Frederick Webb Hodge

“ Juan de Oñate, colonizer of New Mexico and founder of Santa Fé, passed over Espejo’s route for a part of his journey through Chihuahua to the new province, but instead of traversing the Conchos to its junction with the Rio Grande, he made a more northerly course to the crossing of the latter stream at the present El Paso, consequently leaving the country of the Jumano on his right. ”

“ The Salinas referred to are situated in the central portion of that part of Valencia county, New Mexico, lying east of the Rio Grande. Bounding the salt lagoon area on the south is the Mesa de los Jumanos, or, as it is termed on present-day if not altogether “modern” maps, “Mesa Jumanes.” This land-mark of course derived its name from the tribe which formerly occupied the vicinity, a fact illustrating the persistency with which aboriginal names are sometimes retained in the Southwest, even where good excuse may exist for forgetting them. ”

“ Their custom of tattooing, the character of their houses, and their semi-agricultural mode of life during the century they were first known, suggest relationship, if not identification, with the Wichita people. References in unpublished Spanish documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicate that the Jumano of the Spaniards of New Mexico were the Tawehash of Texas; and it is known that Tawehash, the name of a division of the Wichita, was also the term by which other Caddoan tribes knew the Wichita tribe proper. ”

“ Besides food, the natives gave the white men buffalo-robes—seemingly the first of their sort mentioned in history. The Indians came in numbers and took the Spaniards “to the settled habitations of others, who lived upon the same food.” It may, I think, be assumed that these other habitations were those of other Jumano, although Cabeza de Vaca mentions that from the second settlement of houses onward was another usage. ”

“ The cause of the disruption between the French and the northern Jumano in 1700 does not appear, but the breach seems to have been healed by 1719, in which year Governor Antonio Valverde y Cossio led an expedition northward and northeastward from Santa Fé against the Ute and Comanche. On a stream called Rio Napestle (probably the present main Arkansas river) , the Governor met the Apache of Quartelejo (i. e. the Jicarillas) , and found men with gunshot wounds “received from the French and their allies, the Pananas [Pawnees] and Jumanas.” ”

“ The former two groups belong to the Tanoan linguistic family and inhabited several pueblos similar to those of their Rio Grande congeners. When, in 1626, Fray Alonso Benavides, the Father Custodian of the missions of New Mexico, appealed for additional missionaries, he had particularly in mind the conversion of the tribes of the Salinas region, especially the Jumano, among whom Fray Juan de Salas had already been. Says Benavides, writing in 1630, “I kept putting off the Xumanas who were asking for him [Salas] , until God should send more laborers.” ”

“ On October 20, 1683, more than 200 Jumano visited El Paso for the purpose of asking for missionaries, “stating that thirty-two tribes were waiting for baptism, because, being on the point of fighting a great battle, and anxious because they were few while the enemy were more than 30,000 in number, they invoked the aid of the holy cross, of which they had heard from their forefathers, and at once there descended through the air a cross wrought in red, with a pedestal two yards in breadth ... ”

“ They have the finest persons of any people we saw,” he continues, “of the greatest activity and strength, who best understood us and intelligently answered our inquiries. We called them the Cow Nation, because most of the cattle [buffalo] killed are slaughtered in their neighborhood, [1] and along up that river for more than fifty leagues they destroy great numbers.” ”

“ Reference has been made to the settlement of the Wichita in the country of the Wichita mountains in the present Oklahoma, after having occupied the so-called Quivira country of Kansas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Further evidence of the connection of the Wichita-Tawehash people with the Jumano is afforded as late as 1844 by Josiah Gregg, who was engaged in the Santa Fé trade and was personally familiar with the plains and their aboriginal occupants. ”

“ There are few Indian tribes, whose6 history forms part of that of our own land, that have a record traceable to the first half of the sixteenth century. [3]
The next Spaniards to pass through the Jumano country were Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado and his party in company with three missionaries, in 1581; but no new light is thrown on the tribe in question, and indeed there is no definite evidence in the account of two of the soldiers [4] who were members of the little party that they were seen at all, although the Rio Grande was followed northward from its junction with the Conchos. ”

“ It is not usually difficult to account for the decimation or even for the extinction of a tribe ravaged by war or by epidemics, of which there are numerous instances; but of the Jumano Indians, of whom this paper treats, there is no evidence that they were especially warlike in character, that they had a greater number of enemies than the average tribe, or that they had suffered unusually the inroads of disease. ”

“ The name Jumano, it will also be seen, was applied to both the Wichita and their immediate relatives the Tawehash, or Taguayazes, as they were called by the Spaniards, a southern or Texas branch of the tribe, long before the Wichita drifted southward from Kansas to the vicinity of the mountains in Oklahoma that still bear their name. ”

“ In 1535 and again in 1582 the Spaniards found a semi-agricultural tribe living in more or less permanent houses, some of them built of grass, on the Rio Grande at the junction of the Conchos in Chihuahua and along the former stream northward for a number of leagues. ”

“ They remained in the region more than six months, going southeastward down the river for 50 leagues, visiting the Cuitoas, Escanjaques, and Aijaos, and finally the Tejas. During their journey the party traversed, from north to south, a distance of 250 leagues, or, according to Posadas, from the latitude of Santa Fé in 37° to that of the Tejas in 28°. ”

“ The women are dressed with deer-skin, and some few men, mostly the aged, who are 5incapable of fighting. The country is very populous. We asked how it was they did not plant maize. They answered it was that they might not lose what they should put in the ground ”