Contacts with Non-Indians

The Wichita were among those tribes who encountered the Spanish expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1541. At that time, they lived along the Arkansas River in what is now central Kansas. Coronado sought but never found great riches in Wichita country, which he called the Kingdom of Quivira. A Franciscan missionary named Juan de Padilla stayed behind with the Indians to try to convert them to Catholicism. But the Wichita killed him three years later when he began working with another tribe as well.

Over a century later in 1662, the Spaniard Diego Dionisio de Penalosa led an army against the Wichita and defeated them in battle. Soon afterward, the tribe migrated southward to the Canadian River in what is now Oklahoma. The French explorer Bernard de la Harpe met up with them there in 1719 and established trade relations.

Wichita and Caddo traders were called Taovayas by the French. The Taovayas established a profitable business as middlemen between the French and the more westerly Plains tribes, who brought buffalo robes and other furs to trade for crops and French tools. The French traders, many of whom had Indian families, carried the furs on pack trains of horses from the Indian villages to river landings. From there, flatboats and canoe-like boats called pirogues carried the pelts downriver to the Mississippi and on to New Orleans. Then seaworthy ships transported the goods to Europe.

OSAGE war parties attacking from the north drove the Wichita farther south during the mid-1700s. They settled on the upper Red River in what is now southern Oklahoma and northern Texas. There the Taovayas and French traders kept up their trade out of San Bernardo and San Teodoro (called the Twin Villages), and out of Natchitoches. An alliance with the powerful COMANCHE helped protect the Taovayas from the Osage, APACHE, and Spanish.

In 1763, at the end of the French and Indian wars, France lost its North American possessions to Britain and Spain. In the years to follow, Spanish traders managed to drive most of the French out of business, and the Taovayas no longer had a trade monopoly. In 1801, France regained the Louisiana Territory from Spain, but sold it to the United States two years later. American exploration and settlement west of the Mississippi followed.

In 1835, the Wichita signed their first treaty with the United States. By 1850, the Wichita had moved again into the Wichita Mountains near Fort Sill of the Indian Territory. The Wichita and Caddo were assigned a reservation north of the Washita River in 1859. During the Civil War in the 1860s, most Wichita returned to Kansas to a site that became the city of Wichita. They returned to the Indian Territory after the hostilities. In 1872, they officially gave up all their other lands to the United States.