Tawakoni

The Tawakoni, whose name means a river bend among red sand hills, were one of the village peoples of the Wichita confederation, speaking a Wichita tongue of the Caddoan family and living by farming, seasonal bison hunting and trade. When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado reached Quivira in Kansas in 1541, its people called their land Tancoa, a name scholars link to the later Tawakoni.

Osage raids drove them south into Texas, where they settled beside the Waco, traded with the French and fought the Spanish until chief Quiscat traveled to San Antonio in 1772 to seek peace.

War with Stephen F. Austin's colonists in the 1820s and repeated epidemics cut their numbers and pushed them out of central Texas. In 1835 they signed a treaty with the United States at Camp Holmes, the first agreement to count them together with the Wichita peoples.