During the building process, two doorways at least six feet high were left open on either side of the structure, one facing east and once facing west, for spiritual purposes. “All these poles meet at the center up at the top of the grass house, and they’re tied to one or two-or sometimes I’ve seen three-hoops of heavy grape vines,” explains Owings.
They’re about eight foot apart-depends on how big the grass house is-then we laid poles across each of those forks.” Once this center structure was created, Owings said they set a larger ring of thinner poles outside this structure, bending them inward. “We got the bending forks set first, four on each side. “We contacted some Pueblo men, and they brought us a load of pine from New Mexico,” he says, detailing the building of the house near Anadarko.Ībout 40 volunteers assisted in building that grass house. Traditionally, Owings notes, the Wichita would have used cedar for the large load-bearing poles, as cedar lasts longer and resists insects.
“Nothing will eat it because it’s too tough and there’s no food value,” Owings says. These reeds are much sturdier than prairie grass, and they wouldn’t have attracted deer. Owings believes that the beehive-shaped “grass houses” were most commonly built with reeds, some of which are called “swamp grass” and could easily be found growing near rivers. If you’ve got a house made of grass, what’s going to happen? They’ll eat it if they run out of food.” “Years ago, some explorers who lived with the Wichita said they had domesticated a lot of wild animals-deer for one-that wandered around in the village. “Some of them say you can use grass,” says Owings, who goes on to explain why he disagrees. Owings notes there is some disagreement among Wichita elders about what type of material the Wichita used over the 500 years that they are believed to have built these homes in locations such as along the great bend of the Arkansas River, west of the Flint Hills near present-day McPherson. The biggest challenge, he says, was the gathering of the materials, which consisted of large pine poles, hundreds of locust and willow branches that had to be hand-stripped of bark, and finally, a huge supply of long-stem reeds to create the shingle-like thatch for the outside of the structure. In 1975, Owings helped orchestrate the building of a grass house north of Anadarko. These structures were successfully used for thousands of years and continued to be built for all the same reasons people still build houses today: comfort, safety, and community.Īt the age of 79, Stuart Owings, an elder with the Wichita tribe living on the Wichita reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, thinks he may be one of the last living Wichita with first-hand knowledge of grass house building.
Thanks to oral and written history, the connected memory of living tribe members, and the diligent work of archaeologists, we know what those structures looked like and roughly how they functioned in day-to-day life. Long before Euro-American settlers built soddies and farmhouses in Kansas, Indigenous people populated the area and built houses with native materials. Indigenous people’s oral histories and archeological research provide insight into the first Kansas homes Photo courtesy of the Kansas Historical Society
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