Hawaastatkiicu

Hawaastatkiicu is a name for the Washita River of the southern Great Plains, flowing toward the Red River through present-day Oklahoma. Its valley preserves evidence of villages flourishing between about 1250 and 1450, a period archaeologists call the Washita River phase. Settlements commonly contained five to twenty houses, with storage pits, hearths, refuse deposits and burial areas. Excavated houses included rectangular buildings made with upright posts and wattle-and-daub walls. The river therefore belonged to an inhabited farming landscape well before nineteenth-century military expeditions. In 1834 Captain James Dean's infantry cleared a road from Fort Towson toward the river's mouth and established Camp Washita as a forward base for the Dodge-Leavenworth expedition. George Catlin travelled with the advance party, while disease disabled many soldiers and animals at the camp. The valley's long history combines Indigenous settlement with the later movement of American forces into a region whose waterways already had established names and uses.