By tradition, the first Caddo village in Texas, Tall-Timber-on-the-Hill, was located near present-day Caddo Lake on the Louisiana-Texas border.
By the time of the first meeting with white men the Caddo were more of an agricultural society rather than one bent on constant war. Caddos were a remarkably amiable group; at least amiable with whites in the first year of contact. The Caddos' civilized tendencies, in comparison to other more barbaric Texas tribes, was appreciated by the French and Spanish who encountered them. Unfortunately, this civilized tendency made it easier for the whites to destroy them either by warfare or disease from white contact.
The Caddo, at the time of first white contact, were primarily farmers. Their homes were often forty-foot-high circular houses, thatched with straw and furnished with colored rugs, baskets, and pottery. Fields planted with corn, beans, squash and pumpkins surrounded their villages. They also grew sunflowers, melons, tobacco and gourds. The Caddo went on three or four-month long expeditions to present-day Oklahoma or the Texas plains seeking buffalo.
They had no constant contact with white men until the French began extending the fur trade in to their lands during the eighteenth century. However, in 1691, Domingo Teran do los Rios led an expedition northward from Mexico, reaching the Caddos' temple mound site near present-day Alto, Texas. These Spaniards were welcomed by the Caddos who repeatedly gave them their traditional greeting of "tejas." The word meant "friends" but the Spanish misunderstood it to be the name of the area or the people themselves. The Spanish authorities bequeathed the area with this Caddo word Tejas. Years later it was changed to "Texas."
Sources:
Fehrenbach, T. R. Lone Stare: A History of Texas and the Texans. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1968.
Hoxie, Frederick E., Editor. Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life from Paleo-Indians to the Present. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1996.
Waldman, Carl. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. Facts on File Publications, New York, NY and Oxford, England, 1988.
