When two Wichita traders first encountered Europeans visiting the Pecos Pueblo in 1540, the Wichita tribes dominated the Southern Plains area, which stretched from Kansas to Central Texas. In the three centuries that followed, the Wichitas would be forced to negotiate with competitors, both European and Indian, for land, resources, trade, and their very survival. The Wichita, often referred to as the Grass-house People are members of the Caddoan language group which the Caddo, Waco, Tawakoni, Hainai and Pawnee. In the eighteenth century a southern branch of the Wichita was known as the Tawehash, a name that seems to have been sometimes applied to the entire Wichita group. A sedentary agricultural people, the Wichita were necessarily village dwellers. They erected substantial and often large habitations, conical in shape and thatched with grass, commonly called grass houses. The process of building a grass-house was not only complicated, but was always accompanied with an intricate ceremonial procedure, the details of which were known to few. The divine instruction for the building of the grass-house is indicative of all of Wichita culture.

The men also kept record of their war deeds by tattooing symbols on their arms and chests, thus using their own bodies as tally-boards and obviating the need from carrying coup sticks.

From the 1750s to 1810 one band of the Wichita Indians was on the Red River north of the site of present Nocona, Texas. The Wichitas, during this period, were prominent middlemen in the trade between the Comanches on the plains and Louisiana merchants. In 1859 the Wichita confederacy, the Wacoes, Tawakonis, and Kichais, and other associated tribes were relocated on the Wichita Reservation near present Anadarko, Oklahoma.

For more Indian history with old photographs check out INDEX OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN. The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes Home Page is an interesting Native American web site.

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