Among the Indigenous peoples that frequented the Erath County area when the first Anglo immigrants arrived were the Anadarko. The name, I found out recently, means “Those who ate the honey of the bumble-bee,” one of the agricultural Caddoan peoples that lived in East Texas for millennia. The Anadarko leader, Jose Maria, known among his people as Iesh, along with other Caddo Chefs, signed a treaty in 1835, in which they promised to give up their land and move west to the Trinity and Brazos Rivers. The Anadarko were the mounted fighting branch of the Caddo and were the equal of the Comanche in tactical skills. Jose Maria’s people became scouts and auxiliary cavalry in the service of the United States government and gained the trust of the earliest Anglo settlers. The year that John Stephen arrived at the site of Stephenville, 1854, with the first thirty wagons of settlers, was the same year that the Anadarko were placed on a reservation on the Brazos River. The Anadarko, and other Texas Indians built log cabins and cleared land for their crops. For a time, the Anadarko were allowed to leave the reservation to hunt black bear for their oil, but a couple of ugly incidents confined the Anadarko to the reservation except for military duty against the Comanches. Stephenville vigilantes harassed the reservation and murdered Indigenous farmers caught alone in their fields. On august 1, 1859, the government moved the Anadarko to a new reservation in Oklahoma, and the Texas Trail of Tears brought the surviving 462 Anadarko, Caddo, and Hasinai to the Washita River. The site where they camped has become Anadarko, Oklahoma.