Waco

The Waco were a Wichita people whose agricultural village stood near the meeting of the Brazos and Bosque rivers. Their fields and grass-covered houses formed part of a network of Wichita settlements in central Texas. They cultivated crops beside the river and hunted bison on the plains, maintaining ties with the related Tawakoni and other neighboring communities.

Wichita groups moved south into Texas during the eighteenth century. In 1824 the Waco village on the Brazos was reported to have between five and six hundred inhabitants. Around 1830 Cherokee newcomers displaced the Waco from the village, and by the middle of the decade it had been abandoned. In 1837 Texas Rangers established a short-lived military outpost nearby, on the site of the former settlement.