An Intermediate Report on the James Bayou Survey, Marion County, Texas: A Search for Caddo Village

• Main Author: McCrocklin, Claude
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: SFA ScholarWorks 1992
• Subjects: American Southeast; Caddo; American Material Culture; American Studies; Anthropology; Archaeological Anthropology; Environmental Studies; History; History of Art; Architecture; and Archaeology; Other American Studies; Other Arts and Humanities; Other History of Art; United States History; Indian; Stratford Lake; Archeological Survey
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/vol1992/iss1/9; https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2375&context=ita

This is a brief report on an archeological survey of James Bayou in East Texas that was organized to find the site of a large Historic Caddo Indian village that was reported to be in the area. Much is known about the village people. They were Kadohadacho Caddo from the Great Bend region of the Red River in Southwest Arkansas who had migrated to the area now known as James Bayou about 1800. The population of the village they established was reported to be near 500 people, and they stayed in the East Texas and Northwest Louisiana area into the early 1840s. However, none of the early contemporary writers who provide this information reported the exact location of the village, and thus the site's location was unknown when the survey was initiated. As of this report, we have surveyed both sides of James Bayou from the Louisiana line to near Stratford Lake. This was our target area since the lower Louisiana part of the Bayou had been surveyed in 1986-1987 under my direction by Shreveport members of the Louisiana Archaeological Society. In all of this vast area the only sites found on both surveys old enough to be components of the Caddo village were in a four mile area along the 200-250 foot contour on the north and east sides of James Bayou. The ten sites found and tested seemed to have a date range of 1790 to, the 1840s, which is the same as the occupation range of the Caddo village. These sites could well be components of the village since no records that we can find report anyone else in that part of Spanish East Texas through the entire period.