Asked how he feels about the loss of ancestral land, Ross answered: “You can’t really answer that question, because no one ever sits down and talks about it. It is a dark legacy. I think about it. . . . If you come to Waco, you can see how beautiful this country is, and you think, what if the Texans, or the French or the Spanish, never showed up? Would this be Waco? Would there be a Lake Whitney? You can just dream about what was here.”

Earl Elam, a Hill College scholar of Wichita history, said the exact timeline of the abandonment of the Waco Indian Village is lost to history.

Unclear accounts

Accounts from the late 19th century say Cherokees from the Red River area avenged a Waco raid on their horses in spring 1829 by sending a war party to the Waco village, where they took 55 scalps.

Elam cautions that the accounts are not entirely clear that the raid they describe was the village in present-day Waco or some other Waco or Tawakoni village nearby on the Brazos.

Nonethless, Elam said, there’s no historical evidence of an inhabited village after 1830 or 1831, and it appears that the Cherokee raid and a smallpox epidemic devasted the band of Wacos.