Kitikiti'sh

The Kitikiti'sh, meaning raccoon-eyed people for their tattooed eye-rings, are the people better known as the Wichita. They spoke Caddoan tongues and lived in domed grass lodges in settled towns from the Arkansas to the Red River. Their ancestors had farmed the Washita valley from about 900 and later built the Great Bend towns of Kansas.

In 1541 Coronado found the land he called Quivira among them. Epidemics and Apache and Osage pressure thinned them in the seventeenth century, and Apache attacks drove them south to the Red River by 1757.

Allied with the Comanche, they destroyed the San Saba Mission and defeated a Spanish army of five hundred at the Twin Villages. A smallpox epidemic in 1777 and 1778 killed about a third of them, and after 1803 the surviving related bands were increasingly grouped under the single name Wichita.