The Caddo and the Cession of Eighteen Thirty-Five

The land beneath Shreveport's downtown grid belonged, for centuries before any American surveyor arrived, to the Caddo. Specifically to the Kadohadacho confederacy, the northernmost branch of the Caddo-speaking peoples, whose villages and fields spread across the Red River valley of what is now northwest Louisiana and northeast Texas. They had lived in this territory so long that Caddo Lake itself carries their name, and the parish surrounding Shreveport still does today.

By the eighteen thirties, American pressure on their homeland had become severe. The federal government wanted the Red River valley cleared of its Native inhabitants to make way for the settlers and speculators who were already crowding the frontier. In eighteen thirty-five, under conditions that historians describe as coercive, the Kadohadacho signed a treaty ceding their remaining Red River lands to the United States.

In return they were granted a reservation in East Texas, then part of independent Mexico, though Anglo-American immigration was already overwhelming that territory too. The ink had barely dried when Texas declared independence from Mexico in eighteen thirty-six, and within a decade the Caddo had lost that refuge as well. By eighteen fifty-nine they had been relocated again, this time to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, where their descendants, the Caddo Nation, remain enrolled citizens today.

The Shreve Town Company acquired its founding plot directly from this cession. The sixty-four-block plat that became Shreveport was legally described as land sold to the company in eighteen thirty-five by the indigenous Caddo. The city grew from that transfer, and the parish, the lake, and the people who gave their name to both were gone before Shreveport had its first paved street.