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.