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Sometimes history reaches over and slaps you like a Zen master, thereby rearranging your perceptions.
Consciously or not, Alston Thoms pulled off such a feat with his lecture "Native Plant Foods in the Post Oak Savannahs," which he presented Thursday night at the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History in connection with its current exhibit, "The Caddo: Traditions and Heritage."
Thoms, an associate professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University, painted a myth-shattering picture of life in the Brazos Valley before and after Europeans arrived.
"Texas was a cosmopolitan place before the Europeans arrived," he said. "Texas was full of people in 1528," the year the Spanish explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca landed on Galveston Island, which he dubbed the Isle of Misfortune.
And those native people were mobile, traveling great distances from northern Mexico through Texas into the Mississippi Valley to explore, trade and socialize. "An early version of NAFTA," Thoms likes to call it.
The Brazos Valley had been inhabited for thousands of years by hunter-gatherers whose diet consisted mostly of roots such as camas (wild hyacinth), wild onions and wine cup that they roasted on hot rocks in huge earth ovens and formed into loaves. The early Spanish explorers called the inhabitants "roots people."
Hundreds of the earth ovens have been found near Lake Somerville.
The tribal identification of these early native people is unclear, Thoms said, but it appears that the Atakapans were the earliest known inhabitants. They included the Bedias, for whom the Grimes County town is named.
Unlike the hunter-gatherers of the Brazos Valley, the Caddo, whose territory ranged from East Texas into Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and even parts of Missouri, were farmers. They were settled people whose crops included numerous varieties of corn and beans.
"The Caddo are a populous nation of people, and so extensive that those who give detailed reports of them do not know where it ends," a Spanish priest, Father Damian Massanet, wrote in 1690. "They have houses made of wood, cultivate the soil, plant maize and other crops, wear clothes and punish misdemeanors, especially theft."
The Caddo had a sophisticated social structure, built mounds for their temples and for burial, managed a huge trade network and held annual trade fairs that drew native peoples from a wide area. Thoms said theirs was probably the most complex pre-Columbian society in Texas.
The Caddo, though they didn't live in the Brazos Valley, were no strangers to the area, Thoms said. They made regular hunting forays into the region for deer and, at times, bison, to supplement their diet. And they traveled here on the old road the Spanish called El Camino Real, which roughly followed the path of today's Texas 21. The section of El Camino Real known as Old San Antonio Road, or OSR, of course, forms the northern boundary of Brazos County.
Every Spanish expedition that traveled El Camino Real encountered Caddo hunting parties, Thoms said.
"This would have been sort of the outskirts of their tribal range," Bess Manning, curator of collections and exhibits at the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History, said of the Caddo, whom she called "deeply prehistoric" and important in the history of Texas. The state's name, in fact, is derived from the Caddo word for ally or friend. And Caddoan languages were spoken by other peoples, including the Pawnee and the Wichita.
Most of the Caddo were wiped out by European diseases, and they ended up on a small reservation in Oklahoma. They're no longer on a reservation, but the Caddo Nation is headquartered at Binger, Okla., site of the Caddo Heritage Library and Resource Center, along with a casino. The Caddo are now believed to number 4,000 to 5,000 members.
In Texas, their legacy is preserved in several places. Caddo Lake, on the Texas-Louisiana border, bears their name. And surviving mounds can be seen at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site near Alto, on Texas 21.
* "The Caddo: Traditions and Heritage" will remain on display at the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
