The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 15401845. By F. Todd Smith. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 206. Maps. $32.95.) In recent decades, historians have noted the power that native peoples could gain from living on the border of European colonies. Well-positioned Indian groups could play one European power off against another to gain weapons and other trade goods from both sides. F. Todd Smith's most recent book reveals that living in a borderland was not always an asset. Focusing on the Wichitas from their first contact with Europeans through the United States annexation of Texas, Smith's latest book forms a companion piece to his previous books: The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542-1854 (1995) and The Caddos, The Wichitas, and the United States, 1846-1901 (1996). In the sixteenth century, the people today known as the Wichitas or Kitikitish lived in many independent towns along the Arkansas and Red Rivers and their tributaries in what is today Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Women farmed the fertile riverbeds while men hunted bison on the plains and deer and bear closer to home. Loosely allied for centuries, these Caddoan-speaking Tawakonis, Taovayas, Guichitas, Iscanis, and Kichais only became known as the Wichitas when, in 1835, United States officials erroneously labeled the entire people with the name of one of the smaller groups, the Guichitas. Smith looks backwards from this nineteenth-century Anglo-defined tribal designation to reveal three centuries of change in the lives of these peoples. As Smith shows throughout the book, Europeans (often unwittingly) were catalysts for change, but native peoples made their own decisions and adapted in their own ways. The sixteenth-century Wichita peoples were an essential part of a wide trade network, stretching from the pueblos in the southwest, across the Mississippi, up the Ohio River and beyond. In the mid-1500s, Coronado and other Spanish explorers passed through Wichita country, leaving diseases and horses behind. Disease devastated many Wichita towns and encouraged the first in a long series of consolidations. Although the introduction of the horse improved their hunting range, and raiding for horses gave them a new trade good, the Wichita peoples did not benefit relative to their western neighbors. The Apaches' and Comanches' greater access to horses allowed them to dominate the southern plains. Smith outlines the difficulties the Wichitas faced in their attempts to build trading relations with the French and Spanish who settled Louisiana and Texas in the eighteenth century. Lack of access to weapons left the Wichitas vulnerable to their northern and western Indian neighbors. To the north, the Osages used their position close to the Mississippi River to monopolize European trade there. Well-armed, they raided the Wichitas for slaves and pushed them out of their homelands on the Arkansas River and southwest into Texas. Still undergoing Apache attacks, the Wichitas found themselves pressed from all sides on a crowded borderland. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Wichitas became central to border disputes between the United States and Spain. Diplomatic ties with the Wichitas could strengthen either country's claim to the region and might prove useful if war broke out. Recognizing this new opportunity, the Wichitas courted both United States and Spanish alliance and trade. But as settlers poured into the region from the east and the Mexican independence movement distracted the Spanish, the issue of the border declined, and the Wichitas lost their short-lived negotiating power. …