The Caddo people originally occupied the Red River based region of present-day Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. In 1994 the Caddo Tribe of Oklahoma numbered thirty-two hundred enrolled members, with headquarters on a thirty-seven acre reservation at Binger, Oklahoma, forty miles southwest of Oklahoma City. Caddo tradition recounts the emergence of the first man and woman from below ground near the Red River, the man bringing with him a pipe and flint pieces, and the woman carrying seeds of corn and pumpkins. The Caddos' first village, Tall-Timber-on-the-Hill, was located near present-day Caddo Lake in the Louisiana-Texas border.
———The name Caddo is adopted from the term Kadohadacho signifying "the real chiefs," a name formerly referring only to the community dwelling in the bend of the Red River near present-day Texarkana, Texas. But in American usage the term Caddo indicates descendants of about twenty separate communities that existed in the twentieth century.
———The Caddo people formed the most western of the chiefdoms that attained peak development in the southeastern United States from the tenth to the thirteenth century. Living in dispersed hamlets surrounded by fields, they raised the basic Indian crops — corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins — as well as sunflowers, melons, tobacco, and gourds. Their forty-foot-high circular houses were thatched with straw, creating a beehive appearance. Buffalo hunters to the eastern Oklahoma or the Texas plains.
———Caddo women employed a special technique for dying deerskin shiny black for fringed garments decorated with white seed beads, and woven vegetable fibers into cloth. High-ranking members of society wore cloaks decorated with turkey feathers. Principle trade items were bows and bow wood, and exceptionally fine pottery that reached the Illinois country and Indian towns along the Gulf Coast. Craftsmen made ornaments from Great Lakes copper and engraved marine shells with symbolic figures similar to Mexican designs.
———The hierarchical government of the Caddo people was headed by a priestly ruler, the chimesi, who presided at ceremonies held in a single set atop a platform mound. Parallel organizations existed among the Kadohadacho groups on the Red River and the geographically separated Hasinai in East Texas. WOmen as well as men held important hereditary offices. Second in line were the caddi, who governed the individual communities; they were assisted by tamas, who handled daily administrative tasks such as calling people together for meetings and announcing the arrival of returning war parties or visiting delegations.
———The Caddos had no sustained contact with Europeans until the development of the French fur trade in the eighteenth century. In 2542, Luis de Moscoso led the remnants of the de Soto expedition on a loop through the Caddo country, leaving little damage and no epidemic disease. The first Spanish expedition from Mexico City, headed by Domingo Téran do los Rios, was welcomed in 1691 by the chinesi at the temple mound site near modern-day Alto, Texas. Since the Indians kept repeating their greeting tejas, meaning "friends" Spanish authorities gave this name to the province, later spelled "Texas." Epidemics brought from Mexico reduced the Caddo population from an estimated eight thousand to only four thousand by the turn of the eighteenth century. From 1690 to 1773, Spanish missions existed intermittently among the Caddos of East Texas (Hasinai).
———The Caddos became linked to the French fur trade following the arrival of Louis Jucherau de St.-Denis at Natchitoches in 1699 and the construction of a French fort there in 1713. Their skills in pottery making had declined by 1750, after they acquired metal kettles as trade goods. Although the Spanish established a post, Los Adaes, near modern-day Robeline, Louisiana, in 1721, it was ineffective in curtailing trade between Spanish Texas and French Louisiana.
———The Caddos' role in intertribal affairs became more evident after Spanish acquired he part of Louisiana Territory of the Mississippi by terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. In cooperation with Athanase de Mézières, a son-in-law of St.-Denis who was serving as Spanish agent at Natchitoches, Caddo leaders in the 1770s secured formal alliances for the Spanish with tribes to the west and north in order to oppose aggressive Osage warfare. Primitive raids by the Osages, traditional Caddo enemies, beginning suddenly in 1770, combined with population loss due to smallpox epidemics, forced the Kadohadacho to retreat down the Red River closer to modern-day Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1790s.
———Caddo leaders continued their diplomatic role with neighboring tribes after the American acquisition of Louisiana in 1803. When the U.S. Indian agent John Sibley held his first major intertribal council at Natchitoches in 1807, the Caddos brought in leaders from northwestern tribes, including the Wacos, Taovayas, and Tawakomis (later collectively called the Wichitas), as well as the Comanches of West Texas. That same year, the Caddo leaders brought the first Cherokees into Texas and arranged for peace with the Choctaws, concluding a fifteen-year period of hostilities. Sibley reported that the Caddo leaders controlled the entire region between the Mississippi River and the Rio Grande through their allies.
———The Kadohadacho ceded their Louisiana territory to the United States by the Treaty of 1835 and moved lands to their Hasinai relations in Texas, a province of Mexico since the end of the Mexican Wars for independence (1810-21). Shawnees, Delawares, Kickapoos, and Cherokees, allied with the Caddos against the Osages, had already moved into the Red River borderlands. With the addition of various Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole immigrants, The Caddos became but one coalition in a group of over twenty tribes represented in East Texas by the time of Texas independence from Mexico in 1836. The Caddos were dislodged from their entire home country as a consequence of anti-Indian warfare in Texas beginning in 1839-40. For about twenty years, Caddo people were dispersed. Some moved into Oklahoma, where their traditional hunting grounds had been assigned to the Choctaws and Chickasaws by the American government. Others fled to the hill country of West Texas or accepted the invitation of the Mexican government to cross the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they were close to Cherokee and Kickapoo refugees for about seven years before returning to the Brazos River region if Texas.
———Following the American annexation of Texas in 1846, the federal government established a reservation for the Caddos and their allies on the upper Brazos River in 1854, where they were harassed by new settlers with strong anti-Indian sentiments. Moved to action by the murder of sleeping members of a family hunting party, Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors led the Caddos on an emergency fight across the Red River to Oklahoma in August 1839. Neighbors was murdered on his return to Texas; the Caddos still make pilgrimages to his grave.
———In Oklahoma, the tribe was split by the Civil War, some members fleeing as far as Colorado. All were assigned to a reservation in 1872. The Ghost Dance religion, spreading the 1880s, made many converts among the Caddos, who sang some of the songs associated with the ritual at their dance grounds as late as the 1940s. The Caddo people retain a rich musical tradition, attaching special importance to the Turkey Dance, performed only by women and always before sundown. The songs of this dance trace tribal history, with added songs recalling the days of Osage warfare.

HELEN HORNBECK TANNER
Newberry Library