Whose Land This Was First

People have lived along Richland Creek for more than 10,000 years. Before the Richland-Chambers Reservoir was built downstream, archaeologists from Southern Methodist University surveyed the valley in 1980 and 1981 and recorded more than 300 prehistoric sites. The oldest find was part of an Ice Age spear point of the Clovis type. Thousands of years later, families moved with the seasons: up to the creek terraces in fall for acorns, nuts and deer, and down to the creeks in spring and summer for fish and mussels. In time they took up the bow and made pottery. The same study reported preliminary evidence of a drought between about AD 1000 and 1300, worse than any in recorded Texas history, that may have emptied the valley.

By the 1700s, this was Tawakoni country. The Tawakoni, one of the Wichita peoples, first appear in European records in 1719, on the Canadian River. By the late 1700s their main range ran between present-day Waco and Palestine, which takes in this ground. In 1797, Philip Nolan's expedition met them in the Tehuacana Hills, the chain whose northern tip is Pisgah Ridge.

They did not have the country to themselves. Annie Carpenter Love, the county's first historian, wrote in 1933 that the Cherokee, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Delaware, Caddo, Ioni and Anadarko hunted here from the east, and the Tawakoni, Kichai, Waco and Comanche from the west and south. She called it a "neutral hunting ground."

The state historical marker on Pisgah Ridge says that in 1830, Cherokees "reportedly" burned a village south of the ridge that the Tonkawa and Tawakoni had shared. We keep the marker's word: the burning is reported, not proven. Another state marker records that the Tawakoni village in the Tehuacana Hills was destroyed by Cherokees in the early 1830s. The Pisgah Ridge marker does not say where the burned village stood, and no public record we have found does. Texas keeps archaeological site locations confidential to protect them. We will not guess at one.

In 1835, the Tawakoni met in council at Tehuacana Spring. Within three years, surveyors were running lines through their hunting country. In the spring of 1838, Love wrote, a survey party was attacked on Richland Creek near Pin Oak Creek, and Colonel Richard Sparks was killed at its camp. That October, near present-day Dawson, about 25 surveyors mapping land promised to veterans of the Texas Revolution were warned off by roughly 300 Kickapoo, Waco, Tawakoni and Caddo men, then attacked. About 18 surveyors and some 30 of the Native fighters died. Settlers remembered it as the Surveyors' Fight. We think the warning belongs at the front of that story. Every line the surveyors drew marked a piece of someone's country for someone else.

Between 1843 and 1845, councils on Tehuacana Creek near Waco brought the Republic of Texas together with the Waco, Tawakoni, Kichai, Wichita, Caddo, Tonkawa and others. The treaty of October 1844 opened this country to permanent Anglo settlement. That same year, Eleazar Nash arrived from Massachusetts and named the settlement on the ridge Pisgah.

Within fifteen years the nations were gone from it. The Tawakoni lived for three years on a reservation at Fort Belknap. On the Brazos reservation, Caddo, Anadarko, Waco and Tonkawa families kept their own villages until the summer of 1859, when the reservation was abandoned. Its people were taken north across the Red River and placed with the Wichita in Indian Territory. The Tawakoni went with them.

The Tawakoni, Kichai and Waco did not disappear. Today's Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, based at Anadarko, Oklahoma, name the Wichita, Waco, Taovaya, Tawakoni and Kichai as their people. The other nations in this story are living nations too, among them the Caddo Nation, the Tonkawa Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, the Comanche Nation, the Cherokee Nation, and the Kickapoo tribes of Oklahoma and Texas. Their histories are theirs to tell. This page is only what the records say about whose land this was first.