DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker says about the Caddo Indian Communities in Wood County. Long before there was a Wood County, before there was a Texas, before any of this had a name on a map, people were living well along the Sabine River. We're talking early in the ninth century — and that is not a typo.
The ninth century. The Caddo, several affiliated groups with their own distinct dialects and their own distinct customs, moved into parts of what we now call Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. They didn't just scrape by out here.
They built complex societies — successful trade networks, advanced agriculture, intricate rituals — and those societies spread out along the rivers and creeks of the region like roots finding water. By the 1540s, European explorers came through and met the descendants of those early settlers. They wrote the first descriptions of the people called Kadhadacho.
That word, according to those accounts, means "Real Chief" or "Real Caddo." Think about that name for a second. Real Caddo. There's a quiet kind of confidence in that.
Locally, it was the Hasinai tribe of the Caddo Nation that populated this area. Now, when American settlers pushed into northeast Texas in the early nineteenth century, they ran right into the evidence of everything that had come before. Pottery.
Stone tools. Burial mounds. Artifacts left behind by the Caddo and their ancestors, confirming that the Sabine River and its tributaries had been supporting life here for centuries.
The settlers found a confederacy of tribes they called the Caddo, and what they found in the earth told a story that went back a thousand years. But by the early 1840s, the Caddo had moved out of their ancestral homeland. In 1855 they settled at the Brazos Indian Reservation near Graham — about a hundred and fifty miles west of here.
Then in 1859, they moved again, this time to the Washita River in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Today, the Caddo Nation headquarters sits in Binger, Oklahoma, where members continue to maintain their cultural traditions through pottery, song, dance, and language. Archeologists, ethnologists, and others have spent considerable effort trying to reconstruct the early, unrecorded history of the Caddo — working from artifacts, landscape features, folklore, and comparative historical accounts.
And right here in Wood County, archeological sites discovered within the Mineola Nature Preserve on the Sabine River have helped enrich that record. A thousand years of a people flourishing along one river — and we're still piecing together the full story. That river's been running a long time, and it remembers more than we do.
What the marker says
Early in the ninth century, the Caddo, several affiliated groups of people with distinct dialects and customs, moved into parts of present Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. Complex societies based on successful trade, advanced agriculture and intricate rituals soon dispersed along the rivers and creeks of the region. By the 1540s, European explorers met their descendants and wrote the first descriptions of those called Kadhadacho, meaning "Real Chief" or "Real Caddo." Locally, the Hasinai tribe of the Caddo Nation populated the area. As American settlers moved into northeast Texas in the early 19th century, they encountered the confederacy of tribes called Caddo and found cultural evidence of their ancestors, including pottery, stone tools and burial mounds. Such artifacts confirm that the Sabine River and its tributaries have supported life here for centuries. By the early 1840s, the Caddo had moved out of their ancestral homeland, settling in 1855 at the Brazos Indian Reservation near Graham (150 mi. W) and in 1859 at the Washita River in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Today, the Caddo Nation headquarters is in Binger, Oklahoma, where members maintain cultural traditions through pottery, song, dance and language. Archeologists, ethnologists and others have worked to reconstruct the early, unrecorded history of the Caddo. Artifacts, landscape features, folklore and comparative historical accounts help tell the story of people who flourished here for a thousand years. Archeological sites discovered within the Mineola Nature Preserve on the Sabine River help enrich the record of significant contributions the Caddo made to the cultural history and development of the state of Texas. 2007