Yscanis
Also called the Yxcani Indians, these people were a tribe of the Wichita Confederacy who first made their home in along the lower Canadian River in present-day Oklahoma. They were first met by the "white man," in 1719 when Jean Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe, a French explorer, made his way through the area. Under pressure from their bitter enemies, the Comanche and the Osage, they made their way to Texas by the middle of the 18th century. Fray José Francisco Calahorra y Saenz visited them in the area of North Texas in 1760 and made an unsuccessful attempt to establish a mission for them. Twelve years later, in 1772, Athanase de Mézières visited them on the east bank of the Trinity River below the site of present Palestine. At this time, Mezieres described the village as consisting of 60 warriors and their families. They lived in a scattered agricultural settlement, raised maize, beans, melons, and calabashes, were closely allied with the other Wichita tribes, whose language they spoke, and were said by Mezières to be cannibals. Juan Agustín Morfí in 1781 heard that they were living in a large village eight leagues up the Brazos River from the Tawakoni Indian settlement near the site of present Waco. The name, "Yscanis" was last used in 1794. But a quarter of a century later, when the Tawakoni villages were again mentioned in the records, one of them appears as that of the Waco, a name formerly unknown in Texas, and not accounted for by migration. The Waco may have been the Yscanis under a new name.