Taovaya

The Taovaya were the strongest of the Wichita divisions, speaking a Wichita dialect of the Caddoan family and farming in grass-lodge towns while hunting bison on the plains. They originated in Kansas, and Tabas, a province that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado heard of during his Quivira expedition of 1541, is generally taken for an early form of their name.

Squeezed by the Osage and Apache, they moved south to the Red River in the 1720s, building twin towns on the Texas border. A French-brokered peace with the Comanche in 1746 opened their trading heyday. In 1759 they routed a Spanish army at the Battle of the Twin Villages, capturing two cannons.

Smallpox killed more than three hundred in 1777 and 1778; when chief Awahakei died in 1811 the tribe fragmented, its remnants merging into the Tawakoni and the people henceforth called Wichita.