Caddo

The Caddo (Hasinay) built the westernmost world of the Mississippian tradition: from about 800 to 1400 CE their confederacies raised huge earthwork mounds across northeast Texas, western Louisiana, southwestern Arkansas and southeastern Oklahoma, farming maize in Red River bottoms and trading salt, bois d'arc bows and turquoise. At Spiro and other ceremonial centres, priests of the Great Morning Star managed a ranked society whose engraved shell cups and copper plates match anything from Cahokia. French and Spanish newcomers found three linked confederacies, the Hasinai, Kadohadacho and Natchitoches, rich in horses and middlemen of the southern trade. Epidemics and American pressure compressed them onto a Texas reservation, then removal to Indian Territory in 1859. The Caddo Nation of Oklahoma at Binger keeps the Hasinay language, the turkey dance and the mound-builder memory: the oldest mound tradition west of the Mississippi, whose Spiro shells still set the standard for southeastern art, and whose salt makers still work the Red River brine.