The Quivira

Scholars have determined Quivira inhabitants were ancestors of today’s Wichita based on written accounts, language, and found artifacts.  

Coronado wrote: “They have no clothes, nor cotton to make them of; they simply tan the hides of the cows which they hunt, and which pasture around their village and in the neighborhood of a large river. They eat their meat raw like the Querechos and Tejas, and are enemies to one another and war among one another. All these men look alike. The inhabitants of Quivira are the best of hunters and they plant maize."

Compiling a report from others from the expedition, Viceroy Juan Domínguez de Mendoza wrote: “All that there is at Quivira is a very brutish people, without any decency whatever in their houses nor in anything. These are of straw, like the Tarascan settlements; in some villages there are as many as 200 houses; they have corn and beans and melons; they do not have cotton nor fowls, nor do they make bread which is cooked, except under the ashes.”

These Wichita forerunners have been referred to as the painted people because of facial tattoos. Later Wichita also were known by tattoos around their eyes that made them resemble raccoons. Rice County finds confirmed the Quiviran made tattoos on their skin by pressing bone needles into their skin to deposit ink made from ground up stones or other materials.  

The Quiviran used bison parts for trade and exchanged goods in a network that stretched coast to coast. If they traveled to trade, the Quivirans didn’t have horses until the Spaniards came, so they would strap packages of dried meat and hides to themselves and their pack dogs and walk. 

They built pit houses from grasses about 6’ deep and 6’ in diameter using tree poles. A hole left in the cone-shaped native grass roofs provided light and smoke outlet from fires.  Doors opened downhill for drainage.