Caddo Nation: North Texas Before Texas

Before there was a Texas, before there was a Spain, before there was a European name for any of this territory, the Caddo people were here. They had been here since at least eight hundred years after the common era, building earthen mound complexes across East and North Texas, creating one of the most sophisticated agricultural and trade societies in the southern interior of North America.

The Caddo built platform mounds for ceremonial and civic use, cultivated crops in the river bottomlands, and maintained trade networks that reached from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains, connecting communities across hundreds of miles through exchange goods that have been identified by archaeologists in sites far from any Caddo village. Their population before European contact has been estimated at more than two hundred thousand people organized across a confederation of affiliated communities.

Spanish explorers encountered them in the sixteen hundreds. The Caddo word for "friends," or "allies," is recorded in Spanish sources as something close to "tejas." Texas has carried a Caddo word in its name ever since, though the people who gave it the word were not consulted on the matter.

Epidemic disease arrived with the Spanish. Colonial pressure followed. French and Spanish territorial competition over Louisiana and Texas drew the Caddo into entanglements that were not theirs to choose. Anglo-American settlement in the nineteenth century accelerated a dispossession that had been underway for two centuries. A population once numbered in the hundreds of thousands fell to near extinction.

The Caddo Nation is federally recognized today, headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma. They maintain tribal government, cultural programs, and a living relationship to the territory that became North Texas long after they had named it. The best surviving physical record of their civilization sits at the Caddo Mound State Historic Site near Alto, Texas, about one hundred seventy-five miles southeast of Dallas. The public record in the Dallas-Fort Worth area does not include a tribal-authored primary source for this history. The account above draws on academic and National Park Service scholarship; the Caddo Nation's own telling lives at their tribal website.