Smith, describing the Virginia Indians, says (_True Travels_, vol. i. p. 130): “Their houses are built like our arbors, of small young springs bowed and tyed, and so close covered with mats, or the barkes of trees very handsomely, that nothwithstanding either winde, raine, or weather, they are as warm as stoves, but very smoaky, yet at the toppe of the house there is a hole made for the smoake to go into right over the fire.
“Against the fire they lie on little hurdles of Reeds covered with a mat, borne from the ground a foote and more by a hurdle of wood. On these round about the house they lie heads and points, one by the other, against the fire, some covered with mats, some with skins, and some stark naked lie on the ground, from six to twenty in a house.”
In Parkman’s _Jesuits in North America_ there is a lively account of Le Jeune’s experience in passing the winter of 1633-4 among the Algonquins: “Put aside the bear-skin, and enter the hut. Here, in a space some thirteen feet square, were packed nineteen savages, men, women and children, with their dogs, crouched, squatted, coiled like hedge-hogs, or lying on their backs, with knees drawn up perpendicularly to keep their feet out of the fire.... The bark covering was full of crevices, through which the icy blasts streamed in upon him from all sides; and the hole above, at once window and chimney, was so large, that, as he [Le Jeune] lay, he could watch the stars as well as in the open air. While the fire in the midst, fed with fat pine-knots, scorched him on one side, on the other he had much ado to keep himself from freezing. At times, however, the crowded hut seemed heated to the temperature of an oven. But these evils were light when compared to the intolerable plague of smoke. During a snow-storm, and often at other times, the wigwam was filled with fumes so dense, stifling, and acrid, that all its inmates were forced to lie flat on their faces, breathing through mouths in contact with the cold earth. Their throats and mouths felt as if on fire; their scorched eyes streamed with tears.... The dogs were not an unmixed evil, for by sleeping on and around [Le Jeune], they kept him warm at night; but, as an offset to this good service, they walked, ran and jumped over him as he lay” (pp. 27-8).