Great Southwest Trail Caddo Trade Silver — Bowie County

The Great Southwest Trail, for hundreds of years the main line of travel from Mississippi River Indian villages to the South and West, passed by a Caddo Indian village on the site that later became Texarkana. Seventy Indian mounds within a thirty-mile radius of Texarkana mark Caddo occupation. Bowie County archeological evidence indicates occupation as early as the Late Archaic Period. By first European contact the area was Caddo country; French trader Alexis Grappé and Le Poste des Cadodaquious operated northwest of Texarkana in the eighteenth century. Red River entrada folklore imagines trade silver and tribute caches along the Great Southwest Trail. Coordinates mark downtown Texarkana on State Line Avenue at the Bowie–Miller county border.