Chapter 1 | Section 2
Convergence of Empires and Nations
In the borderlands of the southern plains centuries ago, we can envision a meeting of empires (large areas controlled by one group) and nations in the place we call Oklahoma today. Beginning in the fifteenth century (the 1400s), this place was home to Native nations, including the Wichitas, Caddos, and Plains Apaches. An extensive trade network existed within the southern plains—today’s Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Louisiana—and within areas as far away as the Great Lakes and Mexico.
Discovery and Exploration, 1541–1820, by Charles Banks Wilson, is the first of four historical murals commissioned in the 1970s by the Oklahoma state legislature. The mural depicts Wichita communities with their distinctive grass houses and existing trade networks, the Antelope Hills on the Canadian River in western Oklahoma near the Texas Panhandle, bison, and the Spanish, French, and American expeditions over time in a place that will become Oklahoma.
Courtesy of the Capitol Art Collection, Oklahoma Arts Council.
These borderland Native nations were sovereign, meaning that they governed themselves and made their own decisions about resources and cultural practices. Interactions between Native nations and Europeans reflected a variety of strategies, including alliances, trade, violence, adaptation, and change. Over time, a series of nations, including Spain and France, then Mexico, Texas, and the United States, claimed the land and often tried to claim the people. The first documented Spanish visits into these borderlands were to Wichita and Caddo country. In 1541, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado traveled north from Mexico City to the borderlands, interacting with Wichita villages along the Arkansas River.
Almost one year later, Luis de Moscoso led the remnants of the Hernando de Soto expedition to the Red River where the Spanish encountered the Natchez and Caddos.
Caddos
Organized into three confederacies, the Caddos were matrilineal, meaning they traced kinship ties through women (in contrast to patrilineal tribes, which trace kinship ties through men). The women raised crops, including corn, beans, and squash. Men hunted deer, bear, and turkey. Mainly sedentary, or settled in one place, one Caddo group lived along the bend of the Red River near where the Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas borders come together today. After the Spanish introduced horses to the Americas, in the mid-1600s, the Caddos began to travel west to the plains each winter to hunt bison.
Bison herds in 1500 and 1870. In 1500, bison roamed most of what is now the United States and parts of Canada and Mexico. By 1870, hunting had reduced the bison population to two herds in the Great Plains.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
By the 1720s the Spanish and French were well established in Texas and Louisiana, with the borders of the two empires converging near Caddo country. The Caddos established trade ties with the French after explorer Bernard de La Harpe entered their territory in 1719. They allowed the French to set up three trading posts along the Red River.
Wichitas
The Wichitas are related to the Caddos, and the two nations share many things in common. Like the Caddos, the Wichitas were matrilineal. Wichita people farmed in villages to the west of Caddo territory, on the eastern edge of the Great Plains in the Arkansas River Valley. Their houses were made of wood beams with grass-thatched roofs. Women raised corn, beans, and squash. Men went on annual bison hunts that lasted for several weeks.
Buffalo Hunt, by Acee Blue Eagle. This painting depicts an Indigenous man hunting a bison. For many Native tribes, the annual buffalo hunt lasted for several weeks. Muscogee (Creek) and Pawnee artist Acee Blue Eagle attended boarding schools including Nuyaka Mission Boarding School near Bristow, and Chilocco Indian School in north-central Oklahoma near Newkirk, where he graduated in 1926. He studied art at Bacone College in Muskogee and at the University of Oklahoma. You can view his murals at the Seminole Post Office and Bacone College.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Judicial Center, Oklahoma Supreme Court.
After the hunts, women would skin the bison, smoke the meat, and tan the hides. The southern plains were filled with bison, and the Wichitas had long specialized in making bison robes and other bison products, trading them with Pueblo people to the west and Caddo people to the east. Wichita dependence on bison increased with the arrival of horses.
By the 1740s, the Wichita villages had become important places for French traders traveling northwest up the Red River from Arkansas and Louisiana and continuing on to Santa Fe. The Wichitas traded bison robes with the French for guns, knives, and other metal goods. Eighteenth-century French maps show Wichita villages on either side of the Red River in today’s Jefferson County, Oklahoma, and Montague County, Texas.
This photo was taken in Chickasha, Indian Territory, sometime before statehood in 1907. It depicts Wichita grass houses. In the spring, summer, and early fall months, the Wichita people would live in grass houses that provided cool relief from the warm weather. During the late fall and winter, Wichita people left their villages for extended buffalo hunts.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The Pawnee people engaged in seasonal agriculture in the spring and fall, and bison hunting in the summer and winter. This photo shows women processing bison hide at a Pawnee camp in 1886. Today the Pawnee Nation coordinates a Pawnee Seed Preservation Project, offering varieties of ancestral Pawnee corn to Pawnee citizens. Through this project, modern-day Pawnees experience connection with their ancestors, who traveled from Nebraska to Indian Territory in the mid-1870s.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
In these villages, which also included Deer Creek to the north, the Wichitas farmed, hunted, and processed bison meat and hides. They traded for goods from other Native groups and Europeans. Tools changed, weapons changed, and settlement locations and defense tactics changed as the Wichitas met and traded with or warred against other Native and European nations. For example, the Wichitas adapted to the arrival of Apaches.
Bison grazing in the Wichita Mountains as captured by photographer Jim Argo. Many Native nations participated in annual bison hunts on the southern plains. Bison provided Indigenous people with hides and meat, and they were also culturally significant. Due to overhunting, the bison population has decreased dramatically, and now they are mostly located in wildlife refuges, such as the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, both located in Oklahoma.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Apache Diaspora
The Apache diaspora continued for over four centuries. The term “diaspora” describes the dispersal of a people from their homeland. Called “Apaches” by others, these people called themselves Ndé, or the People. Like the Kiowas and other Athabascan peoples, their traditional homelands may have been in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada. By 1500 some Apaches followed the bison to the southern plains. There, in today’s New Mexico, Apaches interacted with Pueblo agricultural villages, sometimes peacefully through trade and exchange of services, and sometimes through raiding and conflict.
By the early 1700s, Apaches in the southern plains lived in today’s panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, eastern Colorado, and western Kansas. They had developed trade relationships with the Pueblos of present-day New Mexico along the Rio Grande. They were a highly mobile people and moved according to the seasons. In the spring they lived in the river valleys and planted corn, beans, and squash. In early summer they left the river valleys to hunt bison in the southern plains. By fall they returned to harvest their crops. During the winter they lived near the mountains.
Apache homelands bordered competing nations and empires such as the Spanish, Comanche, and French. Along the Rio Grande in today’s New Mexico, the Ndé interacted with Pueblo agricultural villages, sometimes peacefully through trade of goods, services, and enslaved people and other times by raiding the pueblos.
By the 1600s and 1700s, the Spanish colonial government used the term “apache” to describe people as the enemy and enslaved many of them as forced laborers. By the late 1700s, displaced Apaches lived in bondage in New Mexico, New Spain, and New France by forging connections with other exploited people, including servants and enslaved people of African descent.
Comanches
Horse culture spread throughout the American West and provided many Native groups with greater mobility. The Comanches began expanding their seasonal movement from the northern plains to the southern plains in the eighteenth century. In this way, they accessed new technologies such as guns, gunpowder, and iron tools and knives and the mobility of Spanish horses. Comanche strength grew following the Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish in 1680. Comanches converged on Apache villages, and they became enemies. Comanches took captives to be exchanged in New Mexico and also sold captives in Native trading networks to the east in the southern plains and Arkansas River Valley. There the Comanches entered the well-established trade system where Plains hunters traded hides and meat for manufactured goods. By the early 1700s in French Louisiana, Comanches offered enslaved Apaches to Spanish and French buyers, receiving horses and guns that gave them additional advantages over their Apache competitors.
For about one hundred years, from 1750 to 1850, the Comanches were a force in the Southwest. The Comanches used trade networks, diplomacy, kinship ties, and violence with other Indigenous peoples and European communities to create an extensive empire in the region of today’s Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. The Comanches were positioned next to other Indigenous homelands and European settler colonial nations, including Spain and France and later the United States and Mexico.
Disease
Diseases arrived in the Americas with the first Europeans in the 1500s and attacked the Native populations in waves for the next three centuries. Although the introduction of disease over hundreds of years resulted in tremendous loss of life, Native communities adapted to the devastation and responded to changes in order to preserve their ways of life. For example, the Comanches were warring with the Wichitas while continuing to trade with them. In 1777–78 an epidemic, perhaps smallpox, spread throughout the concentrated Wichita villages, resulting in the death of one-third of the population. In contrast, the highly mobile Comanches did not seem to contract smallpox. However, in the early 1780s and continuing into the first half of the nineteenth century, smallpox and cholera introduced by new traders from new places spread throughout the Americas and caused enormous loss of life in the region of today’s Oklahoma, even among Comanche people.