Hatchel/Barkman Caddo Indian Village
Texarkana vicinity, Bowie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Near here for 1,000 years, 800-1800 A.D., lived civilized Caddoes, who thought they were the sole survivors of a prehistoric flood and ancestors of all Indians. Their ceremonial mounds stood high above Red River. They had a significant role in exchanges between Puebloan Indians and the Mound-Builders in the east. They domesticated food plants such as corn, squash and beans and manufactured fine pottery. Because of pressure from Euro-American settlers, they left this area, and descendants are found in Oklahoma. Their village site is now under state protection. (1981) Incise in base: Marker sponsored by the Hoblitzelle Foundation
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
For a thousand years, from roughly 800 to 1800 A.D., the Caddo people lived along the Red River near this spot, raising ceremonial earthen mounds and farming corn, squash, and beans. Skilled potters and traders, they linked the Puebloan peoples of the Southwest with the mound-building cultures to the east. Mounting pressure from Euro-American settlement eventually forced them from their homeland, and their descendants live today in Oklahoma.
Why it matters
The Caddo mound centers represent one of North America's great Indigenous civilizations, a reminder that a sophisticated trading and agricultural society flourished here for centuries before European arrival.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The French in Texas
Texarkana, TX
For roughly a century after La Salle planted his ill-fated Fort Saint Louis on the Texas coast in 1685, French explorers and traders pressed into a land Spain claimed but barely held. In 1719 the French captain Bénard de La Harpe came up the Red River and built a second Fort Saint Louis among the Nassonite Indians, turning this stretch of northeast Texas into a busy trading crossroads with the Caddo, Wichita, Tawakoni, Tonkawa and other nations. The French traded freely — guns included — which made them more welcome than the silver-hunting Spanish, until Louisiana passed to Spain in 1762. Tens of thousands of French and Caddo artifacts recovered nearby, down to millstones from a frontier flour mill, still testify to that vanished commerce.
Site of Epperson's Ferry
Maud, TX
Where Trammel's Trace met the water, a crossing first used by Caddo people and later by French and Spanish explorers became Mark Epperson's ferry sometime before 1837. Travelers relied on it until a wooden bridge, and then the modern span of 1924, made the ferry obsolete. When Lake Texarkana flooded the original site in the 1950s, the state moved this 1936 monument seven miles to higher ground.
Bowie County
New Boston, TX
Carved from Red River County land in December 1840 and organized the next year, Bowie County honors James Bowie, the Long Expedition veteran who died defending the Alamo. The country had been home to agricultural Indians before 1800 and was charted for Anglo-American settlement in 1819, back when it was still frontier of the fledgling Texas Republic. Its county seat wandered among DeKalb, Old Boston, Texarkana, and Boston as railroads and farming, lumber, and manufacturing took hold.
Caddo Trace
Daingerfield, TX
The Caddo Trace was an ancient hunting and trade path worn by the Caddo people who lived in the northeast corner of what became Texas. Like many Indigenous routes, it was later taken over by newcomers, becoming part of stage and mail lines after 1840 and a road for teamsters and marching soldiers. It touched or crossed the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Trammel's traces, and modern state highways still trace its course.