The Jumanos' Western Border, ca. 1580

In the previous post, I made a very very rough sketch of the boundaries of Jumano territory, meant mostly just to establish the general vicinity where the Jumanos lived.  In this post, I will attempt to define more precisely the western border of that territory—from the Pueblo region in New Mexico down to La Junta, and thence to the mouth of the Pecos River along the Rio Grande.  Or, more or less, the strip of land along the arrows shown on this map:

This is a difficult area to study, for a couple of reasons.  One is that the region was populated by a confusing menagerie of tribes about whom very little is known—in most cases, the corpus of texts that survive from their languages is either extremely small (e.g. 3 words in Amotomanco) or nonexistent—and who go by multiple names.  This means that their linguistic and ethnic affiliation is difficult or impossible to determine, making it hard for people like me to figure out what the major "political units" were.  Secondly, I still feel like I know next to nothing about northern Mexico.  Consequently, I'm very uncertain about my conclusions here, and wouldn't be surprised if I got many, many things wrong owing simply to my ignorance of the region.  For some reason, it is also much more difficult to find information on the eastern portion (east of La Junta) of this corridor than the western portion, so I'm going to discuss them separately.

First, the western portion (El Paso to La Junta): Cabeza de Vaca passed through this area briefly in the 1530's, but as with Texas his account is not very useful for determining the locations of tribes.  Coronado completely bypassed this area, taking a more westerly route through Arizona, so there are no accounts from the 1540's either.  It's not until the 1580's that we get useful data—this comes from two expeditions: the Rodriguez-Chamuscado expedition of 1581-2 (also known as the Rodriguez-Sánchez expedition—henceforth just "Rodriguez expedition") and the Antonio de Espejo expedition of 1582-3.  Both expeditions had multiple accounts written, but the most useful are that of Hernán Gallegos for the Rodriguez expedition and that of Pérez de Luxán for the Espejo.  Both expeditions followed a nearly-identical itinerary: starting from Santa Bárbara (too far south to be shown on the map), they followed the San Gregorio river (ditto), Rio Florido river, and Rio Conchos river to La Junta.  Thence, up the Rio Grande to the southern Pueblos... at which point their itineraries diverged, but that's of no concern to me because it takes us beyond the purview of this post.

The relevant events from the Rodriguez expedition were¹:

• Entered the Rio Conchos at the Rio Florido confluence.
• Sailed up the Conchos, encountering Conchos Indians for "over fifty leagues".  After the Conchos they met a tribe called the "Rayas"—these may have been a northerly band of the Conchos since they "inhabit the same land and use the same language."  I do not know whether the 50 leagues figure includes the Rayas or only the Conchos proper.  While among the Rayas, the expedition measured their latitude as 29 degrees.
• Encountered the "Cabris" further down the Rio Conchos.
• Encountered the "Amotomancos" further down the Rio Conchos, near La Junta.
• Went due north through Amotomanco territory, bypassing La Junta, and hit the Rio Grande.  Encountered more Amotomancos up the Rio Grande.
• Farther up the Rio Grande, encountered an unnamed tribe at war with the Amotomancos.
• Wandered despondently for 2 weeks.  Then, encountered people of a mountain tribe who fled from their approach.  My sources don't name these people (Mecham implies that they weren't Tanpachoas), but I've noticed some authors like to always associate "mountain tribe" with "Apache", so these may have been Mescaleros.
• Entered Pueblo region.

The relevant events from the Espejo expedition were²:

• Entered the Rio Conchos at the Rio Florido confluence.
• Sailed down the Rio Conchos, encountering Conchos Indians for "150 miles" (according to Mecham).
• Further down the Rio Conchos, encountered the "Pazaguates" for 30-40 miles (Mecham).  Scholars believe these to have been the same as the Cabris.
• Further down the Rio Conchos, encountered the "Otomoacos".  This is clearly another attempt to render the same name as rendered by "Amotomancos".
• Entered La Junta.  "Abriaches" inhabited the junction settlement, as well as other settlements down the Rio Grande.
• Went north up the Rio Grande, encountering more Otomoacos.
• "Forty-five leagues" up from La Junta, encountered the "Caguates".  Scholars identify these as the unnamed tribe at war with the Amotomancos encountered by the Rodriguez expedition.
• Traversed Caguate territory for "fourteen leagues", then encountered the "Tanpachoas" at "some distance below El Paso" (Mecham).
• Continued on to the Pueblo region.  The total distance travelled was said to be 121 leagues.

... I'd like to make a short digression and give a couple reasons why figures such as "14 leagues along the Rio Grande" aren't as useful as you might think.

Firstly, there were two kinds of "league" used by the Spanish Empire (Chardon 1980).  The first was known as the legua común, equaling 20,000 Castilian feet (or ~3.5 miles).  The second was called the legua legal and equaled 15,000 Castilian feet (or ~2.6 miles).  The legua legal was adopted in the 13th century and later abolished in 1587 when the Spaniards realized that having two different widespread definitions of "league" might just might be a teensie bit confusing.  After 1587, the Spain was supposed to go back to just using the legua común, but since the legua legal had been the "official" league during the heyday of the Spanish conquest, her colonies in the New World continued to use both leagues not only in the 1500's but on into the 1600's.  In other words, whenever a summary of the Rodriguez-Chamuscado or Espejo or Coronado or Oñate [etc.] expedition mentions "leagues", I have no idea which league they're using. And yes, you'd be correct if you said that nobody ever bothers to specify.

Secondly, how far "up" or "down" a river a person can travel is not immediately obvious.  Rivers have this trait called sinuosity, which refers to how winding and meandering they are—literally, a river's "sinuosity" is an expression of its true length divided by the distance, as the crow flies, from its head to its mouth.  So, a river with sinuosity = 1 would be perfectly straight, and the more meandering the river is, the higher its sinuosity.  A while ago, some mathematician arguing from first principles said that the average river should have a sinuosity value equal to pi—i.e., to find the length of a river, measure the distance from point A to point B and multiply by 3.141592653...  Then some people on the internet decided to test it empirically, and built a massive database of river lengths.  They found that the average sinuosity of real-world rivers actually tends around 1.94.  (You can read about it in this article by James Grime a.k.a. "that skinny guy from Numberphile".)

This poses a problem because, firstly, one cannot always know how sinuous a river is (1.94 may be the average, but some rivers' sinuosity is as low as 1.24 or as high as 5.88), and secondly, when a contemporary observer says "we traveled x leagues down the river," I don't know whether they are reporting the actual distance they traveled or are doing their best to approximate the would-be linear distance.  This, combined with the fact that I don't even know what a "league" is, means that taking these primary accounts at their word is problematic.

... So.  The Gallegos and Luxán accounts can be synthesized thusly (I have marked out 29 degrees, where the Rodriguez expedition encountered the Rayas, as well as half-a-degree north and south to allow for instrumental error):

Except for the Conchos (who may have already been known to the Spaniards and thus had their name standardized), none of these labels are known—so far as I know—to later history.  However, the territories align reasonably well with tribes known to have later inhabited the Conchos-Rio Grande system—Forbes (1959) identifies them as the following:

• Caguates = the Sumas
• Tanpachoas = the Mansos
• Abriaches = the Julimes
• Amotomancos/Otomoacos = the Cholomes

The first three of these are seemingly accepted by everybody.  The fourth—identifying the Otomoacos as the later Cholomes—not so much, but I can work with it.  The only source I could find that made an attempt to identify the Cabris/Pazaguates is Carl Sauer's The Distribution of Aboriginal Tribes and Languages in Northwestern Mexico (1934)... considered something of a seminal work, as I understand... which states off-hand that they were a "branch of Jumano".  That might be a relic of an earlier time when writers were more liberal in applying the term "Jumano" to the Indians of west Texas and the El Paso-La Junta corridor... or, there might be more to it (see below).  Antonio de Espejo, in his personal account of his expedition (universally considered less reliable than the Luxán account), calls them all Jumanos.

Assuming Forbes' tribal identifications (for now), the previous map can be relabeled thusly:

Determining exactly where the borders were between these peoples is a bit more difficult than just the order that Rodriguez and Espejo encountered them.  As explained above, the primary documents' statements regarding distances traveled are not as reliable—or easy to interpret—as one would hope.  However, after examining the aforementioned accounts with Rudolph Troike's (1988) analysis—as  well as [warning: original research] [warning: boring minutiae sure to be of interest to absolutely no one] carefully studying the area on Google Earth³—I've come to the following conclusions:

• The border of the Conchos-Rayas with the Cabris/Pazaguates:  Either the mountain pass at the El Granero Dam, or in the valley northeast near Monclovio-Herrera.  In favor of the mountain pass: it accords better with Gallego's reported distance travelled of 50 leagues (the actual distance is 143 miles, or 55 leguas legales, from the Rio Florido junction), and forms a more natural geological boundary.  In favor of the valley: it leaves a little more room for the Rayas, as the El Granero Dam itself is almost exactly at 29° north latitude, and it agrees better with Troike's statement that the Cabris/Pazaguates were first encountered "about fifty miles" from La Junta.  It hardly matters, though, since you can barely tell the difference on the scale my maps use.
• The border of the Cabris/Pazaguates with the Cholomes:  This one is more difficult to find.  Gallegos writes that the expedition first encountered the "Amotomancos" after crossing a difficult sierra.  Carl Sauer and Randolph Troike both identify this as the sierra due west of El Mezquite.  However, Jack Forbes (1959) states that in later decades the Cholomes inhabited the locales of Coyame and Cuchillo Parado, in the valley above [west] of this sierra.  If the Amotomancos were Cholomes, as Forbes claims, this would imply that Gallegos' difficult crossing was the mountain pass northeast of La Paz de México, which puts the Pazaguate-Cholome border west of where Sauer and Troike claim.  The discrepancy (about 12 miles) is almost indiscernible on my map, so I guess it doesn't matter, but I still feel like pointing it out.
• The border of the Cholomes with the Sumas:  Forbes (1959) states that in the 1700's⁴ the northernmost band of the Cholomes had their northern limit at Eagle Peak.  Assuming, as Gallegos says, that the end of Cholome territory occurs at the entrance to a valley (going north), that would mean not the part of the river directly beneath Eagle Peak, but rather the pass leading into the valley, slightly to the south, near the inflection point of the Texas-Mexico border.  This (145 miles = 55½ leguas legales along the Rio Grande) would have taken the expeditions somewhat farther upstream than the 45 leagues Espejo records if the expedition followed the Rio Grande directly.  However the Rio Grande is very sinuous and its meanders are tight, especially in this area, so it is possible that they bypassed some of them rather than obsessively following the riverside.  Combined with human error, and the possibility of the river changing course over the past four centuries, this places the Eagle Peak valley entrance well within the plausible range.
• The border of the Sumas with the Mansos:  I honestly don't know.  Luxán says they first encountered Tanpachoas 14 leagues past the previous border, in the midst of a marsh.  This is much further south than I've seen anyone place the Mansos in later decades, and it leaves very little room along the Rio Grande for the Sumas—despite the fact that the Sumas are often presented as the most conspicuous tribe living in the Rio Grande valley zone.  Hickerson (p. 38) says that Oñate saw them in the same area later in 1598, but either she or I must be mistaken about the location of the marsh, because she apparently thinks that they were near El Paso at this point.  Since I can't determine where Espejo's "Tanpachoas" were, I'm going to have to rely on what authors have said regarding the location of the Manso in later periods, and hope they didn't move around much [I doubt they did].  Beckett & Corbett (1992) place the Mansos' northern edge at Hatch, New Mexico (Hickerson puts it at Las Cruces, south of Hatch), and their southern edge "south of El Paso, Texas"—the accompanying map shows that "south of El Paso" means roughly the local maximum on the border just southeast of Juarez.

The borders were thus:

(I will later be lumping several of these tribes together, anyway, so it doesn't matter that much.)

I'm not going to worry about what the western borders of the Mansos, Sumas, etc. were, because that is exactly the kind of leap-frogging that causes me to drift my attention from one region to another.  Only their eastern borders will concern me now, since they form the western border of Jumano territory—which is what I'm supposed to be finding.  However, for curiosity's sake and to plant a lede for me to pick up later on, there are a few statements I can make:

The Mansos possibly formed a political unit with their neighbors to the west, the Janos and Jocomes—the Mansos' extended west to the Florida Mountains, and the proposed Manso-Jano-Jocome unit extended farther west and southwest, to Janos, Mexico and the Chiricahua Mountains (Beckett & Corbett 1992—their source for MJJ unity is Forbes (1959), who is usually too lumpy, but here I think he may have been right).  The Jano-Jocomes deserve further attention in the future, since Forbes (1957) alludes to territorial changes involving them and the other tribes of north-central Chihuahua in the very early colonial period.

The Sumas in 1565 extended westward to the Casas Grandes valley (Forbes 1959).  Regarding the Otomoacos, Kelley (1953) suggests that they were identical with another tribe, the Tecolotes, whom he distinguishes from the Cholomes.  Investigating the Cholomes ≟ Otomoacos ≟ Tecolotes problem might provide an answer to who the Cabris/Pazaguates were, but that's a project for another day.  Also worth noting: in Espejo's personal account, he mentions encountering Tobosos after the Conchos.  Mecham (1926) thinks that this is one of the (several) instances where Espejo was mistaken.

Regarding the eastern borders, Beckett & Corbett state that the Mansos' territory included the Franklin and Organ Mountains of the trans-Pecos, (I assume these must have been seized by the Apaches at some later point).  Whether the Caballo Mountains to their north were Manso or Apache owned is unknown.  As for the Sumas, the best I can do is go according to the following map (from Lockhart 1997) showing Manso territory more-or-less as described above, and the Sumas in a khukuri knife-shaped swathe running east-to-west, with their eastern portion jutting some distance into Texas.

This makes the eastern Manso and Suma borders like so:

As you can see, I smoothed out the overlap between the Mansos and Sumas—I'm gonna mostly be doing this for the sake of legibility, although there will be some instances where I won't be able to ignore instances of overlapping territories, e.g. the Assiniboines and Plains Cree, whose territories massively overlapped.  Much of the map will by necessity be approximations anyway.

(Forget about the Cholomes for just a minute.)

Moving on, to the eastern portion: the Chisos Mountain area in the Big Bend region of Texas, just north of the river, was inhabited by a tribe called the Chizos (as you'd expect).  North of them lived the Cíbolos, who may have been Jumanos.  I haven't yet been able to find anything on who lived further east, south of the Rio Grande in northern Coahuila, directly across from the Pecos River, except for this one map in Griffen (1969) that puts the Cacastes there:

(A confusing menagerie, like I said...)

This makes the eastern part of the Jumano western border like so:

So, then, who exactly are all these people?  Because I want my map to be somewhat useful, where justifiable I want to merge smaller groups into larger political units—so that my map is more legible (rather than an endlessly confusing mess with a thousand names on it), and so that the labels are more recognizable (e.g. most folks probably haven't heard of the Kotsoteka, Yamparika, Saulteaux, and Odawa, but they have heard of the Comanche and Ojibwe).  It is impossible for me to be entirely consistent with this: most of the larger tribes were never unified under a single governing body, nobody can in general agree on what defines a """People""", etc. etc.  But I have to try.

Almost everyone agrees that the Mansos were their own thing.  The exception is Jack Forbes (1959), who argues that the Jumanos, Sumas, Cholomes, Mansos, Janos, Jocomes, and Apache(!) all spoke the same language and were the same people, but later scholars reject the majority of his hypothesis.  The Julimes are universally considered separate at least from their neighbors to the north.  There is slightly more disagreement about the Cíbolos: most consider them a division of the Jumanos, but Nancy Kenmotsu's somewhat critical review of Hickerson's book states that they were not:

"Although sometimes found in the company of the Jumanos, they, like the Jumanos, were always cited as a distinct ethnic group and they continued to exist long after the Jumanos had ceased to be.  If the Jumanos are to be recognized as a distinct group, should not the same courtesy be afforded other groups, especially those that were equally prominent in the documents and managed to survive European colonization for a longer period?"

Maria Wade (2003) and the Handbook (when in doubt, go to the Handbook!), however, both consider them Jumanos.  This is Wade (p. 250):

"Judging from the research completed, it is very likely that the Jumano, in a broad sense, represented a series of groups that included (at least) the Jumano proper, the Cibolo, the Gediondo, the Machome, and Those Who Make Bows..."

As for the Sumas, Hickerson considers them a western branch of the Jumanos (their name was sometimes written like "Sumanas" and is certainly a rendering of the same word).  This was also the opinion of earlier scholars (Sauer, Swanton, etc.), but most people nowadays think the Sumas distinct enough at least to be treated as a separate people.  Lockhart goes further, and says that the Jumanos of the Tompiro region were also a separate people: he builds his argument on archeological continuity in Tompiro, and on the fact that whereas the Plains Jumanos were called "Jumanos", the inhabitants of Tompiro were called "Xumanas", with an X.  Since the two consonants were and are pronounced identically in Spanish, however, I'm not sure how strong this evidence is.⁵  Hickerson considers them to be the same.  There's no way to be sure, and I lack the credentials to make any judgement, but... frankly, if I don't want my map to just be the words "It Is Disputed" over and over again, I'm going to have to make arbitrary decisions now and then, and one of them is this: the Tompiros were Jumanos.

The Rayas are very easily placed as a division of the Conchos.  Sauer (1934) also assigns the Chizos and the Julimes to the Conchos group, citing a document from 1684:

"The other nations lately in rebellion have different names such as Chisos, Julimes, and others which it is impossible to remember, and are included under the appellation of Conchos, which is the more general name."

William Griffen, in the Handbook, agrees with Sauer re the Chizos—he doesn't seem to take a position on the Julimes, but let's say that they were Conchos as well.

The Otomoaco/Amotomanco/Cholomes and Cabris/Pazaguates/??? are groups that authors seem not to opine on as much as I would like, so I am having to grasp at straws regarding their affiliation.  Carl Sauer speculatively calls the Cholomes a "Jumano remnant," referring to the theory that the Jumanos had their original home on the Rio Grande, as well as placing other(?) Jumanos on the river above La Junta.  The Handbook also places Jumanos on the Rio Grande above La Junta, separate from the Suma, but doesn't mention the Cholomes:

"In the lower Conchos River valley, north of Concho territory, on the Rio Grande at La Junta, was a group of people who were definitely sedentary and who lived in pueblo-like towns.  These peoples were given several different names during the colonial period, but most probably belonged to a sedentary branch of the Jumanos, some of whom at one time or another were reported farther north on the Plains hunting buffalo.  These town-dwelling Jumano in and around the mouth of the Rio Conchos were probably related to the much less sedentary Suma, who lived westward upriver in northeastern Chihuahua."

(map from the Handbook)

It may be that the Cholomes were Jumanos; it may also be that the Otomoaco/Amotomanco were Jumanos and not Cholomes—either way, the label "Cholomes" on the map can be replaced with a western extension of the Jumanos.

Assuming the Cholomes to be Jumanos, this means I have a gap in the western Jumano border which needs to be filled: the western edge of the Cholomes.  The best I can do here is quote Forbes (1959):

"The Cholomes are a little known body of Indians who lived in an arc from the Rio Grande Valley south to Coyame and thence to the Conchos Valley at Cuchillo Parado."

I don't know whether his "arc" was concave or convex with respect to the Rio Grande-Conchos valleys.  Coyame is just a dozen or so miles west of Cuchillo Parado, so that doesn't help.  Griffen (1983) says that the Rio Grande Jumanos were "definitely sedentary," and people in general describe the Rio Grande Jumanos and/or Sumas as sticking close to the river... so I'm assuming the Cholome "arc" is open to the west.

As for the Cabris/Pazaguates, I have no idea.  As stated earlier, Sauer (1934) says that they were Jumanos, but one needs to be skeptical of claims of Jumano affiliation coming from earlier sources.  Griffen, in the Handbook, doesn't mention them, but his map (if one can draw such high-resolution conclusions by looking closely at it) clearly puts the Concho-Jumano border along the Rio Conchos in the place where Gallegos and Luxán say the Cabris/Pazaguate – Amotomanco/Otomoaco border was located.  For now, I am going with the Griffen theory: the Cabris/Pazaguates were Conchos.

I neither know nor (for the moment) care who the Cacastes were—however, it is plausible that their border with the Jumanos on the north followed the course of the Rio Grande, since the river is relatively impassable in this region, (from Hickerson, p. xxv):

"Below La Junta the Rio Grande has cut a series of deep rocky canyons as it passes through the mountainous Big Bend region... the lower course of the Pecos also has deeply eroded canyons.  The canyons of the Rio Grande system mark a natural limit to the South Plains as an aboriginal culture area, since they would have discouraged travel, especially in the years prior to the introduction of horses."

Thus, the western border of the Jumanos in the sixteenth century (quod erat demonstrandum), is like so:

The changes that occurred later on this area were the following:  the Apaches (both east and west of the Mescalero territory shown) expand southward into Mexico, seizing all of the Plains Jumano and the western majority of the Manso and Suma territories.  The Mansos and Sumas were missionized by the Spanish in the seventeenth century, which may be shown on the map as being within Spanish territory.  Carl Sauer also mentions a Concho advance up the Rio Conchos and into Texas, seizing former-Jumano territory, however that may have also been after the region was under Spanish dominion—I don't know.

As I said in the beginning of this post, we lack data for this region from the 1540's, which for reasons that will become clear in a future post is the decade I've decided as the starting point for the Jumano sketch.  However, it is probably unlikely that the situation either here or out on the plains changed very noticeably between 1541 and 1581-3.  So, I think I can safely graft the above map with the map given in the previous post:

The southeastern and northern borders of Jumano territory, ca. 1540-1580 or so, still need to be investigated before I can map their conquest by the Apaches.  That will be the subject of future posts.

Footnotes:

¹ — My main source for the Rodriguez expedition is the translation and commentary of the Gallegos account in Hammond & Rey (1927).

² — My main source for the Espejo expedition is the summary and commentary of the Luxán account in Mecham (1926).

³ — Using the Path tool to trace the length of the lower Rio Conchos (from its junction with the Rio Florido), I measured a sinuosity value of 1.90, so it's a fairly well-behaved river.

⁴ — I don't know whether he means the seventeen-aughts or the eighteenth century.

⁵ — The merger of /ʃ/ (written <x>) and /ʒ/ (written <j>) in Spanish occurred in the sixteenth century, according to Pharies (2003, p. 153).

References:

Patrick H. Beckett & Terry L. Corbett, The Manso Indians (1992).

Roland Chardon, "The Linear League in North America" (1980).

Jack D. Forbes, "The Janos, Jocomes, Mansos and Sumas Indians" (1957).

― "Unknown Athapaskans: The Identification of the Jano, Jocome, Jumano, Manso, Suma, and Other Indian Tribes of the Southwest" (1959).

William B. Griffen, Culture Change and Shifting Populations in Central Northern Mexico (1969).

― "Southern Periphery: East". In The Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 10: Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (1983).

James Grime, "A meandering tale: the truth about pi and rivers" (2015), via The Guardian.

George P. Hammond & Agapito Rey, "The Rodriguez Expedition to New Mexico, 1581-1582" (1927).

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

J. Charles Kelley, "The Historic Indian Pueblos of La Junta de los Rios" (1953).

Nancy Kenmotsu, review of Hickerson The Jumanos, in Plains Anthropologist Vol 40 No 152 (1995).

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

J. Lloyd Mecham, "Antonio de Espejo and His Journey to New Mexico" (1926).

David A. Pharies, A Brief History of the Spanish Language (2006).

Carl Sauer, The Distribution of Aboriginal Tribes and Languages in Northwestern Mexico (1934).

Rudolph C. Troike, "Amotomanco (Otomoaco) and Tanpachoa as Uto-Aztecan Languages, and the Jumano Problem Once More" (1988).

Maria F. Wade, The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799 (2003).