Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/156

Rh the tribe has been variously explained, but may be connected with wits, or wets, their own word for "man."

Within the historic period, which in their case dates back more than three centuries, they have ranged from central Texas to Arkansas river, and there is evidence that at one time a part of them at least lived farther eastward in Arkansas and Louisiana. They are identical with the people of the ancient Quivira, with whom Coronado, in 1541, found "corn and houses of straw." At the beginning of their official relations with the government the Waco and Tawdkoni were in Texas, about the present Waco city and Tawdkoni creek, while the Wichita and Kichai had their permanent village in the Wichita mountains, on upper Red river. Driven out of Texas by the whites, they were collected on the present reservation in 1859, but had hardly gathered their first crop when they were again scattered by the outbreak of the civil war, and fled north, remaining about the site of the present city of Wichita, Kansas, until the struggle was over, when they returned to their homes on the reservation. They have never been at war with the whites.

Like all the tribes of Caddoan stock, the Wichita are an agricultural people, and even before the coming of the white man raised large quantities of corn, which they ground into meal upon stone metates or in wooden mortars, or boiled in pottery of their own making. Their surplus supplies were deposited in cistern-like caches lined with bark.

Their permanent houses are of unique construction, being dome-shape structures of grass thatch laid over a framework of poles, with earth banked up around the base. From Catlin we have a picture of such a village, as he found it, on upper Red river in 1834, but, as is the case in other of his drawings, with the forms somewhat idealized. It may be mentioned that the circular embankments on this village site were plainly to be seen when the writer identified the location a few years ago. In making up the Wichita delegation for Omaha a typical grass house