Introducing the Jumanos

I've been working on the project off and on over the past year or so.  Been doing a lot of reading on aboriginal American history, learning a bunch, etc.  I know more than I ever knew I didn't know and know I know less than I ever thought I knew, as Bilbo Baggins might say.  I got a huge-oh stack of notes, but almost nothing so far visually—no "draft maps" or anything.  I'm hoping to try to rectify that in the immediate future, by focusing my attention more on individual regions (at least until I can get some draft maps going) via blog posts.  This will be the first in a series of posts where I sketch out the territory of one tribe in particular: the Jumanos.

My principal sources on the Jumano are two articles and one book, all by Nancy Hickerson: "Ethnogenesis in the South Plains," "The War for the South Plains: 1500-1700," and The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains.  Other sources will be given in the endnotes.

To begin, here's a (rather messy and busy) map of Texas, and some things to remember:

(full sized version)

One, I'm not going to worry about the "Pueblo Region" right now—that place is very dense and complicated, and probably deserves its own mini-focus.  The Pueblos (Tanoan and Keresan speakers, mostly) were agricultural city-dwellers, so it's hard to know just how much of the surrounding territory they controlled—for now, I just traced their outline based on a couple of maps and called it good.  I've labeled the only places within it that are important to Jumano history: Taos Pueblo, Pecos Pueblo, and the Tompiro province east of the Manzano mountains.  The Tompiros themselves were Jumanos... or at least some of them were.

Two: don't confuse your rivers!  The Conchos in the southwest is different from the Concho in central Texas.  The Colorado River is not the same as the one in Colorado.  The "Nueces River" shown on the map is the river currently known by that name—it is not the same as the "Río de las Nueces" from colonial times, which name probably referred to the Concho and/or Colorado.

So.  The Jumanos were at one point one of the most important tribes in what is now Texas, specializing in having a wide trading network and in being extensive buffalo hunters.  They had their floruit sometime in the 16th century, and then over the course of the 17th century they gradually lost all of their territory to the Apache who were coming down from the north.  By the decade around 1700 A.D. they were refugees, having lost all their territory to the Apaches.  What happened to them after then is something of a mystery.  At one point they were believed to have become (or to simply have been all along) the Taovaya (=Tawehash) Wichitas, but I don't know how popular that theory is anymore.¹  Some of them must have assimilated into the Apache nation, as there is mention of an "Apaches Jumanes" group here and there in the 18th century.  It's also possible, of course, that they just fizzled out as a valid ethnos, a la the Huns in Europe.

Another explanation is that they never existed in the first place.  This idea was popularized in the 1940s: that the name "Jumano" didn't refer to any ethnic or political unit but was just a catch-all term for all Indians east of the Pueblos who painted their faces.  In other words, there never was a "Jumano tribe"... this might be why they didn't get a chapter devoted to them in the Handbook of North American Indians.  As a layperson I don't know how much cachet this theory has nowadays, but I get the impression it at least isn't nearly as popular as it once was.  Almost all the sources I've consulted seem to agree that the Jumanos were at the very least real.

(By the way, I assume that "Jumano" is pronounced in the Spanish fashion, like "Humano"... but apparently in the 1600's it was pronounced like "Shumano"—the Spanish of the time had I guess not yet undergone the /ʃ/ > /x/ sound change.  The name was spelled "Choumane" by the French; it's probably the same name as that of the "Sumana" or "Suma"; and John Swanton in his encyclopedic Indian Tribes of North America refers to them as "Shumans".  In the 17th century it was also spelled "Xumano".)

Nancy Hickerson's theory of what became of the Jumanos is a little peculiar: she says that they were Plains Tanoans, and that after they "vanished" they moved north and became the progenitors of the Kiowa nation.  This seems, on the face of it, unlikely—the Kiowas, to my knowledge, show up in history much, much farther north, in the Black Hills region, and their own traditions state that they were previously further north still, along the Yellowstone River; and I'm unaware of any scholars who are convinced by the Jumanos-are-Kiowas theory (some might like the weaker Jumanos-are-Tanoan theory, I don't know).²  It does, however, rather elegantly solve the mystery of why one inexplicably Plains-dwelling Tanoan tribe seems to vanish right before another inexplicably Plains-dwelling Tanoan tribe seems to show up... if the Jumanos were Tanoan.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Back to Texas.

First step: start at the beginning.  Map out the regions which the Jumanos are definitely known to have inhabited, at or near the dawn of their recorded history.  Then from there I can examine each frontier in more detail, and attempt to draw the sketch forward in time, showing their evolution from the golden age in the 1500's to their eventual conquest by the Apaches.  Cabeza de Vaca traipsed about in Texas in the 1530's, but the earliest we have any decent knowledge about Texas is the early 1540's—when both the Coronado (1541) and De Soto (1542) expeditions briefly wandered into it.  So my starting point will be 1540.

The Jumanos, as early as we can ascertain, inhabited three major locales: one was their main homeland along the Concho River and the adjacent buffalo plain.  This river was called the "Río Nueces" or "Río de las Nueces" in the 17th century; people used to debate where the "Nueces" was, but I think most everyone now agrees it was the Concho.

(I think this map is from the Texas State Historical Association)

The second was around La Junta, located at the junction of the Rio Conchos and Rio Grande.  The third was the Tompiro province of the Pueblos, east of the Manzano mountains, which was something of an entrepôt of theirs for the Pueblos.  (To be fair, it's not entirely known whether Tompiro was entirely a Jumano province, but for my purposes I'm going to treat it as such.)  Travel between these locales was conducted along the Rio Grande and Pecos rivers, as well as a well-worn trade route through the trans-Pecos that skirted the Davis Mountains and crossed the river at Toyah Creek near modern Pecos, Texas.  So, just so we have SOME place to start, let's say tentatively that the Jumano territory ca. 1540 was more or less a triangle connecting these three regions.

As an aside, and for due diligence, here is what the great American historian George Hyde had to say about the Jumanos:

"[The Jumano] tribe seems to have been the only one that actually advanced northward and eastward into the high plains at the time when the Apaches were coming down from the north, and... by 1598 the Jumanos were raiding the Apaches with sufficient power to make that tribe anxious for peace.  One suspects that at this period the Apaches of the plains were not the fierce raiders they were half a century later...

After 1600 another Jumano group established itself out in the plains on a stream which the Spanish called the Río Nueces.  Bolton locates these Jumanos in West Texas in the Colorado River region, but the Spanish accounts seem to make it more probable that the place was on the Canadian or Red River.  With or near the Jumanos on the Río Nueces was a tribe called by the Spaniards Aijados...

One may surmise that this tribe [lived] on the lower Río Grande in 1535, wandering on foot, and not planting crops or having permanent villages...  The Jumanos then advanced east to Río Pecos and either established the Pueblo Humanos in the Salinas [Tompiro] district or made that pueblo their trading center.  They then began to raid the Apaches of the Vaquero group, evidently on the upper Canadian in the Texas Panhandle...  Finally, about 1630, the Jumanos established themselves in fixed villages on Río Nueces."³

I fizzle with respect and admiration for Hyde... but... unfortunately, almost everything he says here about the Jumanos is now thought to be inaccurate.  He places them originally on the Rio Grande and has them move east later on—as stated earlier, they are now believed to be autochthonous to the Concho River area.  He also has them moving into Tompiro at a later date, which I haven't [yet] seen any modern scholar assert.  He identifies the "Río Nueces" as the Canadian or Red River; I believe nearly everyone now agrees with Bolton's identification of the Nueces as the Concho—remember that the modern "Nueces River" is entirely different!  (My guess is that the "Spanish accounts" he refers to are of the Martín-Castillo and Guadalajara expeditions of the 1650's.)  Also, the "Aijados" probably didn't even exist.⁴

I have a lot more to say about the Jumanos in the 16th century, but since the perfect is the enemy of the good I'm going to wrap this post up and continue in later posts.  But first, one more thing: the Jumanos did not control all of the trans-Pecos region.  From a very early date, the Guadalupe and Sacramento mountains were inhabited by Apaches—now identifiable as the Mescalero, and at least some of whom were known in colonial days as "Apaches of the Seven Rivers".

Just how early a date they lived in those mountains is another matter.  Hickerson says that Cabeza de Vaca saw them there in 1535, calling them "Mountain People".  The problem, though, is that most scholars no longer believe Cabeza de Vaca even crossed the trans-Pecos, so that whoever and wherever the "Mountain People" were, they weren't Guadalupe-Sacramento mountain Apaches.⁵  Hickerson puts Vaca in the mountains by assuming [a slightly-modified version of] the 1940 Cleve Hallenbeck route for his itinerary... nowadays, most scholars prefer the 1955 Alex Krieger route, according to which Cabeza de Vaca never crossed the trans-Pecos.

(Krieger and Hallenbeck routes from Chipman⁶)

So were there Apaches in the trans-Pecos in 1540?  Two resources I've used so far comment on this.  Bill Lockhart⁷ says that in the 1580s, there were Apaches "northeast" of El Paso, and that they "may well have arrived at approximately the same time as the Spaniards."  "Approximately the same time" is in the context of a 1400 to 1600 AD estimate for Apachean migration into the Southwest so is a little vague and speculative.  Morris Opler in the Handbook⁸ says that the Mescalero "continually occupied essentially the same territories" from the 17th century to 1860... but that can't be true for the entirety of the territories shown on his map for the early period.  Neither of those authors are terribly helpful here, but I'm going to go ahead and cautiously assume that Apaches were in the Guadalupe-Sacramento mountains by the 1540s.

Second question: what was the range of trans-Pecos Apache territory?  Obviously it ended on the north side with the Pueblos (Apaches from the mountains—presumably both north and south—raided and harassed the Pueblo Indians in the colonial period... my sources seem ambiguous over whether they did this since aboriginal times or if they were antagonized by Spanish slaving expeditions).  Hickerson puts them north of the Davis Mountain trade route; that may depend on her interpretation re De Vaca and such, but others at least say that the Big Bend region was occupied by "Cíbolos" who may or may not have been Jumanos⁹, not Apaches.

So: Apaches in trans-Pecos, south of Pueblo and north of the Davis Mountain trade route—what about longitude?  Authors seem to agree that at least this group of Apaches was bounded on the west by the Rio Grande.  On the eastern side it's a little different.  Maria Wade interprets the historical documents as implying "the hunting range of the Jumano groups extended at least from the area around Toyah Creek, Texas... to Carlsbad, New Mexico" in the decades around 1600.¹⁰  Assuming that the Jumanos avoided the region north of Carlsbad out of fear of the Apache, I'll let the Apache territory extend a little bit east of the Pecos River north of Carlsbad.

The above map is subject to considerable revision on three fronts: the western Jumano border, the northern Jumano border, and the southeastern Jumano border.  Each merits a considerably amount of discussion (hence the dotted line).  In the following posts, I will discuss each border region in depth.  Then I will have a reasonably-complete map of the Jumanos circa 1540, and can trace their century-and-a-half of conquest by the Apaches.

References:

[1] Herbert E. Bolton, "The Jumano Indians in Texas, 1650-1771" (1911).

[2] e.g. William C. Meadows, "New Data on Kiowa Protohistoric Origins" (2016) rejects the Jumano-to-Kiowa hypothesis.

[3] George E. Hyde, Indians of the High Plains (1959), pp. 10-14.

[4] W.W. Newcomb and T.N. Campbell, "Southern Plains Ethnohistory: A Re-examination of the Escanjaques, Ahijados, and Cuitoas." In Pathways to Plains Prehistory: Anthropological Perspectives of Plains Natives and Their Pasts, ed. Don G. Wyckoff & Jack L. Hofman (1982).

[5] Nancy Kenmotsu, review of Nancy Hickerson The Jumanos. In Plains Anthropologist Vol. 40 No. 152 (1995).

[6] Donald E. Chipman, "In Search of Cabeza de Vaca's Route across Texas: An Historiographical Survey" (1987).

[7] Bill Lockhart, "Protohistoric Confusion: A Cultural Comparison of the Manso, Suma, and Jumano Indians of the Paso del Norte Region" (1997).

[8] Morris E. Opler, "Mescalero Apache". In Handbook of North American Indians: Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (1983).

[9] Kenmotsu, review of Hickerson.
[10] Maria F. Wade, The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799 (2003), p. 72.

On Historical Maps of America and their Quality

Historical maps of North America all suck. This might sound like a harsh statement, but it is my opinion and I believe I can back it up. Consider, for example, this popular Youtube video which purports to depict all of human history of the entire world from the 4th millennium B.C. to the present:

It’s a very entertaining and informative video. I’m sure there are many inaccuracies in it, but I wouldn’t hold that against the author, since any project with that much information is going to include some inaccuracies—especially considering how difficult it can be to research this sort of thing. But in its coverage of North America it, well, it sucks. Why? Well, most historical maps of North America look like this:

This map shows the states, colonies, and territories of America and other powers in the territory now encompassing the continguous United States. Maps like this are very common, and seem innocuous enough. But they are all (almost without exception) strangely deficient for those of us who have read Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, in which we’re shown the following map of the sovereign territory of the Comanche Indians in the early 1800s:

Or perhaps the more recent The Heart of Everything That Is, in which we see the following map of the territory controlled by the various divisions of the Sioux in the 1860s:

As you can see, both of these powerful nomadic empires controlled significant swathes of territory in what is now the United States. But they never show up in conventional maps—historical or otherwise—of North America or of the United States. The above Youtube video falls prey to the same problem. De jure (someone’s “jure”, anyway) these areas were claimed by mapmakers for the various imperial powers of the Atlantic seaboard (plus Russia), but de facto much of the continent remained the demesne of this or that Native American tribe up until the late 19th century.

Of course I’m hardly the first person to raise the “But what about the Indians?” objection to these kinds of maps. But, see, the problem is that many maps which seem to make an effort of mapping the territory of Indian tribes over time... are also terrible. Some of them are like this travesty, a.k.a. “The Most Inaccurate Map Ever Made”:

In due fairness, the caption on the right suggests that this map was originally made as part of an alternate-history scenario, and was not intended as a historical map of pre-Columbian North America. Unfortunately, however, it seems that at least 124,047 people on Facebook interpreted it otherwise. If this were an attempt at a pre-1492 map of North America, then almost every single aspect of it would be completely wrong.  Just a few examples:

• The “Olmec Kingdom” did not coexist with the Aztec Empire—the Olmecs were gone as a civilization nearly two thousand years before the emergence of the Aztecs.

• The “Creek” are shown in Florida. The Creeks were a confederacy or “symmachy” of disparate tribes, and probably didn’t even exist as such in 1492—some scholars place their origin as late as the 18th century (Forgotten Centuries, p. 374).

• California was a dense babel of a hundred-odd tribes and languages up until the 20th century. It was not simply controlled by the “Pomo” and the “Chumash”.

• And so on.

So whatever... it’s not surprising that a speculative alt-history map of an alternate 2015 A.D. which was interpreted by idiots on the Internet as a map of “America before colonization” would be unreliable as a historical depiction of indigenous North America. You would think, though, that the professional cartographers responsible for The Routledge Atlas of American History would do better, yes? Well, you’d be wrong. Here is their map of “The Indian Tribes of North America Before 1492”:

And it's hardly any better:

• The Comanche are shown as occupying Texas, when they would still have been part of the Shoshone nation and living in the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains (Comanche Empire, p. 22-3).
• The “Teton Dakota” are shown in the South Dakota-Wyoming area, when in reality they didn’t occupy lands west of the Mississippi or Missouri Rivers until the decades around 1700 (Siouan Languages, p. 11).
• The Cheyenne are shown in separate northern and southern bands when they didn’t split thusly until the early 1800s or so—and are placed in the Wyoming-Colorado area when as late as the 1700s they were still living in North Dakota (Archaeology, p. 459-60).

Florida isn’t simply given to the Creek this time, but instead is shown to be inhabited primarily by the Seminole, which is just as inaccurate. In reality, the Florida of 1492 was dominated by four groups: the Calusa in the south, the Timucua and Aïs in the north, and the Apalachee in the panhandle… the Seminole probably didn’t even exist at that time, and at any rate their ancestors would have lived farther north. And neither this map nor the previous one seems to show the Cofitachequi or the Coosa, the two most powerful paramount chiefdoms of the Southeast in the early 1500s (Forgotten Centuries, p. 197-256). Of lesser import, but still wrong, is the population estimate given of "approximately one million"—more likely it was around four times that number (Native Population, p. xxviii).

Oftentimes (on Wikipedia, for instance) you see maps based on the one created by Ives Goddard for the Handbook of North American Indians:

Ives Goddard knows his shit, but this map also has problems. For one, it’s an attempt to compress several centuries of history into one map, and wasn't intended to be a snapshot of any one moment in history. Therefore it by necessity has anachronisms: groups such as the Assiniboine and the Comanche, for instance, are shown along with the Calusa and the Timucua… even though the former did not occupy the areas shown (and were not even entities distinct from the Nakota and Shoshone respectively) until the latter were already practically destroyed. Also, since it is a map not of peoples but of languages, there are omissions, such as the aforementioned Coosa and Cofitachequi whose languages we know nothing of, and which may in any rate have been confederacies comprising tribes speaking several distinct languages—I would guess they spoke something Muskogean, but that’s just a guess.

Therefore, since there do not seem to be (to my knowledge) any decent historical maps which show the locations and movements of the indigenous tribes of North America, I have decided to try to create one of my own. I’ve already begun research on this, but it will likely end up being a rather large project which I don’t expect to be done for at least a couple years. Already, however, I’ve identified a few methodological difficulties that necessarily come with such a project:

Firstly, how far back do I begin? Do I start before the historical era and include peoples known only via archaeology, such as Cahokia, the Oneota, and the Olmecs? Archaeology bores me to tears, so I don’t relish the thought of doing research in this area, but it would be remiss of me not to.

Secondly, how do I handle political bodies which comprise numerous ethno-linguistic entities? The “Creek Confederacy” included people from Shawnee and Yuchi stock.  The Siouan-speaking Michigamea were a member of the Illinois Confederacy. The Arapahoan-speaking Gros Ventres were politically part of the Blackfoot Confederacy in the early 1800s.  Similarly, how fine-grained do I define divisions? The Assiniboine are not usually included as part of the “Očhéthi Šakówiŋ”—the "Seven Council Fires" of the Sioux Nation, but were they distinct enough to be considered separate (i.e. did they make war on each other?), and if so how early did this relationship exist?

Thirdly, how to define a tribe’s “boundaries”. Conside the map of “Red Cloud’s Territory” above, for instance.  The territory shown is not only that of the Sioux, but also smaller tribes like the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Mandan, and the Crow. These tribes were subjugated and dominated by the Sioux as the map would imply (I believe the book calls them “client states”?), but they still existed.  Raiding areas sometimes extended beyond a tribe's core territory and leap-frogged over a neighboring tribe. Multiple allied tribes might share a single hunting area (e.g. the Cree and Assiniboine). How best to show this on a map?

I may post more on this at a later date.


Works referenced:

Advances in the Study of Siouan Languages and Linguistics. Catherine Rudin, Bryan J. Gordon eds. 2016.
Archaeology of the Great Plains. W. Raymond Wood, ed. 1998.
Handbook of North American Indians. William C. Sturtevant, series ed. 1978-2008.
The Comanche Empire. Pekka Hämäläinen. 2008.
The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South 1521-1704. Charles Hudson, Carmen Chaves Tesser eds. 1994.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend. Bob Drury, Tom Clavin. 2013.
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. William M. Denevan ed. 1992.
The Routledge Atlas of American History. Martin Gilbert. 2006.