Bedias Creek, which Interstate 45 crosses on the line between Walker and Madison counties, carries the name of the Bidai, the people who lived between the Brazos and Trinity rivers before Anglo-American settlement. The creek is spring-fed and perennial. It rises four miles southeast of North Zulch in far southwestern Madison County and flows east for forty-seven miles to the Trinity River at the Houston County line, and its lower course forms the boundary between Madison and Walker counties. The Bidai, whose name appears in old records as Beadeye, Bedias, Biday and Viday, first appear in a Spanish document of 1691. Their main village stood where the creek meets the Trinity, and they raised corn and hunted deer.
In the 1740s and 1750s some Bidai lived for short periods at Spanish missions on the San Gabriel River and on the lower Trinity. In the 1770s they were reported to be helping the French sell guns to the Lipan Apaches, enemies of Spain. An epidemic in 1776 and 1777 cut their numbers by about half, and by 1820 only a few small groups survived. Some joined the Akokisa and the Koasati; others were taken in 1854 to the Brazos Indian Reservation in Young County and ended in Indian Territory, where their separate identity was soon lost.
Their name stayed on the land. Besides the creek it belongs to the town of Bedias in Grimes County, and through the town to bediasites, the natural glass tektites found mostly in Grimes County. Anglo-American settlement along the creek began in the 1830s.
Getting there
30.8882, -95.7721
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