The Pawnee-Arikara Clade

A brief addendum to my previous post.  In it, I invented two temporary coined terms for the sake of convenience, to make communication easier: I coined "Panaic" to refer to the clade of Caddoan peoples and languages that includes Pawnee and Arikara (who share a relatively-recent common ancestor), and "Minnetaric" for the same reason viz. Crow, Hidatsa, and Mandan.  I used these terms because I was writing about prehistory, and needed a way to refer to two present-day groups' common ancestor, before they differentiated into their respective identities, in a concise manner.  I did not know whether any other terms had ever been used by Real Scholars™ for these groups.

I've since found a couple plausible substitutions for my "Panaic".  The first is a diagram of the Caddoan language family tree, from Wallace Chafe's The History and Geography of the Caddo Language (2004), wherein the term "Pawneean" is used:

The second is from Douglas Parks' Bands and Villages of the Arikara and Pawnee (1979):

"In this paper I shall use "Panian" as a cover term to include the Arikara, Skiri, and all of the other bands of Pawnee; i.e., all of the Pawnee groups north of the Wichita.  I prefer this term to the use of the name Pawnee, since I want to distinguish between the contemporary Pawnee tribe and the larger number of formerly autonomous groups that developed from Proto-Panian, the Ursprache of these bands." (endnote 1)

Of the two homophonous terms, "Pawneean" and "Panian", I prefer the latter because its distinct spelling helps avoid being misinterpreted as referring solely to the Pawnee—I have seen people make similar mistakes with names like "Caddoan" and "Siouan", mistakenly believing them to just be adjectives referring to the Caddo and Sioux, respectively.  So, then I now have a "real" term to use in place of my temporary coinage of "Panaic".  Here are the relevant maps from the last post, updated:

 

No luck yet on finding a legitimate substitute for "Minnetaric", which is a shame since that was the weaker of the two coinages.¹  I had based it on "Minnetaree," an old designation of the Hidatsa which comes from the Mandans' name for them, but had mistakenly thought it was also cognate with the name "Mandan" (which either comes from Assiniboine "Mayatani" or from Lakota Miwátʰani, depending on who you ask).²  Since it isn't, that makes it a less-fitting term that I previously thought... but until I find a suitable replacement, it will have to do.

Notes

¹ Actually, there is "Missouri River Siouan", but that's just... too much of a mouthful.  It also doesn't sound specific enough—someone who isn't familiar with terminology might assume it refers to any Siouans that ever inhabited the Missouri River, which would include e.g. the Omaha and the Lakota.

² Full disclosure: I don't actually know with 100% certainty that Mandan "Minitari" isn't cognate with Assiniboine "Mayatani" and/or Lakota Miwátʰani³—I don't have access to any good Mandan or Assiniboine dictionaries, so I'm unable to check right now.  "Minitari" is usually said to mean "they crossed the water", and Miwátʰani "owl feathers", but I'm not sure how much trust or import to give either etymology.

³ Footnoteception: the italics indicate that the spelling is from a legit linguistic source—in this case, Bruce Ingham's Lakota-English Dictionary.  The quotation marks indicate a probably-deficient-in-some-way transcription from a non-linguistic source.

Some South Dakota Prehistory

In the previous post, I briefly summarized part of the prehistory of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Mandan.  I was already digressing away from the main topic, so I tried to make what I wrote quick and simple—there were details that I chose not to get into for reasons of space—but I'm afraid it just ended up being rushed and unclear.  Also I made a few small errors, of omission and of commission.  So I'm gonna try to cover part of that again, and try to be clearer and more detailed (and accurate) this time around.  As always, remember that I am especially liable to get things wrong when talking about archeology.

The Pawnee and Arikara tribes are closely akin, and seven centuries ago were still one people.  Relatively, at least—the archaeological record perhaps doesn't tell us how unified they were socially or politically, but they presumably still spoke one language.  They lived in sedentary village communities in southern Nebraska and northern Kansas.  As before, I'm using the term "Panaic" to refer to this ancestral population, for the sake of convenience.  The Panaic people are represented by the "Central Plains Village" archaeological tradition.

Meanwhile, South Dakota was inhabited by another group of village-dwelling people, unrelated to the Panaics, represented by the archaeological "Middle Missouri tradition".  There are two areas to the Middle Missouri tradition: the core area along the Missouri River in central South Dakota, roughly between the mouths of the Bad and Cheyenne rivers (henceforth: "the Pierre area"); and the so-called "Eastern Periphery" extending thence across southeastern South Dakota and into northwestern Iowa.

In the previous post, I made two errors regarding the Middle Missouri tradition: 1) I limited it to the Pierre area, not including the Eastern Periphery, and 2) I labeled it "proto-Mandan".  Error #2 might not strictly be wrong per se, but the evidence is ambiguous: the Middle Missouri tradition certainly included the proto-Mandan, yes... but it likely also included the proto-Crow-Hidatsa as well, and possibly other tribes as well.  Specifically who was in the Pierre area, and who in the Eastern Periphery, is not known.  The only hard evidence we have are archaeological remains, and it just so happens that the Mandan and Hidatsa have always been extremely similar in material culture, so it's next to impossible to tell where they were located relative to each other in prehistoric times.

"Mih-Tutta-Hangkusch: A Mandan Village" by Karl Bodmer, 1841.

The Crow, Hidatsa, and Mandan constitute a dialect group known as "Missouri River Siouan".  However, because the Crow and Hidatsa did not become separate from each other until probably the 1700's, and because they and the Mandan are nigh-indistinguishable in the archaeological record, I'm going to employ another term-of-convenience to refer to their collective forebears: "Minnetaric".  Remember: "Panaic" and "Minnetaric" are both names I have invented for convenience's sake—they are not terms used by scholars, or anyone else.  In the 13th century, Minnetarics almost certainly occupied the Pierre area.  The Eastern Periphery was probably Minnetaric as well—perhaps proto-Crow-Hidatsa, perhaps other Minnetaric tribes that got lost to history.

By the middle of the 14th century, the Panaics had migrated from the central Plains and established themselves along the Missouri River, downstream from the Pierre area.  These South Dakota Panaic settlements belong to the archaeological "Coalescent tradition".

In my last post, I surmised that this migration was what split the Panaics into the Arikara and Pawnee:

"The 1350-1400 period is reasonably close to the estimated date of separation for the Pawnee and Arikara languages (Parks 1979), so it seems plausible to me that this was when the "Panaic" tribe(s) fissioned: the ancestors of the Arikara emigrating to South Dakota, and the ancestors of the Pawnee presumably going somewhere else."

This is still possible, I suppose, but most archaeologists prefer to say that a later Panaic migration (in 1550) represents the Pawnee-Arikara split (Logan 1996).  Parks' actual estimate for the Pawnee-Arikara schism was around 1450 A.D., give-or-take—or in other words, right between the 1350 migration and the 1550 migration.  So the linguistic evidence is ambiguous as to when the schism occurred.  However, I have no reason to doubt the archaeologists on this, so let it be said: the early Coalescent tradition in South Dakota represents the Panaic people, not just the proto-Arikara.

South Dakota was already something of a war zone when the Panaics decided to move in—settlements along the Missouri River tended to be much more defensive in nature, compared with the Central Plains villages that the Panaics were accustomed to.  These Missouri River settlements were typically surrounded by a ring (sometimes two) of defensive earthworks, topped with palisade walls, and positioned at strategic locations atop cliffs or on hillsides.  For a century prior to the Panaics' arrival, peoples from the Initial Middle Missouri (IMM) and Extended Middle Missouri (EMM) phases had been fighting each other for possession of the Pierre area (Wood 2001, 192).

Aerial photograph from 1965 of the ruins of a fortified Middle Missouri settlement.  After four centuries of neglect, and years of getting literally plowed over, the walls and "mural tower" sections are still clearly visible in outline. (from Wood 2001)

After the Panaics arrived on the scene, things just got worse, and a war broke out against the Minnetarics over control of South Dakota (one can only assume that the IMM and EMM forgot their quarrel in the face of a common enemy).  This war is famous among archaeologists because of an archaeological site known as Crow Creek—a spectacular testament to human violence.  At some point in the early 1300's, a Minnetaric war party surrounded a Panaic settlement and—after apparently laying siege to it for some time—attacked, killing nearly 500 of its inhabitants:

"This truly was a massacre rather than a battle; most villagers appear to have been clubbed to death while fleeing.  There is not an embedded arrow point in any of the bodies.  Men, women, and children were indiscriminately killed.  Their noses, hands, and feet were sometimes cut off, teeth smashed, and heads and limbs cut from the body.  The victims, from babies to elders, were universally scalped and mutilated.  The scale of the deaths suggests that most of the inhabitants were killed." (Emerson 2007)

Crow Creek might be the bloodiest massacre committed by a non-state civilization known to all of history (Pinker 2011, 49).  Clearly, then, the Minnetarics didn't take this Panaic invasion lying down.  But, however many teeth they smashed and noses they cut off, it evidently wasn't enough, and by mid-century they had abandoned the entire Eastern Periphery and withdrawn to the relatively-constricted Pierre area.  The Iowan portion of their former territory was taken over by the Chiwere (a group that includes the Ioway, Oto, and Missouria tribes... though I don't think the Missouria were involved here); whether there was a theater of war here like that in South Dakota, I honestly have no idea.

Wherever the proto-Mandans had been before, they were certainly in the Pierre area by ≈1350.  If there had ever been other Minnetaric tribes (apart from the proto-Crow-Hidatsa), they were either destroyed or had their tribal identity subsumed under someone else.  As for the proto-Crow-Hidatsa, they're conventionally supposed to have lived in eastern North Dakota prior to ever encountering the Mandans, but it's not impossible that some may have been in South Dakota with the Mandans at this point.

This, by the way, is why I've been reluctant to use the word "Mandan" when referring to the Middle Missouri tradition.  I don't want to say that, e.g. "the Mandans lived in the Pierre-area" in the 14th century, because maybe they didn't—maybe the Mandans were those people living in the Eastern Periphery, and some other tribe lived in the Pierre-area, were swamped by the Mandan refugees, and lost their tribal identity.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  Or maybe they were both Mandans.  Maybe there's something to the oral tradition that says the Hidatsa Awaxawi band was originally south of the Mandans (Wood 1993).  Or maybe there isn't.  Probably no one knows.

What is known is that: whoever was present in the Pierre-area in 1350, spent the next two centuries or so being gradually driven northward by the expanding power of the Panaics.  By approximately the 16th century or so, the Panaic advance had driven the Mandans and Hidatsas upriver, into central North Dakota which they inhabited in the historical period.  Meanwhile, the Panaics had expanded southward as well, until their northern and southern borders corresponded more or less with the present north and south borders of South Dakota.

Sometime around 1550 A.D., or 200 years after first moving to the Missouri River, a segment of the Panaics migrated back south into Nebraska and settled along the forks of the Loup River.  Whether they had hung on to fond memories of "the old home" for two centuries, or were motivated by other concerns, I don't know.  As mentioned earlier, this was probably the migration that split the Panaics into two tribes—with those remaining in South Dakota becoming the Arikara, and those living in Nebraska becoming the Pawnee.  The Pawnee later split into two geographical divisions: Skiri and South Band.  It was once thought that this split predated the Arikara schism, and that the latter tribe originated as a sub-band within the Skiri—that is now known not to be the case.

There were probably also developments within the "Chiwere" bloc shown on the map, but I haven't yet looked into that.  For now, just take that portion of the "1550-1600 AD" map with skepticism.

Cited sources:

Thomas E. Emerson, "Cahokia and the Evidence for Late Pre-Colombian War in the North American Midcontinent". In Chacon & Mendoza eds., North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence (2007).

Brad Logan, "The Protohistoric Period on the Great Plains". In Jack L. Hofman ed., Archeology and Paleoecology of the Central Great Plains (1996).

Douglas R. Parks, "The Northern Caddoan Languages: Their Subgroupings and Time Depths" (1979).

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (2011).

W. Raymond Wood, "Hidatsa Origins and Relationships" (1993).

— "Plains Village Tradition: Middle Missouri". In Raymond J. DeMallie ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13: Plains, Pt 1 (2001).

Uncited sources:

Duane Anderson, "Ioway Ethnohistory: A Review, Part I" (1973).

Dale R. Henning, "The Oneota Tradition". In W. Raymond Wood ed., Archaeology on the Great Plains (1998).

— "Plains Village Tradition: Eastern Periphery and Oneota Tradition". In Raymond J. DeMallie ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13: Plains, Pt 1 (2001).

Richard A. Krause, "Plains Village Tradition: Coalescent". In Raymond J. DeMallie ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13: Plains, Pt 1 (2001).

Douglas R. Parks & Waldo R. Wedel, "Pawnee Geography: Historical and Sacred" (1985).

W. Raymond Wood & Alan S. Downer, "Notes on the Crow-Hidatsa Schism" (1977).

North of the Jumano

I want to talk about mythical cities for a second.  It's a little peculiar that when the Spanish first landed in America, they did it in the tropics, in Central America.  I don't mean because the humid climate allowed for those epidemics to spread more easily—though that was obviously important in other ways—I mean that they landed practically on the Incas' and Aztecs' doorstep.  That's an exaggeration—the Aztec conquest was 1519, so almost 30 years after Columbus—but it still happened pretty quick, and as a result, the Spanish got strange ideas about what the Americas were like: e.g. that it was full of glorious empires flowing with silver and gold.  And so people like Narváez, Orellana [correction: Gonzalo Pizarro], and De Soto went on conducting expeditions into the continent, hoping to find another Inca Empire to conquer, and when they didn't find any they just made them up instead—fictional kingdoms with names like "Anian" and "Teguayo", apparently lying somewhere off north, waiting to be conquered.  No matter how much of America was explored, the Spanish never really stopped wanting to believe in places like Teguayo, and this went on for centuries—people were still believing this stuff as late as the 1770's (Tyler 1952, Owens 1975).

Everyone knows this.  Anian and Teguayo aren't very well known, but everyone knows El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold—some might know the latter more accurately as the "Seven Cities of Cíbola and Quivira".  It's also not widely-known that "El Dorado" (like "Inca") referred originally not to a kingdom, but to its king—a monarch so wealthy that he painted his whole body over with a coat of gold dust.  Every day he would apply a new coat, and every night wash it off by bathing in the royal pond.  After centuries, this pond had developed a thick layer of gold lining its bottom like silt, which shone at midday with reflected sunlight.  But ideas slip over time, so somehow this eventually morphed into an Atlantis-esque legend of a magical kingdom with giant pyramids made entirely from pure gold:

The idea is so slippery that sometimes El Dorado and the Seven Cities are treated like they're just two names for the same thing, despite being distinct legends with distinct sources.  So that, e.g. National Treasure 2 has Ed Harris refer to El Dorado as "Cíbola" like that's its "real name" or something.  Indiana Jones 4 had the same gimmick, except they called El Dorado "Akator"—I have no idea where that name comes from, they might have made it up.

Speaking of ideas slipping: the conquistadors don't have a very good reputation these days.  And, true, it's not very endearing to read about Orellana and De Soto's mad quests for glory, killing and torturing villagers for not relinquishing their nonexistent treasure... (Narváez got lucky: he's mostly just remembered as an incompetent)...  but when it comes to the Spaniards' lack of geographical knowledge, at least, I think we should cut them a little slack.  It's too easy to write off the wannabe-conquistadors as nincompoops for expecting to find kingdoms of gold in Oklahoma or wherever, but really, how could they have known?  America was well-nigh unknown to western Europeans of the time, but so was China.  If you read about some guy in the 1500's who travelled eastward hoping to find Cathay and the kingdom of Prester John, he might sound a little quixotic, but he wouldn't come across as quite the dumbass that Coronado, I think for some people, does.  Cathay was a real place.  Still is.

Cíbola and Quivira were also real places.  This came as a surprise to me when I learned it.  I had heard of the "Seven Cities of Cíbola and Quivira" and had seen National Treasure 2, and so only knew those names in the context of being mythical places that didn't exist, but they were both real.  "Cíbola" comes from Cabeza de Vaca—it referred originally to the Cíbolo Indians (who were probably Jumanos, as I've said), and somehow ended up as a name for the Zuni pueblo of Háwikuh, or for the entire Pueblo region in general.  It wasn't some mythical far-away citadel full of riches: the Spanish knew exactly where Cíbola was, they'd been there, they'd seen it.

Same for Quivira, although it didn't get as many visitors—it was the region occupied by the [various, then-independent divisions of what would later become the] Wichita tribe, especially the area along the Arkansas River in central Kansas.  One of the Quiviran settlements, Etzanoa, had a population of 20,000 people (Wenzl 2017).  Etzanoa was no Tenochtitlán, but Quivira was impressive enough to have a reputation throughout the Plains and the Southwest—if you were an Indian in the 16th century, and some Spaniard came up and asked you about that vast, wealthy kingdom to the north he had heard so much about, you'd probably assume that's what he was referring to.  ("Kingdom" is not inaccurate: the Wichitas of Quivira, like their Caddo brethren, were organized into hereditary chiefdoms—Etzanoa was governed by a ruler called a catarax (Vehik 1992, M. Wedel 1988, 21).)

Which brings me to the point of this post.  Such a Spaniard looking for such a kingdom was Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.  In 1541, after spending the winter in Cíbola province, he went eastward looking for Quivira.  He found it, but that's for another day—what's important now is that, somewhere out on the high plains between Cíbola and Quivira, he encountered two other groups of people.  The first were nomadic bison-hunters from the "Querecho" tribe.  Beyond them, in some vaguely southeast-ish direction, were another tribe called the "Teyas", who lived much as the Querechos except that they painted their faces.  The Teyas and the Querechos were said to be enemies (Newcomb 1993).

Just like Luxán's "Caguates" and "Tanpachoas", this is another case where the earliest explorers to some area used ideosyncratic names to refer to the local inhabitants, and modern researchers have to try and figure out who they meant.  It's a common problem.  For reasons I won't go into, virtually everybody agrees that the Querechos were a group of Apaches.  The Teyas are more difficult—some people say they were Caddoans, Jumanos, or another Apache group.  My impression is that Teya=Jumano is the most commonly held opinion of the sources I've read, but Teya=Apache is also plausible, as according to Carlisle (2001, 52-3):

"Both the Querechos and Teyas used dog nomadism, which was not attributed to any other group...[A]rguments generally used to dispute an Apache identification for the Teyas can be easily refuted. The enmity between the two tribes could have simply been an intra-tribal dispute and does not necessarily indicate that the two tribes were of different nations. The fact that Teyas painted themselves while Querechos did not is a moot point, since some Apache tribes used paint while others did not. The fact that the Teyas were more sedentary and practiced farming also does not eliminate the possibility that the Teyas were Apaches. The Jicarillas of later times, for example, were sedentary and practiced agriculture." (pp. 52-3)

In 1598, Vicente de Zaldívar passed through the same area as Coronado sixty years earlier; he, too, encountered two tribes of people who were at war with each other and whose description roughly matches that of the Querechos and the Teyas—the first were the "Vaqueros" (another commonly-accepted name for the Apaches), and the second were called the "Xumanas" (Habicht-Mauche 1992).  This is probably the best evidence that the Teyas were Jumanos.

So, in 1541 Coronado passed through the northern border of the Jumanos with the Apaches.  All we need to do is figure out where that was.  Tracking the itineraries of these early Spanish entradas is a difficult business—it's pretty impressive that researchers have been able to reconstruct them to any degree of confidence.  For instance, this is what people used to think Coronado's route from the Pueblos to Quivira was:

(route from Schroeder 1962)

But scholars now think that it was more like this:

(route from W. Wedel 1990)

(While among the Teyas, the expedition made a dramatic course correction once Coronado learned from the Teyas that Quivira lay to the north, not the east, and that his Indian guide had been leading him astray.  Maybe.  See M. Wedel 1988, 38-52.)

Assuming this route means that the Querechos were on the Llano Estacado south of the Canadian River, and that the Teyas were in a region of north Texas called the Caprock Canyonlands—a series of canyons cutting into the Llano Estacado plain on its eastern edge.  This matches the descriptions from the Coronado expedition and of the Teyas and Querechos much better.  Or so they say, at least... I haven't actually read the Castañeda account, nor do I know anything about Texan geology any more than what my sources tell me.

So, in 1541, in between encountering the Querechos and the Teyas, Coronado crossed over the northern border of Jumano territory—I want to locate this border.  Unfortunately, the expedition accounts themselves don't provide enough detail to locate which canyons Coronado found the Teya.  Hickerson (1994, 25), citing the authority of "scholarly consensus", places one of the major Teya encampments in Palo Duro canyon, one of the biggest (the biggest?) canyons in the Caprock region.  I have no intention of going against scholarly consensus—especially since I'm not an expert in any of this, and I want my map project to be a work of synthesizing what other, smarter people have said—however, there is good reason to doubt that the Jumanos were situated that far north.

This involves archeology.  Disclaimer: I am a total and utter noob when it comes to archeology.  I've been trying to educate myself recently on the archeology of North America, but it's not a field that I feel at home with... at all... and I place very little confidence in my ability to understand most of it.  So even more than usual, I'm not saying any of this with any authority, and the probability is rather high that I might unintentionally misrepresent my sources, or come to a faulty conclusion due to not understanding the methodologies or assumptions of the field.

Now that that's out of the way: the Texas Panhandle region, for the protohistoric period, is dominated by two archeological complexes: the Garza complex and the Tierra Blanca complex.  Both complexes began around 1450 or so, and they both lasted until around 1650 (Habicht-Mauche 1992).  Tierra Blanca is known mostly from sites in and around Palo Duro canyon, and Garza is mostly found in various canyons south of and including Blanco Canyon (where the upper Brazos River flows through the Caprock canyonlands).  On the following map, I've outlined the regions where each complex is found—the solid line represents each complex's "core area", and the dotted line includes other regions where artifacts have been found.

(based on Blakeslee et al. 2003)

For comparison, here is the same map, only I've added all of the known Jumano locations as mentioned in contemporary Spanish documents (from Kenmotsu 2001):

(Note, by the way, that south-easternmost six dots—nearest the ocean—are all from the late 1680's, after the Jumanos had been ousted from their lands by the Apaches, so they may represent refugee Jumanos found outside of their historic territory.)

And that is why the Jumanos cannot have inhabited Palo Duro Canyon.  Whoever the inhabitants of Palo Duro canyon were (the Tierra Blanca complex people), they were different from the Garza complex people.  And if either of those two complexes represents the Jumanos, it is certainly the Garza.  As you can see, the Garza area is slightly to the north of the bulk of attested Jumano locations, so there is a slight possibility that the Garzas and/or Teyas were some otherwise-unattested tribe, north of the Jumanos and presumably destroyed along with the Jumanos by the southward Apache advance.  That is possible, but unlikely—in either case, the Jumanos were still not in Palo Duro Canyon.

It is highly likely that the Tierra Blanca complex represents the Apaches (Hughes, in Blakeslee et al. 2003).  It is also generally accepted both that the Teyas were Jumanos and that the Garza complex represents the Teyas.  Not everybody agrees with this (e.g. Donald Blakeslee), but most do—I haven't gone back and done a "poll" of all my sources to see who supports what hypothesis (and I'm not going to, because that sounds tedious), but my distinct impression is that the majority opinion is Garza=Teya=Jumano and Tierra Blanca=Querecho=Apache:

It then remains to locate the border between the Tierra Blanca and Garza complexes, and we will have found the northern border of the Jumanos.  This will be accurate to 1541 A.D. if the Teya=Jumano hypothesis is correct; if that hypothesis is not correct, it will still be accurate to the general period of ≈1450 to ≈1650 spanned by the two complexes.  As you can guess from the map, this border is located between the upper reaches of the Brazos and Red rivers.

That gives the Jumanos' northern border in Texas like so:

The New Mexican portion of the border, adjacent the Pueblo region, remains to be defined.  This is more difficult, as it involves the Athabaskan arrival in the Southwest, which is a vast and contentious topic that deserves more attention in the future.  For now, this is the condensed version, as best as I can manage:

The Apacheans (Apaches and Navajos), for the majority of the historic period, inhabited the Southwest; being Athabaskans, though, their origins lie to the north—in Alaska and subarctic Canada.  Some centuries ago, the ancestors of the Apacheans expanded or migrated south from their old home and, eventually, ended up in the New Mexico area—however, the precise route that they took is not known.  Historians posit three main possibilities: an intermontane route, a High Plains route, and a Plains-border route near the mountains (Wilcox 1981, Carlisle 2001).  The Rocky Mountains are presumably difficult to cross, so the Pueblo area constitutes one of the "gates" in the North American axial mountain chain—consequently both plains-route theories dictate that the Athabaskans would have had to traverse the entire north-south length of the Great Plains before swinging westward into the Southwest.

Intermontane, Plains-border, and High Plains migration routes.

(from Gilmore & Larmore 2008)

More archeology: around 750 years ago, the Great Plains were inhabited by a number of semisedentary, village-dwelling civilizations.  In South Dakota it was the Initial Middle Missouri tradition (proto-Mandans, probably), which ranged as far west as the Black Hills.  In Nebraska and Kansas it was the Central Plains Village tradition (proto-Pawnee-Arikara... what do I call that group, "Panaic"?), which ranged westward to Wyoming and Colorado, within sight of the Rockies.  In southeast Colorado was the Apishapa phase (proto-Who-The-Hell-Knows), and in the Texas panhandle the Antelope Creek focus (ditto).

Great Plains, ca. 1250 A.D. (not comprehensive)

(from Wood 2001, Drass 1998, Gilmore & Larmore 2008)

By the early 14th century, the Initial Middle Missouri folk had contracted to living along the Missouri River, and the Central Plains Village had abandoned their western reaches on the High Plains:

Great Plains, ca. 1300 A.D. (not comprehensive)

Then by ≈1350, the Proto-Pawnee-Arikara had completely abandoned the central plains in Nebraska and northern Kansas, with at least some of them removing north to the Missouri River in South Dakota and establishing the archeological Coalescent tradition.  The 1350-1400 period is reasonably close to the estimated date of separation for the Pawnee and Arikara languages (Parks 1979), so it seems plausible to me that this was when the "Panaic" tribe(s) fissioned: the ancestors of the Arikara emigrating to South Dakota, and the ancestors of the Pawnee presumably going somewhere else.

By ≈1400, the Apishapa phase disappeared, and by ≈1450 the Antelope Creek focus was supplanted by the Tierra Blanca complex i.e. the Apaches.  So, from 1250 to 1450 there was a large-scale civilizational collapse on the Plains, that progressed gradually from north to south and from west to east—it's been suggested by some (e.g. Hughes, in Blakeslee et al.) that these people were being conquered or driven out by the Athabaskans on their migration south—a good old-fashioned barbarian invasion, Vandal-style.  This is probably what happened to the Apishapa phase, and certainly what happened to the Antelope Creek focus... but as for the Caddoans and Siouans, most researchers think rather that their retreat was due to drought conditions on the Plains.

So: this is the context in which to view the 17th century Apache invasion of Texas, which eventually divested the Jumanos of their whole territory.  It was the most recent episode of an Athabaskan völkerwanderung that began possibly a thousand years earlier, up in Canada.

Getting back on track: this is what Nancy Hickerson speculates might have been the Jumanos' territory at its maximum extent:

"It encompassed the South Plains of western Texas and eastern New Mexico, and may have extended to adjacent regions of Oklahoma, Colorado, and northern Chihuahua." (p. xxiv)

Glancing at the map, giving them any part of Colorado seems a bit excessive.  In a later article (1996), she constructs the following chronology for the northwestern Jumano frontier:

≈1600: Apaches trading at Taos and Picuris and "battling their enemies, the Jumano farther south, near Pecos Pueblo"

≈1630: Apaches trading at Pecos; Jumanos "withdrawn over 100 leagues to the east"

1660's: Apaches cut off access to Tompiro province

This puts the Jumano-Apache border between Picuris and Pecos (Picuris is just barely south of Taos) in 1600, in between Tompiro and Pecos in 1630, and southeast of Tompiro by 1670... moving south and east.  It seems neat and tidy, except it doesn't quite work.  The archeological evidence shows that by ≈1550 and probably earlier,  somebody was spending time at Pecos Pueblo who had access to a particular kind of agatized dolomite that is only found in the Texas Panhandle near the Canadian River (Wilcox 1981).  These somebodies must have been the people of the Tierra Blanca complex, i.e. the Apaches; according to Wilcox, these Apaches spent their winters near the Pueblos for trading purposes, returning to the plains to hunt in the spring.

So, allowing that maybe Wilcox and Hickerson might both be a little right, I'm going to place the border directly adjacent to Pecos Pueblo.  This, then, is my hopeful attempt at rendering the northern border of the Jumanos circa 1540:

Those shapes seem really visually unpleasant for some reason... oh well, it can't be helped.  And, to reiterate, that map assumes that the borders of the Mansos, Sumas, and Conchos were more-or-less the same in 1540 as they were in the 1580's.  I have no way of knowing that, but I just have to hope and assume they were.  In the next post I will talk about the southeastern Jumano border.

[Note on archeological dates: It's hard finding authoritative dates for various archeological complexes and traditions—different sources I consulted sometimes differed by literally centuries.  My general references have been: various chapters in the Handbook of North American Indians, various chapters in Archeology on the Great Plains (1998), various chapters in From Clovis to Comanchero: Archeological Overview of the Southern Great Plains (1989), and Boyd (1997).]

References

Donald J. Blakeslee et al., "Bison Hunters of the Llano in 1541: A Panel Discussion" (2003).

Douglas K. Boyd, Caprock Canyonlands Archeology: A Synthesis of the Late Prehistory and History of Lake Alan Henry and the Texas Panhandle-Plains: Volume II (1997).

Jeffrey D. Carlisle, Spanish Relations with the Apache Nations East of the Rio Grande (2001).

Raymond J. DeMallie (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13: Plains (2001).

Richard R. Drass, "The Southern Plains Villagers" (1998). In Archaeology on the Great Plains.

Kevin P. Gilmore and Sean Larmore, "Migration Models and the Athapaskan Diaspora as Viewed from the Colorado High Country" (2008).

Judith A. Habicht-Mauche, "Coronado's Querechos and Teyas in the Archaeological Record of the Texas Panhandle" (1992).

Nancy Parrott Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains (1994).

— "Ethnogenesis in the South Plains: Jumano to Kiowa?" (1996).

Jack L. Hofman et al., From Clovis to Comanchero: Archeological Overview of the Southern Great Plains (1989).

Nancy Adele Kenmotsu, "Seeking Friends, Avoiding Enemies: The Jumano Response to Spanish Colonization, A.D. 1580-1750" (2001).

William W. Newcomb, Jr., "Historic Indians of Central Texas" (1993).

Douglas R. Parks, "The Northern Caddoan Languages: Their Subgroupings and Time Depths" (1979).

Robert R. Owens, "The Myth of Anian" (1975).

Albert H. Schroeder, "A Re-analysis of the Routes of Coronado and Oñate into the Plains in 1541 and 1601" (1962).

S. Lyman Tyler, "The Myth of the Lake of Copala and Land of Teguayo" (1952).

Susan C. Vehik, "Wichita Culture History" (1992).

Mildred Mott Wedel, The Wichita Indians 1541-1750: Ethnohistorical Essays (1988).

Waldo R. Wedel, "Coronado, Quivira, and Kansas: An Archeologist's View" (1990).

Roy Wenzl, "Lost city found: Etzanoa of the great Wichita Nation" (2017). In The Wichita Eagle.

David R. Wilcox, "The Entry of Athapaskans into the American Southwest: The Problem Today" (1981).

W. Raymond Wood, Archaeology on the Great Plains (1988).

— "Plains Village Tradition: Middle Missouri" (2001). In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 13: Plains.

More on the Cacaxtles

I said in the last post that the only Indian group I can find associated with the far northern Coahuila region was the Cacastes, as shown on William B. Griffen's map.  I had recognized the name, and knew that they're also known as "Cacaxtles", but nothing more—I tried to find some more information (either corroborating or discorroborating) on the Cacastes, but couldn't find anything.

I guess I didn't look as hard as I could have, however, because it turns out there is a very detailed article out there: "The Cacaxtle Indians of Northeastern Mexico and Southern Texas" by the inimitable Thomas Nolan Campbell.  "Very detailed" is a relative term, since the Cacaxtles [I'm gonna use his spelling] are all but unknown to the historical record except for two Spanish punitive expeditions from the 1660's.  Their presumed territory, according to Campbell:

"[D]uring the period 1663-1693 the Cacaxtle were associated with the large lowland area to the north and east of the mountain front that passes diagonally across the Mexican states of Nuevo León and Coahuila.  This lowland area extends from the mountain front northward across the Rio Grande to the southern margin of the Edwards Plateau of Texas.  Within this large lowland area the Cacaxtle can best be linked with a more restricted area on both sides of the Rio Grande in which today one finds the communities of Guerrero, Coahuila, and Eagle Pass, Texas."

Or, the shaded region labeled "A" on this map:

The name "Cacaxtle" is from Nahuatl, and Campbell says that they may be identical to another group known to history under another name.  He doesn't speculate who this other group might be, but I don't suppose there'd any point: Campbell has elsewhere written that the exact same area associated with the Cacaxtle—the north and south banks of the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass to Guerrero—was occupied by at least four separate Coahuiltecan groups: the Terocodame, the Ocana, the Yorica, and the Hape (Campbell 1979).  Maybe these four were bands of a single tribe, maybe they weren't, maybe they were the Cacaxtle, maybe not, who knows?

Eagle Pass and Guerrero are far from the northern Coahuila locality where Griffen put the "Cacastes" on his map.  Campbell says that people first started putting the Cacaxtle there in the 1940's, due to a misinterpretation of the primary account of the 1660's punitive expeditions.  After then, scholars spent several decades just copying each others' errors... as it goes.  Campbell also says that the Cacaxtle were never numerous or important, and that people have inflated their importance over time—unless one is making a high-resolution map of the Coahuiltecan area, there's really no reason to include them on a map at all.

On account of this, I've removed the "Cacastes" from my map:

That sets me back a bit, since I once again don't know who lived in northern Coahuila.  I suspect, however, that the answer is nobody: the region is extremely barren.  Nearly the entire population of the administrative municipality, Acuña, is stuffed into one city located at the far eastern edge, on the Rio Grande, and aside from that the region has a population density of 0.5.  Hunter-gatherer folk can be mighty resourceful, but for the time being I'm going to assume that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, far northern Coahuila was more-or-less uninhabited.

References

T. N. Campbell, Ethnohistoric Notes on Indian Groups Associated With Three Spanish Missions at Guerrero, Coahuila (1979).

— "The Cacaxtle Indians of Northeastern Mexico and Southern Texas." In La Tierra: Journal of the Southern Texas Archaeological Association Vol. 11 No. 1 (1984).