pting perhaps Me-le, in the white man's ways of house building.
He has erected for his family, which consists of one wife and three
children, a cypress board house, and furnished it with doors and
windows, partitions, floors, and ceiling. In the house are one upper and
one or two lower rooms. Outside, he has a stairway to the upper floor,
and from the upper floor a balcony. He possesses also an elevated bed,
a trunk for his clothing, and a straw hat.

Besides the permanent home for the Seminole family, there is also the
lodge which it occupies when for any cause it temporarily leaves the
house. The lodges, or the temporary structures which the Seminole make
when "camping out," are, of course, much simpler and less comfortable
than their houses. I had the privilege of visiting two "camping"
parties--one of forty-eight Indians, at Tak-o-si-mac-la's cane field, on
the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp; the other of twenty-two persons, at a
Koonti ground, on Horse Creek, not far from the site of what was, long
ago, Fort Davenport.

I found great difficulty in reaching the "camp" at the sugar cane field.
I was obliged to leave my conveyance some distance from the island on
which the cane field was located. When we arrived at the shore of the
saw-grass marsh no outward sign indicated the presence of fifty Indians
so close at hand; but suddenly three turbaned Seminole emerged from the
marsh, as we stood there. Learning from our guide our business, they
cordially offered to conduct us through the water and saw-grass to the
camp. The wading was annoying and, to me, difficult; but at length we
secured dry footing in the jungle on the island, and after a tortuous
way through the tangled vegetation, which walled in the camp from the
prairie, we entered the large clearing and the collection of lodges
where the Indians were. These lodges, placed very close together and
seemingly without order, were almost all made of white cotton cloths,
which were each stretched over ridge poles and tied to four corner
posts. The lodges were in shape like the fly of a wall tent, simply a
sheet stretched for a cover.

At a Koonti ground on Horse Creek I met the Cat Fish Lake Indians. They
had been forced to leave their homes to secure an extra supply of Koonti
flour, because, as I understood the woman who told me, some animals had
eaten all their sweet potatoes. The lodges of this party differed from
those of the southern Indians in being covered above