The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540-1845.

By F. Todd Smith. Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University, No. 87. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. Pp. [xiv], 206. $32.95, ISBN 0-89096-952-3.)

Once again F. Todd Smith, an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas, has provided a scholarly treatment of an Indian people who have never had one devoted to them. The Wichita Indians--corn-growing, buffalo-hunting peoples mainly of Texas and Oklahoma--are his focus this time, making it the third book in his Caddo-Wichita trilogy. And, as before, Smith has sifted through reams of documents, articles, and books to deliver a very detailed chronicle of Euroamerican-Wichita relations to 1845, when the Wichitas signed a short-lived peace treaty with the Republic of Texas.

This book certainly achieves the goal Smith set out for it--not the final word on Wichita history, but a "base for other scholars to build upon and produce more detailed studies of these tribes ..." (p. xiii). While one will find little interpretation of Wichita agendas and strategies, there is still a tremendous amount of basic information here. It is as if Smith used every scrap of historical (but not anthropological) information he could find on the Wichitas and put it all into this monograph. But Smith capably juggles all the myriad details, such as the names of Indian nations, their chiefs, and Spanish outposts and officials, all of which changed every generation or so.

Except for a brief explanation of Wichita culture, Smith begins in 1540, when scouts with Francisco Coronado's expedition first encountered the Wichitas in present-day Kansas. Over the next two centuries the Wichitas migrated south into Texas, where they came into even greater contact with the Spanish. One of the best things about this book is that it provides an in-depth look at Spanish policy toward the Wichitas. As Smith sees it, by the eighteenth century the Wichitas, decimated by disease and battered by Osage and Comanche raids, veritably begged the Spanish for an alliance so they could acquire the trade goods they so desperately needed. Instead, Spain dithered over who was the worse enemy: the Apaches, the Wichitas, or the Comanches. In the end, the Wichitas had to scramble for merchandise where they could, trading when possible, raiding if need be. The arrival of Americans to the area in the nineteenth century changed nothing for the Wichitas either. Despite their first treaty with the United States in 1835, it brought them neither a secure source of manufactured goods nor a guarantee to their lands. The treaty of 1845 with Texas, with which Smith ends the book, was yet another failed Wichita attempt at diplomacy.

This is a good, solid book on Euroamerican-Wichita relations. For those unfamiliar with the Wichita Indians, this is a great place to start.

DAVID LA VERE
University of North Carolina at Wilmington