The People the City is Named For

Before there was a city, there was a village. The Waco people, a division of the Wichita confederacy, had cultivated the banks of the Brazos River here for generations. When Stephen F.

Austin's surveyors documented their settlement in eighteen twenty-four, they counted thirty-three beehive-shaped houses of woven rush and river cane, standing twenty to twenty-five feet tall, surrounded by nearly two hundred acres of corn, beans, melons, peach trees, and pumpkins, all enclosed in brush fences against the deer. The Waco were not nomadic hunters. They were farmers and traders, anchored to this bend in the Brazos by the richest bottomland in central Texas.

Their name survives in two Spanish-derived spellings, Huaco and Hueco, and one theory links it to a Spanish word meaning empty, though the land the Waco people occupied was anything but that. What emptied it was a sequence of pressures. Cherokee incursions pushed them northward in eighteen thirty.

A treaty in eighteen thirty-five, another in eighteen forty-six, and a final removal in eighteen seventy-two handed their territory to incoming Anglo settlers one agreement at a time. By eighteen seventy-two, the Waco had been relocated to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, where their descendants remain enrolled members of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, headquartered in Anadarko. The city that rose on their fields kept the name and forgot the story for a long time.

The Brazos bottomland that made this spot worth settling is the same ground you are passing over now. It was productive enough that people have been living beside it for thousands of years. The Waco people simply knew it first.