People of the Grass House: The Wichita Before the City

Long before any map said "Kansas," a people called Wichita lived here at the meeting of rivers. They called themselves Kitikiti'sh, which means "raccoon eyes," a name drawn from the tattoo patterns the men wore on their faces. To outsiders they were the Wichita, but they had been building settled, sophisticated villages on these plains for centuries before Europeans gave the name to paper.

Their homes were unlike any you might picture for a Plains tribe. Not tipis, not hide tents, but domed grass lodges up to thirty feet across, built from cedar piers set in a circle, layered with willow wattlework, and thatched in overlapping tiers of long grass like living shingles. A village might hold dozens of these lodges, and the Wichita people built such villages across a vast territory stretching from what is now San Antonio, Texas, northward to the great bend of the Arkansas River.

At the center of each major village stood something remarkable: a council circle. Archaeologists recognize these structures as rings of semi-subterranean buildings surrounding a central patio. The non-local artifacts found inside them, items traded from far-away peoples, suggest these were not ordinary dwellings. They were the homes of political and ritual leaders, or perhaps gathering places for ceremonies tied to the turning of seasons. Some researchers have suggested they aligned with solstice observations. The question remains open, which means these places still hold their secrets.

The Wichita were farmers and hunters and traders and negotiators. They grew corn and beans and squash in the bottomland near the rivers. They hunted bison across the wide prairie. And they traded with peoples across hundreds of miles. In sixteen oh one, Spanish explorers under Juan de Onate documented a Wichita city called Etzanoa near the confluence of two rivers in what is now southern Kansas, a settlement that archaeological work suggests may have held as many as twenty thousand people at its height.

The Wichita were ultimately forced south by Osage pressure during the seventeen hundreds, returning to this river confluence only in eighteen sixty-three. The city that now carries their name rose on the land they had never quite left.