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Updated: June 6, 2025
But who knows not the Wakoes? even children can go to their hospitable lodges." This episode is historical. In the early months of 1684, four vessels left La Rochelle, in France, for the colonisation of the Mississippi, bearing two hundred and eighty persons. The expedition was commanded by La Salle, who brought with him his nephew, Moranget.
In the remarks which I am about to make relative to the Shoshones, I may as well observe that the same observations will equally apply to the Comanches, Apaches, and Arrapahoes, as they are but subdivisions and offsets from the original stock the Shoshones. The Wakoes, who have not yet been mentioned, or even seen, by any other travellers, I shall hereafter describe.
The next day we met with a band of Wakoes Indians, another subdivision of the Comanches or of the Apaches, and not yet seen or even mentioned by any traveller. They were all mounted upon fine tall horses, evidently a short time before purchased at the Mexican settlements, for some of them had their shoes still on their feet.
We had now entered the white settlements of the Sabine river, and found, to our astonishment, that, far from arriving at civilisation, we were receding from it; the farms of the Wakoes and well-cultivated fields of the Pawnee-Picts, their numerous cattle and comfortable dwellings, were a strong contrast to the miserable twelve-feet-square mud-and-log cabins we passed by.
They fell upon a small village of the Wakoes, whose warriors and hunters were absent, and, not satisfied with taking away all the eatables they could carry, they amused themselves with firing the Indian stores and shooting the children, and did not leave until the village was reduced to a heap of burning ashes.
There we met again with our old friends, the Wakoes, and learned that there was a party of sixty or seventy Yankees or Texians roaming about the upper forks of the Trinity, committing all sorts of depredations, and painting their bodies like the Indians, that their enormities might be laid to the account of the savages.
Kind and hospitable as they were, they refused three or four times to let us penetrate in this sanctum sanctorum, and of course we would not press them further. The Wakoes, or, to say better, their villages, are unknown, except to a few trappers and hunters, who will never betray the kind hospitality they have received by showing the road to them.
The party mentioned by the Wakoes was one of this last description. We left our friends, and, after a journey of three days, we crossed the Brazos, close to a rich copper mine, which has for ages been worked by the Indians, who used, as they do now, this metal for the points of their arrows and lances.
This act of cowardice sealed the fate of the expedition, which was so constantly harassed by the Wakoe warriors, and had lost already so many scalps, that afterwards meeting with a small party of Mexicans, they surrendered to them, that they might escape the well deserved and unrelenting vengeance of the warlike Wakoes.
They were, however, sadly mistaken; when they made their attack they were almost all cut to pieces, and the unburied bones of two hundred and forty Texians remain blanching in the prairie, as a monument of their own rascality and the prowess of the Wakoes.
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