THE CADDO INDIANS THROUGH TIME

F.E. Abernethy

"Ab" Abernethy is Regents Professor Emeritus of English at Stephen F. Austin State University, the executive secretary and editor of the Texas Folklore Society, the curator of exhibits for the East Texas Historical Association, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. He received his doctorate in Renaissance Literature and was a classroom teacher at Woodville High School. He is a World War II veteran, worked in the caves of Mexico and the Yucatán for 20 years, and plays the bass fiddle in the East Texas String Ensemble of Nacogdoches.

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Early people might have come to Texas hunting on the edges of the herds of Pleistocene mastodons and mammoths, but as yet we have no direct evidence of them. We do know that by circa 10,000 B.C. a nomadic people we call the Paleoindians began wandering through East Texas, living off a land rich in animal and vegetable foods. From around 6000 B.C. to A.D. 200, a people anthropologists refer to as Archaic hunted and gathered in the Piney Woods. Then, around A.D. 200, these Archaic people were joined by a movement of Indians out of the Mississippi Valley, and a new culture came to East Texas. This culture became what we today call the Caddos, and they brought with them new ways of hunting, farming, and living. They brought bows and arrows, a settled farming lifestyle, and the household skills of weaving, basketry, and pottery making. These new ways of life became the most sophisticated and advanced Indian culture in Texas.

The Hasinai Caddos of East Texas have an ancient tale that says that their Old People came out of a land of darkness. They brought corn and seeds for squash and pumpkins, and they brought a tribal governing structure with a chief and headmen. They marched westward toward a new world of light and made their homeland around the Neches and Angelina Rivers (southwest of Nacogdoches)¹.

Researchers believe the Caddos and their cultural companions of the Southeast—the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chikasas, and Natchez—were part of a great migration of Asiatics that crossed the Bering Strait 30,000 years ago. These wanderers from Asia flowed down the Columbia River trench, across the Great Plains, through the Mexican highlands, down to the Yucatán. Still moving but always bringing parts of the cultures they left behind, they made a circle from the Yucátan in Mexico up through the islands of the Caribbean until they came again to the mainland of what is now the southeastern United States.

Leon Carter, Caddo, c. 1978. Courtesy of Cecile Carter, Caddo

Their populations grew as they occupied the Southeast, and their language and customs slowly changed as they drifted apart and became new tribes. But they were all still bound by traditions that were too strong to die. These ways of life bound together the Caddos and Creeks and most of the Indians of the Southeast.

Lillie Whitehorn, daughter of Caddo Chief Enock Hoag, c. 1978. Courtesy of Cecile Carter, Caddo

The Hasinai Caddos reached their last territory in East Texas around A.D. 500. At their height, there were over 200,000 Caddo Indians² occupying what is today East Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, southwestern Arkansas, and western Louisiana.

The Caddos were divided into three confederacies (groups united by a common purpose): The Kadohadachos, the dominant confederacy from whom we derived the name Caddo, or Chief, lived around the Great Bend of the Red River in southwestern Arkansas. The Natchitoches Caddos lived around Cane River Lake, near present-day Natchitoches in western Louisiana. The Hasinai Caddos lived around the upper Neches and the Angelina Rivers in East Texas. Each confederation was a casual alliance of several tribes scattered in villages over a large area³.

Because of their location on the eastern boundary of New Spain [land claimed by Spain in North America], next door to the French and later the Americans, the Hasinai Caddos became the most involved Indian confederation in early Texas history and consequently became a part of national and world history.

The Caddos were mound builders, possibly bringing that part of their culture from their distant home across the Caribbean. The hundreds of great sloped mounds could have been distant and faded reflections of the magnificent pyramidal structures found among the Mayans and Olmecs of the Yucatán and Central America⁴.

The Hasinai ceremonial center at the Caddoan Mounds State Historical Park was the southwestern corner of a widespread mound-building culture that covered the southeastern United States and extended northward up the Mississippi River and its drainage.

The Hasinai Caddos built two types of mounds; burial mounds and ceremonial mounds. The burial mounds began as large pit graves for important members of the tribe. The dead appear to have been accompanied by family members and servants who were slain [killed] to keep them company in the land of the dead. These aristocrats were buried with their weapons, jewelry, beautifully crafted pottery, and other indicators of their wealth to maintain their positions in the other world. The graves were refilled with dirt and mounded. These mounds grew higher as following generations buried their chiefs and priests among others in the same mound and added more dirt.

The burial mound at the Caddoan Mounds State Historical Park contains over ninety bodies buried in approximately thirty burial pits. The mound reached a height of twenty feet. The burials took place at the height of the Neches River Caddo culture, between A.D. 900 and A.D. 1300⁵.

The ceremonial mounds were often square mounds, twenty feet or higher, with temple structures built on top. These mounds were the ceremonial and ritual centers of the tribe. Sacred fires were kept within the temple, and there the tribe's gods were worshipped. The temples were places of sacrifice, both human and otherwise, and rituals marked the seasons and the holy times. Priests atop the temple mounds conducted rituals with the people standing in awe below. When the chief priest, the xinesi, died, his temple was burned, new dirt was added, and a new temple was built on the mound site of the old. The temple mounds grew slowly in height, as did the burial mounds, over several hundred years.

Sometime around the fourteenth century, the Caddos could no longer afford mound building. Or perhaps that practice simply fell out of favor. Whatever the cause, the mounds lost their central place in the Caddo culture. They grew over with grass, weeds, and trees, and they began to wear away to their present size.

The Caddo mounds, the remains of which are now best seen at Caddoan Mounds State Historical Park on State Highway 21 west of Alto, are indicative of a thriving society. The vibrant Caddo society could support and care for its people. Laborers built structures supporting the elite part of the society, who lived among the tombs and temples. These Caddos had mastered survival and had the wealth that could support both leisure activities and the creation of objects that did not necessarily contribute to their survival.

Caddoan home at Caddoan Mounds State Historical Park, May 1988. Courtesy of Alice Sackett, San Antonio

The Caddos built other significant structures that single them out from the other Indians of Texas. They built large, round beehive-shaped houses that varied in size from fifteen to fifty feet in diameter⁶, depending on the status of the individuals involved. These houses were twenty to thirty feet tall and were made of layers of thatch enclosing a tall frame of poles bound together at the top. Houses were built communally and housed as many as eight to ten families or thirty to forty people.

Sleeping quarters were spaced around the interior walls and were built to afford some sort of privacy and separation for the individuals and the families. This personal area took about half of the house. The remainder of the interior was used for storage of foods, pottery, baskets, and the utensils necessary for the keeping and cooking of foods. The fire for cooking and warming was in the middle of the house and burned continuously. One woman was assigned the position of chief cook for the house, and the other women helped in the preparation of foods⁷.

The number of people in a house depended on the size of the house, of course. The houses of the elite would be large and were located near the ritual centers of a tribe's territory. The houses got smaller as the people scattered out in small family groups in their hunting grounds.

The Hasinai Caddos went to war when necessary. They took scalps, and they drank the blood and ate the flesh of captives. But they were not a warlike people, as a rule, because they did not have to be⁸. They were seldom under attack, nor did they need to harass their neighbors. The Hasinais in East Texas, therefore, lived without fear of major invasions and built no permanent fortifications. The people built their houses and huts wherever the ground was best for tillage [cultivation] and the woods best for hunting.

Engraving of a Caddo chief

Each tribe in the confederacy had its own elaborate religious and political structure. The xinesi (probably pronounced shinési) was the religious leader, and he was the intermediary between the Caddi Ayo, the supreme god and chief, and the people. The xinesi was in charge of all religious rites as well as the spiritual well-being of the tribal members. He read the holy signs and told the people when to plant, plow, and harvest. In the chain of authority, the xinesi was above the tribal chief.

The caddi, or political chief, was the political and social arbiter of the tribe’s life. When warfare was necessary, he led the way. When the pipe of peace was passed, the caddi presided. Below the caddi were other grades of political leaders who saw to the order and welfare of the tribe, were in charge of the tilling and planting of crops, and oversaw the building of the tribe's houses, among other things. The xinesi and his priests and the caddi and his sub-chiefs were the elite of Caddo society.

Early explorers described the Caddos as being a good-looking, strong, and robust people⁹. Both males and females decorated their bodies with elaborate tattoos. For a while, cranial [head] deformation was popular, and parents flattened and bound their babies’ foreheads to make them beautiful. The men shaved the sides of their heads, leaving a strip of hair down the middle and a long pigtail down the back. They dressed in buckskin that was typically tanned to black or a dark color. The men dressed in breechclouts [loin cloths] and leggings decorated with shells and bones. The women wore fringed skirts and, when the weather required, a poncho-type of top garment. Compared with many of the nomadic Texas Indians, the Caddos were stylish dressers.

Caddo men in their village

The Hasinai Caddos were among the most advanced Indians in Texas. They were prospering farmers, hunters, and gatherers who lived in permanent villages in a land of bears and honey. For much of their East Texas history, they lived in relative richness, occupying the creek and river bottoms and raising their crops in large, carefully cultivated fields of rich soil.

The Caddos farmed communally [together], digging, planting, and cultivating the land and the crops for and with each other. A small-eared early corn and a large late-fall corn were the basis of their diet, along with many varieties of beans, squash, pumpkins, and melons. They also cultivated tobacco, millet, and sunflowers.

The Caddo Indians were also proficient hunters of wild animals including deer, which furnished them with much of their meat and with most of their black buckskin clothes. They raised turkeys but also killed them in the wild.

Caddo Indian in a turkey feather cape

Bears were hunted for their hides and meat, and the fat was used for cooking. The fat was sweet and was consumed as a drink on certain festive occasions. The Caddos also made annual trips across the Trinity River to hunt buffalo. The buffalo meat was cut and dried into jerky. They fished the rivers with trotlines, much as we use now, and netted and trapped ducks and geese when the birds came south on their annual migrations. The Caddos had dogs that they used to hunt bears, raccoons, and opossums. In bad times, they ate them.

Caddo women preparing food. Courtesy of F.E. Abernethy, curator, East Texas Historical Association Exhibit

The East Texas river bottoms were rich in vegetation and natural foods such as pecans, acorns, black walnuts, hickory nuts, and chinquapins. Wild fruits such as grapes, plums, paw-paws, blackberries, dewberries, and mulberries supplemented their diet.

The Hasinai Caddos were great traders and traveled throughout the large Caddo territory trading with other groups of their people. During peaceful times and after they acquired horses in the sixteenth century, they wandered down the Camino Real and adjacent roads trading in "foreign" Texas Indian markets.

In common with the civilized tribes of the Southeast, the Caddos were skilled and talented basket weavers, and their basketry was much in demand. But it was Caddo pottery that exceeded all other crafts in form and fashion. Their pottery was bone tempered and very thin, yet durable. It was symmetrically made and artistically decorated in patterns of circles, scrolls, and swirls¹⁰.

Caddo clay pipe

Pottery colors were in shades of grays, browns, and blacks. Red and white pigments were often rubbed into the engraved designs, and the pots were highly polished. The most usable forms of pottery were bowls, jars of all shapes and sizes, and bottles. Caddo pottery was much in demand for the sake of its beauty and utility and was a popular trade item among the Hasinais.

Caddo artist at work

They also made ceramic effigies [forms] in human and various animal shapes. The Hasinai Caddo also traded shells from the Gulf coast, bois d’arc for bows, and beautifully tanned hides of all kinds.

Europeans met the Caddos as early as 1542. Luis de Moscoso, who had assumed command of Hernando de Soto’s soldiers after de Soto died, came to East Texas searching for a route back to the Spanish settlements in Mexico. They made a long march through the Kadohadacho Caddos on the Red River down to the Hasinai Caddos on the Neches. The Spanish recorded in their journals and on their maps names and descriptions of the Caddo Indian tribes.

The Hasinai Caddos were to go another 125 years before they met Europeans again. In 1687 men from La Salle's Fort Saint Louis settlement on Garcitas Creek stayed at the Caddo camps. The men, including Henri Joutel, Abbé Jean Cavelier, Father Anastase Douay, Pierre Meunier, Pierre Talon, and others from the colony, were attempting to make their way to the Mississippi and travel north to Canada after the murder of their leader, La Salle. After resting, getting women to grind corn for them, and trading for horses, they traveled on. Pierre Talon and Pierre Meunier stayed behind, learned the Caddo language and way of life¹¹, and enlisted their help in providing for the settlers at Fort Saint Louis.

Then, in 1689, the Hasinais on a trading mission to South Texas encountered Alonso de León near present-day Victoria. De León was searching for the French Fort Saint Louis built by La Salle's colonists. The Hasinais greeted the Spanish with the cry of "Taychas!" which meant friend or ally. The Spanish understood "Taychas" to be their tribal name and began referring to the East Texas Hasinai Caddos as the "Tejas." The Spanish land east of the Trinity River became known as the Province of Tejas.

The American settlers who later came across the Sabine into this land of the Tejas called all of it "Texas," and that became the name of the new republic after 1836 and the name of the twenty-eighth state in the Union of the United States in 1845. A lasting legacy of the Caddo Indians is the friendly word of greeting that they gave the Spanish over three hundred years ago.

Father Damián Massanet was with de León. Massanet had come to New Spain and Texas following the tales of the miracles of Mother María de Jesús of Ágreda, Spain. Mother María, according to stories she told sixty years earlier in the 1620s, had through the miracle of bilocation (being in two places at the same time) visited the land of the Tejas, or Caddos, without leaving her convent in Spain. She had instructed the East Texas Indians in the mysteries of Catholicism and had converted many souls for Christ.

Lady in blue

The Tejas Caddos told Father Damián that they were familiar with the stories of God, his Son, and the Holy Mother. They asked that he send missionaries among them to teach them Christianity, as a lady in blue had taught them years before when she had come to their villages. Father Damián, convinced that he was in the midst of a miracle, promised that he would return.

Father Damián returned the following year with General de León to a Caddo village on the Neches River. There they founded Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, the second European settlement in Texas.

Caddo children playing with a man dressed in a deer costume

Unfortunately, the Spanish brought with them more than the teachings of Christianity. They brought diseases that the Caddos had never before known, and the tribes were devastated by plagues. Soon the Spanish were no longer welcome among the Caddos, and in 1693 the Caddos drove out the friars and soldiers, who fled back to Mexico.

Prompted by their fear of the French across the Sabine River in Natchitoches, the Spanish returned to the Hasinais in East Texas in 1716. Domingo Ramón, guided by the Frenchman Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, came among the Caddos of East Texas with soldiers, missionaries, and settlers to establish six missions and two forts. Ramón met among the Hainai tribe of Hasinai Indians a Caddo woman of learning who had been reared in Coahuila and who also spoke Spanish. The Spanish called her Angelina. She became the interpreter and advisor for the Spanish as she had been for the Frenchman St. Denis as early as 1712. Angelina's tribe lived on the river that by the 1760s was called by her name.

Painting of Angelina by Ancel Nunn, c.1979. Courtesy of Lufkin Printing Company

Angelina was an important link between the Europeans and the Caddos during these years of European settlement. She worked with St. Denis and Domingo Ramón in 1716. Later, in 1720, she assisted in the rescue of Simars de Bellisle, a Frenchman who had been left ashore in Galveston and had spent a year as a captive slave of the Atakapans of the Big Thicket. After his rescue, Angelina nursed him back to health and then sent him to St. Denis in Natchitoches. Angelina was still helping the Spanish in 1721 when the Marqués de Aguayo came with Spanish settlers to establish a permanent Spanish settlement in East Texas¹².

The Caddos played political games with all of the Europeans that they encountered, usually playing one nation against the other. They played the religious game with the Spanish in 1690, allowing them to establish Mission San Francisco de los Tejas in their territory. The Hasinais thought that they would profit in gifts and trade goods with the Spanish in their midst. Instead, the Spanish brought an epidemic of diseases that decimated [wiped out] the tribe during that first winter of 1690-1691. At nearly the same time, the Indians were swept with both floods and droughts. Consequently, they turned against the Spanish and ran them out of East Texas.

The Indians were courted by both the Spanish and the French, both for their trade and for their good conduct. Even with the Spanish in their camp, the Hasinais were trading with the French across the Sabine in Natchitoches. As soon as the Spanish left, the trading with the French increased.

After the United States purchased Louisiana in 1803, the competition for the trade and favor of the Caddos was between Spain and the United States, with both countries vying with gifts for the favor of the Indians. Texas, after it became a republic in 1836, was jealous of the United States government’s influence over the Caddos and was also angered at the government’s movement of the Caddos from Louisiana and Arkansas into northeast Texas.

Harry Edge, Caddo Indian

The Caddos, who had lost land in East Texas to the Cherokees, lost more land in 1839 when Texian forces drove the Cherokees, along with other Indian tribes who were living in and near their territory, out of East Texas and into Indian Territory. By this time, however, the number and the power of the Caddos were rapidly diminishing [declining]. They were a problem only when they united with other Indian tribes to go on raids against American settlers.

Julia Edge, born in 1900, Binger, Caddo County, Oklahoma, c. 1978. Courtesy of Cecile Carter, Caddo

After Texas joined the Union in 1845, the United States agreed to give the remaining Caddos, only 2,500 of them by then, land on the Brazos River in Central Texas. The last of the Caddos were moved there in 1854. Within four years, Anglo immigration into Texas had reached the new Indian lands on the Brazos River, and in the competition for land, the Anglos won.

By 1859 the Caddos, now numbering around 1,050, were forced to move again, to Indian Territory, for their own safety¹³. They were later given land on the Washita River in Oklahoma. During the Civil War, the Caddos were caught once again between political forces. Many left the Washita and moved to Kansas for the duration of the war to show their alliance with the Union rather than the Confederacy. They moved back after Appomattox (end of the Civil War). By 1874 the Caddo Reservation boundaries were settled, and the few remaining Caddos from the Kadohadacho, Natchitoches, and Hasinai tribes came together as the unified Caddo Indian Tribe.

Patricia Carter Files and daughter Hallie in traditional Caddoan dress, c. 1973. Courtesy of Cecile Carter, Caddo

Looking back on their history, the Caddos got along best with the French, whom they liked the most. The Americans (new settlers from the United States), who were moving into Caddo territory at the end of the eighteenth and first of the nineteenth century, treated them well enough and earned the Caddos' friendship. The Spanish were tolerated for their gifts and trade, but they were not liked, mainly because they continually tried to make the Indians live differently.

The Caddos did not like Texans, however. East Texans harassed them and then drove them to the Brazos lands, where they were continually under attack by the West Texans. The Texans finally drove the few remaining Caddos out of their state and into the Washita Indian land in Oklahoma. For generations the anger continued against Texans, on whom the Caddos lumped the blame for the loss of all their lands and much of their culture.

In 1867, when the Caddos settled down after the Civil War, the United States gave each family 160 acres of land in the Washita River area, and the tribal land has been there ever since. The Caddos today live along the Washita River in Oklahoma, five miles east of Binger. Their tribal complex consists of administration, cultural, and community buildings, including a museum. Offices for the Headstart program and food services for the elders are located in the complex. The Caddos operate their government under a tribal constitution, and they conduct tribal business under the guidance of an elected eight-member council.

One of the main duties of the council is to search for ways to achieve tribal self-sufficiency. One of their present projects-in-planning is the establishment of a shopping plaza on Interstate 40. They hope to build a plaza with a gas station, convenience store, food court, and eventually a hotel and casino.

Members of the Caddo Tribal Council and Hearing Board at their installation in 1995. Courtesy of Cecile Carter, Caddo

Four thousand Caddos are on the tribal rolls, and nine hundred remain on the Oklahoma tribal land. They still struggle to survive and to maintain some vestiges [remains] of their ancient tribal culture. During the summer at the Caddo Tribal Complex near Binger, they have monthly ceremonials with old traditional dances. In October they have a three-day Culture Club Banquet Dance to raise money and to celebrate their Caddo heritage.

Caddo women dancers in the traditional Caddo Turkey Dance at Binger Y Dance Ground, c. 1993. Courtesy of Cecile Carter, Caddo

The majority of the Caddos left their Washita lands decades ago. World War II moved many of them away from their tribesmen and into the armed services or into wartime industry. Most never returned to the Washita. Their children and their children's children drifted farther and farther away from the Caddo culture and traditions. Most are proud of their Indian heritage but recognize that living the old tribal ways denies them the financial resources of American life. It is the dilemma of Indian culture: they are individuals on the edge, neither able to live in the world of the old Caddo ways nor in the fast-paced, work-oriented life of the Anglos.

Winonna Williams in traditional Caddo woman's dance dress holding a leadership cane, c. 1978. Courtesy of Cecile Carter, Caddo

The Caddos are a large part of a long and rich history. Like the Greeks and Romans, the Caddo nation had its time of power and prosperity. And like the Greeks and the Romans, they reached an apex [high point] of power and prosperity and then began a decline. The Caddos were still flourishing when the Europeans came, but their time of mound-building glory was past. With the coming of the Europeans, that which remained of the Caddo culture went into a final collapse under the pressure of plagues and diseases They retreated before weapons for which they had no defense. They were overwhelmed by a people who came in such numbers and with such determination and hunger for land that a single Indian confederation could never withstand them. The Caddo Indians lost their place in the North American power struggle, but for a time they had lived peacefully and flourished over a vast domain.

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