Eagle Fest 2010

Caddo civilization goes back more than a thousand years before the beginning of written history.  There are indications that the culture of the Caddos was in some respects the disintegrating shadow of something that had once been spectacular.  

The Caddo Indians were agriculturist, and except in drought years, raised an abundance of garden produce.  Their main crops were: corn, beans, squash, sunflower seeds and tobacco.  Both men and women worked in the gardens, with the men doing the heavier tasks and leaving much of the rest to the women.  They used fire to burn over old fields and to clear new ones for panting.

Caddos were adept imitators of deer, so a hunter disguised with the antlers and hide of a deer was able to approach his quarry closely.  Bears, hunted mainly for fat, were hunted in the winter months, as were the buffalo, because in this season the bears were fat and the buffalo were more numerous.   They also hunted prairie chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, mice and snakes.  Fish were used extensively, caught on trotlines almost identical to the ones used today.

Tanned deerskin provided the material for most Caddo clothing.  These Indians were expert tanners, using the brains of deer and buffalo in a process that turned out a lustrous black leather.  Garments were fringed or decorated with small white seeds sewn on them.

Another Caddo custom was the house-raising.  The family who was to live in the house prepared a feast for the workers to enjoy as soon as the work on the house was finished.  The spirit of such house raising bees was a festival and congenial one.   

While the Caddos were self-sufficient, they carried on considerable trade with the Indians to their west.  Cotton blankets and turquoise from the southwest were found among the Hasinais.  In return for these luxuries, the Caddos traded bow wood and slat.

The mighty are sometimes brought as low as the humble by conquering powers.  This was the case with the Caddo Indians of East Texas, although their conquest seems to have been brought about by epidemics rather than war.  The collapse was so rapid and their decline in numbers so great that the onrushing  American frontier hardly took notice of the Caddos.  Although it is true that even as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Caddos appear to have passed their zenith, they remained, nonetheless, the most productive, advanced, and populous people of Texas.