QUITACA INDIANS. The Quitaca Indians were one of twenty Indian groups that joined Juan DomÃnguez de Mendoza on his journey from El Paso to the vicinity of present San Angelo in 1683-84. Mendoza did not indicate at what point the Quitacas joined his party. In a Spanish document of 1771 the Quitacas were mentioned as having signed a peace treaty with the Spanish, along with the Tawakoni, Yscani, and Cantona groups, all of whom are considered to be Wichitas. If these were the same Quitacas mentioned by DomÃnguez de Mendoza, then the Quitacas can be identified as a Wichita people and it can be stated that Wichita groups were ranging much farther west in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century. This identification negates J. R. Swanton's classification of the Quitacas as Coahuiltecan.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bexar Archives, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin. Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed., Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (New York: Scribner, 1908; rpt., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959). Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (2 vols., Washington: GPO, 1907, 1910; rpt., New York: Pageant, 1959). William W. Newcomb, The Indians of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961). John R. Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America (Gross Pointe, Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1968).
