The treaty was signed on July 1, 1835, at the agency house in the Caddo nation in Louisiana, and it reads best as a ledger. Commissioner Jehiel Brooks, for the United States, wrote that the Caddo would cede all their land inside a boundary that ran along the Red River, Pascagoula Bayou, Bayou Pierre and Cypress Bayou to the line with Mexico. Estimates of the acreage run from 600,000 to a million. The price in Article III was $80,000: $30,000 in goods and horses at signing, $10,000 in money within a year of September 1, and $10,000 a year for the four years after. The Kadohadacho and their neighbors had one year to leave the United States at their own expense. Tarshar is usually named head chief, though the Caddo Nation's own history names Tsauninot.
Four leagues for the Grappes
A second paper, signed the same day, reserved four square leagues in the southeast corner of the ceded land for the heirs of Francois Grappe and his three sons, citing a gift the Caddo had made to Grappe in 1801. It also gave one section to Larkin Edwards, the Caddo's longtime interpreter. In September 1837 Caddo chiefs told the Senate that the treaty's lines took in lowlands between Bayou Pierre and the Red River that they had never claimed or sold, and that they had set aside nothing for the Grappes beyond a small piece for Jacques.
What the court said
Brooks was the Caddo agent as well as the commissioner, and on January 18, 1837, he got deeds to the whole reserve from the Grappe heirs. One history holds that Brooks arranged the reserve himself, that the Caddo did not know who Grappe was, and that he bought it for a fraction of its worth. The United States sued in 1846 to recover part of the tract, and a jury found for Brooks and his buyers in May 1848. In 1850 the Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the reserve gave the Grappes absolute title to whatever the Caddo had held there, and it declined to weigh anyone's motives. The ceded ground soon became the town of Shreve, later Shreveport.
The Kadohadacho keep their name
The Senate ratified the treaty on January 26, 1836. Groups left at different times, some first to Texas, and for about twenty years the people were virtually homeless. In 1855 the Caddos were placed on the Brazos Indian Reservation, and in 1859 about 1,050 were removed to the Washita River in Indian Territory under Robert S. Neighbors. The Caddo Nation's history says Neighbors took Chief Jose Maria's group out of Texas to avoid a massacre by frontiersmen led by Col. John R. Baylor.
Kadohadacho means "real chief" or "real Caddo". The Kadohadacho, the Hasinai and the Natchitoches are three confederacies that consolidated geographically through removal, and today they are the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, a single federally recognized tribe with its capital at Binger, in Caddo County. The nation's own history says, "We've been here since time immemorial."
Caddo Lake State Park sits on the water the Caddo called Tso'to, and the Caddo galleries at the Harrison County Historical Museum in Marshall open the longer story.