Etzanoa

Between about 1450 and 1700 the ancestors of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes lived along the Walnut River near where it meets the Arkansas, in grass houses spread among fields of corn, beans, squash and sunflowers. Spanish expeditions reached them in 1594 or 1595 and again in 1601, when Juan de Oñate led more than 70 soldiers and priests out from New Mexico. He called the people Rayados, the striped ones, for the lines tattooed on their faces, counted more than 1,200 houses in a town emptied ahead of him, and turned back when he heard they were gathering to fight. A captive from another nation later drew the Spanish a map and named the town Etzanoa, the Great Settlement.

For centuries nobody could say where it had been, though farmers around Arkansas City had turned up stone tools and pottery since the 1880s. After historians at the University of California, Berkeley, retranslated the Spanish accounts in 2013, the Wichita State archaeologist Donald Blakeslee matched them to the ground here, and a cannonball found in 2017 helped pin down the site of the 1601 fight. Estimates of the population run as high as 20,000; some scholars think the Spanish exaggerated.

The Etzanoa Conservancy opened its immersion center in June 2026, with exhibits, a virtual reality tour and marked trails. Derek Ross, a Wichita tribal member, has been building a grass house there of cedar poles and bluestem. Guided tours by car run April through October.