Taovayas

The Taovaya tribe of the Wichita people were Native Americans from Kansas, who moved south into Oklahoma and Texas in the 18th century. They spoke the Wichita language which is in the Caddoan language family. The Taovayas eventually joined the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, headquartered in Anadarko, Oklahoma.

The people which came to be called the Wichita consisted of several tribes, including the Taovaya or Tawehash; the Tawakoni; the Iscani or Waco; and the Guichita or Wichita Proper. The Taovaya were the most important in the 18th century.

The Taovaya possibly enter written history as early as 1541 when the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an expedition across the Great Plains in search of a rich land called Quivira. What he found were the ancestors of the Wichita, a numerous farming and buffalo hunting people in central Kansas who possessed none of the wealth he sought. The furthest part of Quivira is believed to have been located on the Smoky Hill River near Lindsborg, Kansas. This area was called “Tabas,” similar to the later name of Taovaya. Somewhat later, from about 1630 to 1710, archaeological sites near Marion, Kansas may have been inhabited by the Taovaya.

In 1719, French explorer Claude Charles Du Tisne found two Taovaya villages of people he called "Paniouassa" near the future Neodesha, Kansas. "Pani" was a generic term the French called both Pawnee Indians and Wichita. These were probably Taovaya. That same year another French explorer, Bernard de la Harpe, visited a village, probably a few miles south of Tulsa, Oklahoma in which the inhabitants were from several Wichita tribes including the “Toayas” or Taovayas. The Toavayas were said to be the most numerous of the tribes. In their Kansas and Oklahoma homelands, however, the Wichita were under intense pressure from the Osage and Apache. In the 1720s the Taovayas and their Guichita relatives began to move south to the Red River establishing a large village on the north side of the river in Jefferson County, Oklahoma and on the south side at Spanish Fort, Texas. By the late 1750s all the Wichita tribes were living in Texas or across the Red River in Oklahoma.

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