Caddo

Caddo. Who are the Caddo?. The Caddo people were first encountered by Europeans in 1542 when Hernando de Soto's expedition came to North America. For at least 700 years before that, they were agriculturists who occupied an approximately 50,000 square mile area in present-day Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. There were about 200,000 archaeologically recognized related Caddo people in this ancestral greater Caddo area. The Caddos were Mound Builders whose main diet consisted of the three sisters-corn, beans, and squash. They also consumed all types of animals, fish, nuts, roots, and berries. The Caddo had an extensive trade network ranging from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic coast., Caddos today number around 5,000 enrolled members. They are organized under a federally recognized constitutional republic government located near Binger, Oklahoma. When the Caddo were moved to a reservation in western Oklahoma in 1859, after ceding their homelands in Arkansas and Louisiana in 1835, there were only approximately 600 members remaining. The Caddo reservation, that included Wichita and Delaware Indians and that was located mainly in Caddo County, Oklahoma, was broken up by allotment in 1901.