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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.

Play song

Name

Performed by

Description

Native Words

Translation

Notes

Wichita Ceremonial Rain Song To the Wichita, who depended to a large extent upon their agricultural activities for food supply, rain was of the utmost importance. The Rain Ceremony, lasting four days and nights, was held during the summer. According to Hugh Miller, who sings these songs, the Wichita Rain Ceremony had not been celebrated since 1918. Prior to that time Mr. Miller had attended several of the ceremonies, some of which were conducted by his uncle. He said that there are more than one hundred songs that belong to the ceremony.

The kinship between the songs is readily apparent, for in their descending melodic pattern and their chant-like insistence upon the ground tone, they appear as a cycle of variations on a tone-row. In reply to questions regarding the songs, the singer insisted that each song was a distinct unit and not merely a verse of a song of many verses.
Someone is coming from a journey,
A breeze is following this man.
The rain is coming.

Rain, when you come,
You must fall gently.
Wichita
Wichita Ceremonial Rain Song Wichita
Wichita Deer Dance Song The Deer Dance is found in many North American Indian tribes. It is generally a mimetic dance, performed to secure benefits from the spirit of the deer. The singer, Hugh Miller, could give little information regarding the Wichita Deer Dance other than to state that it was an old dance and "before my time." Mr. Miller was seventy one years old at the time of this recording in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in August 1951. The first song follows a descending pentatonic scale. He gave the following free translations of the two songs: I look like the buck deer
That has power to do things.
Wichita
Wichita Deer Dance Song Something has given a presentiment.
When an owl lights on the limb of a tree,
It speaks an unknown language.
Wichita