The Jumano Indians were a prominent Native American tribe or several tribes who inhabited western Texas and adjacent New Mexico, especially near the La Junta region. They were discovered by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. but had nearly disappeared as a people by 1750.
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Spanish records from the 16th to the 18th century frequently refer to the Jumano Indians. However scholars are uncertain whether the Jumanos were a single widely scattered people or whether Jumano was a generic term used to refer to several different groups. Nor can the language spoken by the Jumanos be determined. Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan, and Athabascan have been suggested.[1] Were the Jumanos the pottery-using farmers who lived at La Junta? Or were the farmers a different people? Were the Jumanos instead a buffalo-hunting plains Indian group who visited La Junta frequently to trade meat and skins for agricultural products but lived on the Plains? Or were the Jumano both the farmers and the buffalo hunters?
Gary Anderson in his book The Indian Southwest: 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention proposes that the Jumano were a people who consisted of multiple ethnic groups that combined people long resident in various sections of Texas with refugees fleeing disease, Spanish missions and Spanish slaving raids south of the Rio Grande.[2]
Cabeza de Vaca may have encountered the Jumanos in 1535 near La Junta, the junction of the Conchos and Rio Grande rivers at Presidio, Texas He describes at length his visit to the "people of the cows" in one of the towns. They were people "with the best bodies that we saw and the greatest liveliness." He particularly focused on their manner of cooking in which, rather than using pottery, they cooked their food in gourds in which they dropped hot stones. This method of cooking is common among the nomads of the Great Plains for whom pottery was too heavy to be carried and used extensively.[3]
La Junta seems to have been a melting pot of Indian tribes in which the Jumanos were only one group. The name "Jumano" was first used by Spanish explorer Antonio de Espejo in 1582 to refer to the agricultural people living at La Junta. Among the other names the Spanish gave to the Indian groups near La Junta were the Cabris, Julimes, Passaguates, Patarabueyes, Amotomancos, Otomacos, Cholomes, Abriaches, and Caguates.[4] A member of Espejo's expedition also called the buffalo-hunting people they encountered on the Pecos River near Pecos, Texas Jumanos.[5] These people had close relations with the Indians at La Junta but it is uncertain whether they were full-time hunter-gatherers and bison hunting nomads or lived part of each year in the agricultural settlements at La Junta. These were likely the same "people of the cows" that Cabeza de Vaca had encountered fifty years earlier.[6] One answer to the question as to whether two people of different cultures—sedentary farmers and buffalo-hunting nomads—were both Jumanos has been suggested by scholars. Perhaps the sedentary people living at La Junta were Patarabueyes and the bison-hunters were Jumanos. Although the nomadic Jumanos maintained close relations—and possibly spoke a similar language to the people living at La Junta, they were a distinct people. From their homeland between the Pecos and Concho Rivers in Texas, the Jumanos traveled widely to trade meat and skins to the Patarabueyes and other Indians in exchange for agricultural products.[7]
A third group of people called "Humanas" or "Ximenas" are associated with the Tompiro pueblo villages of the "salines" about 50 miles east of the Rio Grande on the border of the Great Plains. The ruins of the Pueblo later called Gran Quivira was the largest of several Jumano towns. This location enabled them to trade with the buffalo hunting Indians of the Great Plains and also to mine and trade the extensive salt deposits that gave the region its Spanish name -- "salines." The people living in the Tompiro pueblos were speakers of a Tanoan language.[8] An intriguing speculation is that the Jumano associated with the Pueblo villages were the ancestors of the Kiowa.[9] The Tompiro towns were vacant by 1672, probably as a result of Apache raids, burdensome Spanish levies of food and labor on them, and introduced European diseases.[10]
A fourth group of people have also been proposed by scholars to have been Jumanos. In 1541, on the headwaters of the Brazos River, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado encountered a group of people he called Teyas. The Teyas have been identified by authorities as Apaches, Wichita, or Jumano. One theory is that they were the nomadic relatives of the Pueblo villagers of Gran Quivira and the salines. The Wichita were often referred to as Jumano over the next two centuries.[11]
Amidst this confusion about peoples who were called Jumanos, all scholars seem to agree that, at a minimum, the Jumanos comprised the nomadic bison-hunting people of the Pecos and Concho River valleys of Texas. As wanderers and traders they were often found far from their homeland which may account for the use of their name among Indians of different cultures and locations.[12]
In the 16th century when the Spanish came to the Tompiro Pueblos of New Mexico the Tompiro were involved heavily in trade with the Jumanos.[13]
In 1580 the the population of Jumanos living along the Rio Grande and the Pecos River in 1580 was somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.[14] There may have been other people who would have identified as part of the Jumano people, or at least closely associated with them, living further east in Texas at this time. Other groups that were closely associated with the Jumanos and at times are identified as having been Jumanos were the Julimes, Tobosos and Conchos living progressively further south along the Conchos River from its intersection with the Rio Grande.[15]
The Jumanos of the late 17th century sought an alliance with the Spanish. They were under pressure from the Apaches advancing from the north and drought apparently had adverse impact on agriculture and the buffalo herds in their territory. The Jumanos requested that Christian missions be established in their territory and tried to serve as intermediaries between the Spanish and other tribes. The Spanish visited them in the homeland on the Concho River in 1629, 1650, and 1654. In 1654 the Spanish aided the Jumanos in a battle against the "Cuitaos" (probably the Wichita) and gained a rich harvest of bison skins.[16] In the 1680s, Jumano chief Juan Sabeata was prominent in attempting to forge trade and religious ties with the Spaniards. The Spaniards seem to have lost interest in the Jumanos in the latter part of the 17th century, transferring their priorities to the Caddo of east Texas who were both more numerous and of greater concern because the French were also trying to establish a foothold among the Caddo.
In the early eighteenth century, the Jumano seem to have despaired of Spanish support and turned instead to an alliance with their old enemies, the Apache. By 1729, the Spanish were referring to the two tribes in the same breath as the "Apache Jumanos." By 1750, the Jumanos had almost disappeared as a distinct people, absorbed by the Apache, Caddo, and Wichita, died of diseases, or among the detribalized Indians living at Spanish missions in Central Texas.[17] If, however, the speculation that they were the ancestors of the Kiowa is correct, then they may also have migrated north to the Black Hills region and reappeared on the southern Plains about 1800 as the Kiowa.[18]
The Jumanos have long been considered extinct. However, in the 21st century a few families in Presidio, Texas and Ojinaga, Mexico have claimed to be Jumanos and requested official recognition as an Indian tribe.[19]