The Caddo, First Peoples of the Piney Woods and the Red River

Long before any European set foot on this continent, the Caddo had built something remarkable in the forests of East Texas and along the Red River. They were farmers, traders, and engineers. Their communities were organized into three confederacies, the Hasinai in the piney woods, the Kadohadacho along the Red River, and the Natchitoches farther east, and together these confederacies formed one of the most sophisticated political networks on the southern plains.

The Caddo built earthen platform mounds, that served as ceremonial centers and gathering places. Caddo Mounds State Historic Site near Alto, Texas preserves three of these structures, and scholars have confirmed continuous occupation there from roughly eight hundred to thirteen hundred of the common era. The Caddo traded turquoise from the Southwest, marine shells from the Gulf, copper from the Great Lakes.

They were connected to a vast continental exchange network long before any European arrived to draw maps. Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto brushed the eastern edge of Caddo territory in the early fifteen forties, and his chronicles recorded a populous and organized people. Later Spanish expeditions encountered the Hasinai and heard their greeting, taysha, meaning friend or ally.

The word stuck. By the time the Republic of Texas was naming itself in eighteen thirty-six, that Caddo word had traveled through two centuries of Spanish transcription into the name of the place. The United States forced the Caddo onto a reservation in Indian Territory in eighteen fifty-nine, removing them from the land their ancestors had farmed for centuries.

Their descendants, the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, continue to maintain tribal government and cultural traditions today. The mounds are still here. The name of the state is still theirs.