Plank house

The oldest plank house village found is located in Kitselas Canyon at the Paul Mason Site in western British Columbia, Canada.

Craftspeople would insert a wedge to create a section of wood through the tree's height and remove it with an adze at both ends.

Canadian anthropologist Wilson Duff quotes Simon Fraser, who (upon observation of the Coast Salish homes on the banks of the now-named Fraser River) wrote in his 1800 journal; "as an excellent house 46 × 32 and constructed like American frame houses; the planks are three to 4 inches thick, each plank overlapping the adjoining one a couple of inches; the post, which is very strong and crudely carved, received across beams; the walls are 11 feet high and covered with a slanting roof.

These planks were neither small nor easily obtained, but they were valuable assets and, as such, they were transported with household goods during the seasonal migrations.

The house frames were left intact until the next season when the people returned and reattached their traveling planks and reconstructed their homes.

One type consists of gabled, paired ridgepoles, vertical walls, and roof planks with an interior pit that was reached via steps.

Anthropologist Ronald Leroy Olson, whose subjects were the Quinault, Tlingit and Kwakiutl tribes, defines the coasts of the Pacific Northwest as the place for rectangular plank houses, from the coastal region of British Columbia to the mouth of the Copper River in Alaska, with one exception: the Athabascan Tseutsaut of the head of Portland Canal, who used temporary brush and bark lodges.