The Trinity River had been central to indigenous life in North Central Texas for centuries. The first human occupation of North Central Texas has been estimated to be 12,000 B.C.
Numerous archeological sites in the Trinity River basin reveal artifacts of chert (flakey quartzite rock) tools and projectile points, trade with European occupiers, and presence of burials, but unavoidably tell an incomplete story. Indigenous ways of respecting the earth ensured that they left little; they believed in reciprocating the gift of the earth and its abundant life by returning it to Mother Earth as they found it. Such sites are also often compromised by disturbance from gravel mining, utility instillation, road construction, lake inundation, and deep layers of silting.
While many Indigenous groups traversed the area over time, the people who most embraced the Trinity River region became known collectively as the Wichita or Kirikir’i-s, groups of Caddoan-speaking peoples principally including the Wichita, Waco, Tawakoni, Kichai, Iscani, and Taovaya.
To escape conflict and competition, particularly with Osage to the north and Comanche to the west, the Wichita people began consolidating from the plains to the Trinity basin around 1700. It was natural for them to do so. From the headwaters near the southern bluffs of the Red River, the dendtric streams, creeks, and forks of the Trinity watershed spread like the branches of a tree canopy leading to the main trunk where Dallas was founded. 
The Wichita people were both bison hunters and farmers in semi-permanent villages along creeks and streams; they built tall timbered grass-covered huts; they were warriors but less martial than the Comanche and Osage, perhaps because they were late in acquiring horses and firearms, preferring to fight on foot with long bows crafted from bois d’arc tree branches and fortify their grass-covered huts with earthen embankments; they were referred to as the “raccoon-eyed people” for the male practice of tattooing lines leading from their eyes to their temples; they were transactional, serving as middlemen traders between Comanche and French and as scouts for evolving European and local jurisdictional powers.
The Wichita were horticulturalists, cultivating maize, beans, and squash among other crops, and collecting and planting pecan and bois d’arc nuts and seeds along the streams near their villages. The presence of old-growth pecan and bois d’arc groves in the bottomland is likely the marker for an indigenous village site. (The word pecan is derived from pigan, an indigenous word for nut.) They were also masters of wild medicinal and edible plants, many of which still grow on the Buckeye Trail.
But they were little match for the ravages of smallpox and cholera or the accumulated losses to warfare and captive taking. By 1780-1820, the number of Wichita in North Texas was estimated at less than 1,500. And they were no match for the politics of the emerging Republic of Texas.
With increasing settlers in the region, the Republic of Texas launched an “exterminating war” against Indigenous peoples which, on May 24, 1841, focused on a Wichita village lining the banks of Village Creek, a tributary of the West Fork of the Trinity River in what is now Arlington. The assault resulted in the killing of twelve Wichita people, the capture of an Indigenous woman and child, the burning of the village’s grass-covered huts, and the strategic withdrawal of Indigenous people from the region.
Two years later, an entourage including Republic of Texas president Sam Houston traveled to consummate a treaty with Wichita and other Indigenous leaders, camping along the way at Big Springs near the Buckeye Trail.
The ‘Treaty of Peace and Friendship’ executed on September 29, 1843, at Bird’s Fort near the Village Creek battle site, memorialized the agreement of the Republic of Texas and Indigenous leaders, including numerous Wichita groups, to assign territory for both Indigenous peoples and settlement. It would never be honored by the Republic of Texas and, with annexation by the US shortly, thereafter, was disavowed.
With these epochal events, the caretakers of the Trinity basin were banished, indigenous knowledge and land-care practices were lost, and the Trinity basin frontier was open for development.
