the following detailed description:
“Wednesday 10th. This day I went with some of the men to the lodges, about 60 in number. The following is a description of the form of these lodges and the manner of building them.
“In a circle of a size suited to the dimensions of the intended lodge, they set up 16 forked posts five or six feet high, and lay poles from one fork to another. Against these poles they lean other poles, slanting from the ground, and extending about four inches above the cross poles: these are to receive the ends of the upper poles, that support the roof. They next set up four large forks, fifteen feet high, and about ten feet apart, in the middle of the area; and poles or beams between these. The roof poles are then laid on extending from the lower poles across the beams which rest on the middle forks, of such a length as to leave a hole at the top for a chimney. The whole is then covered with willow branches, except the chimney and a hole below to pass through. On the willow branches they lay grass and lastly clay. At the hole below they build a pen about four feet wide and projecting ten feet from the hut; and hang a buffaloe skin, at the entrance of the hut for a door…”
This Patrick Gass journal entry gives people interested in building an earth lodge a very detailed description of a historical example. Essentially, it is a circular frame of timber, intermixed with smaller pieces of wood, and then covered with grass and clay. It is also big; fifteen feet tall according to Gass. According to him, the village had about 60 such structures.
Although this type of entry can be helpful for people wanting to reconstruct an earth lodge, it can also be helpful to people looking to learn about life of the Arikara. For one, because of the time and effort to build them, we can suspect these people were likely farmers. There are very few examples of hunter-gatherer societies that live in one place and built large homes like this. As you might expect, this suspicion is validated in the same journal entry when Gass recorded;
“They raise corn, beans, and tobacco. Their tobacco is different from any I had before seen: it answers for smoking, but not for chewing.”
John Ordwary, who was also on the expedition, also records receiving vegetables.
“Gave us corn & beans dryed pumkins & Squasshes &.C. &.C”
So, we know the Arikara planned on spending the majority of their year at this village.
If we’re paying close attention, we may also be able to guess that they live in a semi-arid area. This is, of course, true about the area they lived in. Sedentary tribes like the Iroquois who lived where rainfall is abundant constructed longhouses almost completely of wood. On the upper Missouri, there would have been sparse timber available. In order to adapt to their geography, the Arikara constructed shelters that used what resources they had access to. Some trees (for the frame), willows and branches (for the majority of the wattling), grass (lots of this), and earth (again, lots of this).
Finally, we can suspect that the Arikara people probably worked together to build these homes. This is totally guesswork, but when you think about the amount of labor it would have taken in a pre-industrial society, you have to imagine they didn’t construct homes this big by themselves. Just look at some of the videos of people reconstructing these earth lodges today. Even using modern equipment to help, it is still a labor-intensive activity. Equipped with nothing more than some tomahawks, it seems like a good guess that these people worked together to complete the homes.
Earth lodges were fairly common shelters in some areas of the Great Plains. Although they were not used by nomadic buffalo hunters, they were good options for tribes that practiced agriculture. Even if they went on annual excursions after buffalo, they still planned on coming back to their stationary homes. They also were ideal structures in the geographic region the people lived in.
Hopefully, this primary source from Patrick Gass paints a clear picture of what an Arikara earth lodge looked like. It can be useful if you are interested in reconstructing the shelter, or if you are interested in learning about the people who lived in them.
