Rich History

The Lake Interlochen community and adjacent Bob Findlay Linear Park are located in an historic area along Village Creek. According to the Arlington Landmark Preservation Commission and the Arlington Parks & Recreation Department, Village Creek valley within Linear Park was home of the largest concentration of Native Americans in Texas.

From prehistoric times, native peoples practiced agriculture along the banks of Village Creek safe from the periodic floods of the Trinity River. Archeological digs have revealed arrowhead points from 5000 BC. The first accounts of recorded history of settlement along Village Creek came in 1542 when royal Spanish map markers recorded a camp that explorers had made here at an Indian village named "Guasco." They described this area as being the western edge of a "corn belt," where tribes who grew corn along the creek lived in conical-shaped dwellings thatched with grass or bark and navigated the Trinity River on rafts and canoes made from skins stretched over a framework of willow boughs.

The earliest days of the Republic of Texas record the end of the long history of Native American settlement in the Village Creek area. Expeditions of scouting parties made up of rangers, volunteers and militia cleared the area of Indians to make way for colonists and the land hungry settlers who were being attracted with the sales of land grants in 1841 to the W. S. Peters Emigration Land Company of Louisville, Kentucky.

Before being destroyed in the Battle of Village Creek in 1841, a whole series of villages lay on both sides of the creek. Native local tribes included the Anadarko, Caddo, Keechi, Kickapoo, Tawakoni, Tonkawa, Waco, Waxahachie and Wichita, who were all members of the Caddoan Confederacy. Chief of the Caddo was Tarshar the Wolf.

After the United States forcefully removed all Indians living east of the Mississippi River in 1830, native Texas tribes were invaded by many other tribes from the eastern and southeastern United States. These tribes sought refuge in this area rather than stay in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) assigned to them in the Removal Act of 1830. Of these, the Cherokee, Biloxi, Ioni, Delaware and the Chickasaw joined Caddoan tribes in the signing of the peace treaty with the Republic of Texas in 1843. By this time the villages of Village Creek had all been abandoned after repeated expeditions of the Texas militia.