The Kadohadacho are the Caddo people of the Red River's Great Bend, one of three great Caddo divisions with the Hasinai of the Neches and the Natchitoches of the lower Red. Smallpox and Osage raids pushed them downriver from 1788. In 1800 they settled a village called Sha'chahdínnih, Timber Hill, in what is now Marion County, on the west end of the lake they called Tso'to and we call Caddo Lake. It was their last village in the homeland.
Forty years on the lake
The archeologists who found the site say the Great Raft, a mass of drift timber that dammed the Red River, was flooding the old floodplain village and sent the people to higher ground. At Timber Hill they grew corn, beans and pumpkins, and every November nearly all the able-bodied men left for four months to hunt buffalo on the plains to the northwest. Chief Dehahuit, whom the Indian agent John Sibley called "a remarkably shrewd and sensible fellow," traveled as an ambassador to neighboring nations. But smallpox killed almost half the hunters the year they arrived and measles struck three years later. By 1830 drought, flood and settlers had ruined crops and thinned the game. Caddo historian Cecile Elkins Carter wrote that the village "became a place of crying."
The treaty
Work on the Great Raft began in 1833, the year Dehahuit died, and by April 1835 the Red River was open to Shreveport. On July 1, 1835, at the agency house in Louisiana, the federal commissioner Jehiel Brooks signed a treaty with the Caddo chiefs, among them Dehahuit's successor Tarshar, who made his mark. The Caddo ceded nearly a million acres, took $30,000 in goods and horses with cash to follow, and promised to leave the United States within a year. Their regular interpreter, Larkin Edwards, was not at the talks, though his name is on the treaty. The Caddo seem to have believed Timber Hill lay in Louisiana. It lay in Mexico, now Texas, and families left a few at a time. Tarshar led about three quarters of the Caddo to north central Texas in 1836. In 1859, after a short-lived reservation on the Brazos, about 1,050 were removed to the Washita River in Indian Territory. Mary Inkanish, a Caddo woman, remembered that "part of the money was paid, but a part never was paid."
Finding it again
The village stayed lost until Claude McCrocklin, a retired Shreveport cattle buyer turned amateur archeologist, and the historian Jacques Bagur matched an 1839 Louisiana map and an 1842 Texas map to a creek bend near Jim's Bayou. In February 1999 Texas Historical Commission archeologists dug there for six days and recovered 1,307 artifacts, among them a brass arrowpoint, thimbles perforated to jingle on clothing, and Caddo pottery. Caddo from Oklahoma, including Cecile Carter, Richard Subia and Derek Edmonds, worked in the units beside them. As far as anyone knows, it was the first time Caddos had returned to the last place in their homeland. The ridge is private timberland and is told here without directions.
The lake is open to everyone at Caddo Lake State Park, and Caddo pottery and tools are shown at the Museum of Regional History in Texarkana.