Today, we’re looking at David La Vere’s The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo Economics and Politics, 700-1835 (University of Nebraska Press, 1998). 
This book covers a little over a millennium of Caddo history, from what archaeologists believe is the formation of the group around 800 AD up until the breakup of Caddo communities and dislocation of Caddo people from their homeland in the 1830s-1850s. An ambitious stretch of time, no? La Vere covers the ground well, though, but not uniformly.
La Vere works through the archaeologically-known history (basically, everything before about 1650) relatively quickly, focusing heavily on the middle-1600s to middle-1800s; the period for which there are historical documents. He chronicles the interactions between the Caddo and French and Spanish colonial authorities, emphasizing the importance of the former as both businesspeople in the deerskin and bear oil trades and as political brokers. That eminence erodes rapidly when American settlers come to the area. We meet salient leaders, such as Tinhiouen the Elder, Tinhiouen the Younger, and Dehahuit, and learn about interactions with both allied Native American groups (Wichita and Comanche) and antagonists (Choctaws, Apaches, and [especially] the Osage). La Vere evocatively underscores the importance of familial connections, both biological and adoptive, in Caddo exchange networks, and how some colonial groups (the French) worked within this system, some (the Spanish) did not, and others (Americans) basically used it as leverage before dismantling it.
The book is highly-readable, and a good parallel work to F. Todd Smith’s The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542-1854. La Vere is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.
The book is available from Magale Library at Southern Arkansas University (call number E99.C12 L3 1998) just as soon as I return it and it gets re-shelved. It can also be found at the libraries of Henderson State University, Ouachita Baptist University, Barksdale Air Force Base, LSU-Shreveport, and Centenary College.
