blocked the mouth of the stream during part of the spawning season. Such weirs were made from the willows that occur abundantly along the lake shore. Fish were dried on racks to preserve them for the winter months. During the long wet winter and early spring, the diet of dried fish and berries was supplemented by hunting ducks, beaver, muskrat, raccoon, otter, and bear. Winters were for construction and repair, for the arts, socializing and ceremonies, and for stories in a rich oral tradition. Life was, however, not quite idyllic. Northern Coast Salish and Wakashan from harder climates to the north were wont to raid. Food resources varied, and resources were not always sufficient to last through to spring. There is evidence that an extensive trade and potlatch network evolved to help distribute resources to areas in need that varied year to year, and was potent and effective until European diseases arriving in the 1770s and ravaged the region for more than a century. Society There is very little information prior to the 1850s about the ancestors of today's Duwamish people, for a mix of reasons. The anthropological societal descriptions provide snapshots of the structures in the second quarter of the 19th century and a little later. European contact and changes began accelerating greatly from 1833. Each village had one or more cedar plank longhouses (khwaac'ál'al or syúdəbàl?txʷ) containing extended families in a social structures that foreshadowed the cohousing of today. Tens of people lived in each one. There are several reasonable approximations to longhouses in Seattle today. The entry and beam architecture of restaurateur Ivar Haglund's Salmon House Restaurant (1969) beside Lake Union in Northlake is as authentically accurate as building codes allowed. Another example is the north face of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. More recently, the design of the main hall of the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center (opened 2009) closely echoes a traditional longhouse. Villages were usually located facing a beach and body of water or river navigable by canoe, near a creek and drinking water source. Beyond the diffuse villages and anthropogenic grasslands, most land was heavily forested. Understory tended to be dense along the edges; travel by canoe was generally far more practical than by land. The nearby creek (dᶻəlíxʷ) would often be called Little Water(stútələkʷ), an endearing familiar. The People of the Inside and the People of the Large Lake,