Contact information"
Caddo Tribal Council
P.O. Box
487, Binger, OK 73009-0487
405-656-2344, FAX 656-2892
CADDO INDIANS.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century the term Caddo denoted only
one of at least twenty-five distinct but closely affiliated groups centered around the Red
River in Texas,
Arkansas, Louisiana,
and Oklahoma. The
term derives from the French abbreviation of Kadohadacho,
a word meaning "real chief" or "real Caddo" in the Kadohadacho dialect. European chroniclers referred to the
Caddo groups as the Hasinai, Kadohadacho, and Natchitoches
confederacies, although the "confederacies" are better interpreted as
kin-based affiliated groups or bands of Caddo communities. The Hasinai groups lived in the Neches
and Angelina River valleys in East Texas, the Kadohadacho
groups on the Red River in the Great Bend area, and the Natchitoches groups on
the Red River in the vicinity of the French post of Natchitoches (Fort St. Jean
Baptiste aux Natchitos),
established in 1714. The first European description of the Caddo peoples came
in 1542 from diarists traveling with the De Soto entrada, then led by Luis de Moscoso
Alvarado (Hernando De Soto had died in the spring of
1542). The Spanish described several of the Caddo groups as having dense
populations living in scattered settlements and having abundant food reserves
of corn. Twentieth-century archeological investigations of many prehistoric Caddoan sites indicate that Caddo communities were widely
dispersed throughout the major and minor stream valleys of the Caddoan area by around A.D. 800. The roots of these peoples
can be traced to Fourche Maline
or Woodland Period culture groups that began to settle down in small
communities, to manufacture ceramics for cooking and storage of foodstuffs, and
to develop a horticultural way of life based on the raising of tropical
cultigens (corn, squash, and later beans) and certain native plants.
The development of prehistoric Caddo culture
may have been the result of several factors, including: (a) the rise,
elaboration, and maintenance of complex social and political symbols of
authority, ritual, and ceremony (centering on the construction, dismantling,
remodeling, and use of earthen temple and burial mounds); (b) the development
of elite status positions within certain Caddo communities; (c) increased
sedentary life; and (d) the expanding reliance on tropical cultigens in the
economy, with an intensification in the use of maize agriculture after about A.D.
1200. Regardless of the processes involved, it is clear that after about A.D.
900, the Caddo groups were complex and socially ranked societies with
well-planned civic-ceremonial centers, conducted elaborate mortuary rituals and
ceremonial practices, and engaged in extensive interregional trade. Caddoan
societies shared much with their Mississippian neighbors, particularly the
adoption of maize and the development of maize agricultural economies, as well
as systems of social authority and ceremony.
In prehistoric times, the Caddos
lived in dispersed communities of grass and cane covered houses, with the
communities composed of isolated farmsteads, small hamlets, a few larger
villages, and the civic-ceremonial centers. These centers had earthen mounds
used as platforms for temple structures for civic and religious functions, for
burials of the social and political elite, and for ceremonial fire mounds. The
largest communities and the most important civic-ceremonial centers were
primarily located along the major streams-the Red, Arkansas,
Little, Ouachita, and Sabine rivers. The Caddo
peoples developed a successful horticultural economy based on the cultivation
of maize, beans, and squash, as well as such native cultigens as maygrass, amaranth, chenopods, and sunflowers. By about
A.D. 1300 most Caddoan groups were consuming large
amounts of maize, and this plant was clearly the most important food source for
them after that time. Several varieties of corn were cultivated, an early or
"little corn," harvested in July, and the "flour corn,"
harvested in September at the harvest of the Great Corn. Deer was the most
important source of meat to the Caddos, who exploited
bison
and bear for their furs and meat. After the introduction of the horse in the
late seventeenth century, the Caddos began to
participate in winter communal bison hunts on the prairies to the west of their
settlements.
They developed long-distance trade networks in
prehistoric times. Important items of trade were bison hides, salt, and bois d'arc bows, along with copper, stone, turquoise, and marine
shell used for gorgets, cups, and dippers, as well as
finished objects such as pottery vessels and large ceremonial bifaces. Many of the more important trade items were
obtained from great distances (e.g., turquoise from New Mexico, copper from the
Great Lakes, and marine shell from the Gulf Coast), and these items were often
placed as grave goods in the burials of the social and political elite. The
Caddo peoples had a sophisticated technology based on the use of clay, stone,
bone, wood, shell, and other media for the manufacture of tools, clothing,
ceramic vessels, basketry, ornaments, and other material items. The Caddos are particularly well known for the beautiful
artistic and functional ceramic wares they made of many forms and functions,
and the ceramics are considered some of the finest aboriginal pottery
manufactured in North America. Stone was
fashioned into arrowheads, and the Caddos
also made ground stone celts and axes for use in
removing trees and turning over the soil. They made bone into awls, beamers,
digging implements, and hoes, as well as ornaments, beads, and whistles. Hoes and digging tools were also made of freshwater mussel shells,
while marine shells obtained through trade were used in the production of shell
pendants, gorgets, beads, and cups.
The Caddos traced
descent through the maternal line rather than the paternal. Matrilineality
was reflected in kinship terms, as the father and father's brothers were called
by the same term as the mother and the mother's sisters. The Caddos recognized and ranked clans. Marriage typically
occurred between members of different clans. Religious and political authority
in historic Caddoan society rested in a hierarchy of
key positions within and between the various affiliated communities and groups.
The xinesi inherited a position of spiritual
leadership, the caddi the position of
principal headman of a community (also a hereditary leadership position), and
the canahas the position of subordinate
headmen or village elders. The Caddo people turned to the xinesi
for mediation and communication with the supreme god, the Caddi
Ayo, for religious leadership and decision-making
influence between allied villages and in leading certain special rites,
including first-fruits, harvest, and naming ceremonies. The xinesi
imbued everyday life with the supernatural. The caddi
was primarily responsible for making the important political decisions for the
community, sponsoring important ceremonies, leading councils for war
expeditions, and conducting the calumet (or peace pipe) ceremony with visitors
to the communities. The most influential and politically astute Caddo leaders
or caddices in historic times were Tinhiouen
(from ca. 1760 to 1789) and Dehahuit (from ca. 1800
to 1833) of the Kadohadachos, and Iesh
or José María (from about 1842 to 1862) of the Anadarko
or Nadaco tribe.
At the time of sustained European (Spanish and
French) contact with the Caddo groups in the late seventeenth century, Caddo
peoples lived on the Red River and in East
Texas. European populations-living in missions, ranches, and trading
posts-increased throughout the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century
in the Red River valley and in the vicinity of Natchitoches and Nacogdoches,
important fur trading centers, while epidemics between 1691 and 1816 greatly
reduced Caddo populations. At the same time, the Caddo peoples participated in
the fur trade, traded guns, horses, and other items to Europeans and other
Indians, and developed new trade and economic networks. The resulting economic
symbiosis between the Caddo groups and Europeans was an important means of
acculturation because great quantities of European goods became available to
the Caddo. While the Hasinai Caddo groups continued
to live through the 1830s in their traditional East Texas homeland in the Neches and Angelina River valleys, the Kadohadacho
groups moved off the Red River in the 1790s to get away from Osage depredations
and slave-raiding. Their new settlements were between the Sabine
River and Caddo
Lake, generally along
the boundary between the territory
of Louisiana and the province
of Texas. Most of the
Kadohadachos remained in the Caddo
Lake area until about
1842, although with the cession of Caddoan lands in Louisiana
in 1835 and increased Texas
settlement, other Kadohadacho moved to the Brazos River in north central Texas.
By the early 1840s, all Caddo groups had moved to the Brazos River
area to remove themselves from Anglo-American
repressive measures and colonization efforts. They remained there until they
were placed on the Brazos Indian Reservation in 1855, and then in 1859 the
Caddos (about 1,050 people) were removed to the Washita River in Indian Territory (now western Oklahoma)
with the help of Robert
S. Neighbors, superintendent of Indian affairs in Texas.
During the Civil
War most of the Caddo groups abandoned the Indian Territory
and resettled in southern and eastern Kansas,
but they moved back to the Wichita
Reservation in 1867. By 1874 the boundaries of the Caddo reservation were
defined, and the separate Caddo tribes agreed to unite as the unified Caddo
Indian Tribe. Under the terms of the General Allotment Act of 1887, the Caddo
reservation was partitioned in 1902 a 160-acre allotment for each enrolled
Caddo, and the remaining lands were opened for white settlement. The Caddo
peoples continue to live in western Oklahoma,
primarily in Caddo County
near the Caddo Indian Tribe's Tribal Complex, outside Binger, Oklahoma.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hiram F. Gregory,
ed., The Southern Caddo: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 1986). Thomas
R. Hester, Ethnology of the Texas
Indians (New York: Garland, 1991). Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook
of American Indians North of Mexico (2 vols., Washington:
GPO, 1907, 1910; rpt., New York:
Pageant, 1959). Marvin D. Jeter et al., Archeology and Bioarcheology of the Lower
Mississippi Valley and Trans-Mississippi South in Arkansas and Louisiana (Research Series No. 37, Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological
Survey, 1989). Michael S. Nassaney and
Charles R. Cobb, eds., Stability, Transformation, and Variation: The Late Woodland
Southeast (New York: Plenum Press, 1991). Vynola
B. Newkumet and Howard L. Meredith, Hasinai: A Traditional History of the Caddo
Confederacy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988).
Timothy K. Perttula, "The Caddo Nation":
Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). F. Todd Smith, The
Caddo Indians (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995). F.
Todd Smith, "The Red River Caddos: A Historical Overview to 1835," Bulletin of
the Texas
Archeological Society 64 (1994). Dee Ann Story, Cultural History of the
Native Americans, in Archeology and Bioarcheology
of the Gulf Coast Plain (Research Series No. 38, Fayetteville, Arkansas:
Arkansas Archeological Survey, 1990). John R. Swanton, Source Material on
the History and Ethnology of the Caddo Indians (Smithsonian Institution,
Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 132, Washington: GPO, 1942).
Timothy K. Perttula
Recommended citation:
"CADDO
INDIANS." The Handbook of Texas
Online. <http://web.archive.org/web/20040603210920/http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/CC/bmcaj.html>
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