Coronado Quivira Museum

The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, headquartered today at Anadarko, Oklahoma, are the Wichita proper, Waco, Taovaya, Tawakoni and Kichai. In the nation's own telling, the gifts of corn and the bow and arrow came from the first man and woman, Morning Star and the Moon. Archaeologists trace their heritage to the Plains Village cultures; between about 1350 and 1450, some of the Washita River people of Oklahoma apparently moved north to the great bend of the Arkansas, the land the Spanish would call Quivira. The museum dates their towns in Rice County to about 1425 through 1700.

Coronado came in the summer of 1541, led by a captive guide's stories of golden cities, and found farming towns instead. The name Quivira stayed on European maps for more than a century while, as the museum puts it, the people who actually lived there went largely unrecognized. For decades Rice County farmers turned up their pottery and tools. The Lyons newspaper editors Paul and Horace Jones and other researchers tied those finds to Quivira and pushed for this museum. The Tobias-Thompson Complex, the Little River Archeological District, is a National Historic Landmark.

Inside are a full-scale reproduction of a Wichita grass lodge, trade goods, replica Spanish armor and copies of the old maps. The lower level, by the research library, takes up Rice County after 1871, when the Santa Fe railroad and the state organized it and settlers from Scandinavia, Germany and the Volga region of Russia claimed land along the tracks.