Jumanos

The Jumanos were a people, or perhaps several peoples grouped under one name, who ranged across western Texas, New Mexico and northern Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries. Spanish records place them around La Junta de los Ríos, where the Conchos meets the Rio Grande, on the plains between the Pecos and Concho rivers, and near the salt pueblos of New Mexico. Famous as traders and go-betweens, they faded from the record as a distinct people by about 1750, apparently merging into neighbouring nations.

Spanish writers spelled the name many ways, from Jumana and Humana to Xume, and used it across such a wide area that scholars still debate whether it meant one people organised in bands or a general label for several. At a minimum, historians agree, the Jumanos included the nomadic bison hunters of the Pecos and Concho valleys. Gary Anderson has argued that they were a new people formed from several groups, refugees from disease, missions and Spanish slave raids south of the Rio Grande. Nothing certain is known of their language: a vocabulary taken down in 1684 is now lost, just four further words are known, and Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan and Athabaskan links have all been suggested.

Antonio de Espejo first used the name Jumano in 1582, for farming people at La Junta, a crossroads where many groups met; a member of his party also called bison hunters on the Pecos by that name. Charles Kelley proposed that the settled La Junta villagers were a separate people, the Patarabueye, with whom the nomadic Jumanos traded meat and hides for crops. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca may have met Jumanos near La Junta as early as 1535, describing people who cooked by dropping hot stones into gourds. In New Mexico the Spanish called the people of the Tompiro pueblos, east of the Rio Grande, Humanas; the town later known as Gran Quivira was the largest. They mined salt there and traded it with Plains hunters, and the towns were abandoned by 1672 amid epidemics, Apache raids and heavy Spanish demands.

By one scholarly estimate, some 20,000 to 30,000 people, at least partly Jumano, lived along the Rio Grande and Pecos valleys around 1580.

Franciscan missionaries were surprised when Jumanos came asking for baptism, saying they had been taught by "a lady in blue", a figure believed to be the nun Mary of Jesus of Ágreda. By the later 17th century, under pressure from the advancing Lipan and Mescalero Apache and from drought, the Jumanos sought Spanish missions and alliance. Spanish expeditions visited their Concho River homeland in 1629, 1650 and 1654, and in the 1680s the Jumano leader Juan Sabeata worked to build trade and religious ties with New Spain. The Spanish soon turned their attention to the more numerous Caddo of east Texas, where the French were also active.

In the early 18th century the Jumanos sought an alliance with their old Apache enemies, and by 1729 the Spanish spoke of "Apache Jumanos". By 1750 they had all but disappeared from the record. Most scholars think the survivors were absorbed by the Lipan and Mescalero Apache, the Caddo and the Wichita, or lost their separate identity at Spanish missions; Frederick Webb Hodge suggested they became the Tawehash division of the Wichita. The historian Dan Flores has speculated that the pueblo-linked Jumanos were ancestors of the Kiowa, who emerged on the southern Plains around 1800.

Our 1492 map draws a broad, approximate Jumano territory across western Texas and northern Mexico, reaching into New Mexico. It sits beside Apache groups, the Concho and the Tonkawa, with the Coahuiltecan peoples to the south-east.