Quasmigdo

The Quasmigdo, known to their neighbours as the Bidai, are an Atakapan-speaking people of eastern Texas. Bidai is a Caddo word meaning brushwood, referring to the wooded Big Thicket around the lower Trinity River where they lived. Their villages stood on Bedias Creek, and their hunting grounds ran from the Brazos to the Neches.

Spanish explorers noted them in 1691, and the Frenchman François Simars de Bellisle found them farming maize in 1718 and 1720, allied with the Akokisa. They snared game, fished and gathered, summering on the coast and wintering inland in bearskin tents.

Some families joined Mission San Francisco Xavier de Horcasitas in the 1740s, while in 1770 Bidai middlemen sold French guns to the Lipan Apaches against Spanish interests. Epidemics in 1776 and 1777 cut their numbers by at least half, and survivors drifted into Akokisa and Koasati villages.