Caddo

The Caddo are a confederacy of farming peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, spread across northeastern Texas, western Louisiana, southwestern Arkansas and southeastern Oklahoma. Westernmost heirs of Mississippian culture, they built temple mounds from about 800, grandest at Spiro Mounds on the Arkansas River, and by 1200 maize fields supported dense farming villages.

The Great Drought of 1276 to 1299 and Siouan migrations thinned their northern lands. De Soto's expedition fought the Tula in 1541; Franciscan missions won few converts where villagers kept their sacred fires.

In the early eighteenth century French posts spawned Natchitoches and Nacogdoches, as smallpox and measles thinned the Caddo population. Spain, France and the United States after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase courted them, but they stayed neutral until the Removal Act of 1830; in 1835 the Kadohadacho confederacy moved by treaty into Texas, then part of Mexico, whose name comes from the Hasinai word for friend.