The Wichita
Plains: Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Caddo, Wichita, Pawnee
Recorded and Edited by Willard Rhodes
Folk Music Of The United States Issued from the Collections of the Archive of American Folk Song L39
This small Caddoan-speaking tribe appeared to be aboriginal to the country ranging from about the middle Arkansas River in Kansas southward to the Brazos River in Texas, antedating the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa tribes. The Wichita were agriculturists long before their first contact with the white man and raised corn, melons, squash, pumpkins, and tobacco. They bartered their produce with the nomadic Indians for furs and other merchandise.
A distinctive feature of their material culture was their grass house, also found among the Caddo. The description of a Wichita village by Vincent Collyer, made after a visit to Camp Wichita (Fort Sill) in 1869, recreates the scene: "A level plain, dotted with 'huge haystacks,' symmetrical and beautiful, thirty to forty feet high, and as regularly built as though they were laid out by rules of geometry. As we neared them we soon discovered that our haystacks were the houses of the Wichitas, built of straw, thatched layer upon layer, with stout bindings of willow saplings, tied together with buffalo hide, or stripped hickory."
In 1835 they became party to the first treaty made with western Indians by the United States. During the Civil War the failure of the Confederate authorities to carry out the terms of a treaty of 1862 caused a greater part of the Wichita to move to Kansas, where they remained as refugees until 1867 when they returned to Indian Territory. Their agency was reestablished by the United States Indian Office about two miles north of Anadarko.
On June 4, 1894, United States commissioners made an agreement with the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes whereby allotments to 965 Indians on the Wichita-Caddo reservation were completed and the surplus lands were opened to white settlement on August 6, 1901.
A distinctive feature of their material culture was their grass house, also found among the Caddo. The description of a Wichita village by Vincent Collyer, made after a visit to Camp Wichita (Fort Sill) in 1869, recreates the scene: "A level plain, dotted with 'huge haystacks,' symmetrical and beautiful, thirty to forty feet high, and as regularly built as though they were laid out by rules of geometry. As we neared them we soon discovered that our haystacks were the houses of the Wichitas, built of straw, thatched layer upon layer, with stout bindings of willow saplings, tied together with buffalo hide, or stripped hickory."
In 1835 they became party to the first treaty made with western Indians by the United States. During the Civil War the failure of the Confederate authorities to carry out the terms of a treaty of 1862 caused a greater part of the Wichita to move to Kansas, where they remained as refugees until 1867 when they returned to Indian Territory. Their agency was reestablished by the United States Indian Office about two miles north of Anadarko.
On June 4, 1894, United States commissioners made an agreement with the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes whereby allotments to 965 Indians on the Wichita-Caddo reservation were completed and the surplus lands were opened to white settlement on August 6, 1901.