The Jumano Indians
at the Semi-Annual Meeting, April, 1910.
THE DAVIS PRESS
44 FRONT STREET
1910
THE JUMANO INDIANS.
In studying the history and the effect of the contact of the Southwestern Indians with civilization, the writer was baffled by what appeared to be the sudden and almost complete disappearance of a populous tribe which played a rather prominent part in the history of the early exploration and colonization of the Southwest, which occupied villages of a more or less permanent character, and among whom missionaries labored in fruitless endeavor to show them the way to Christianity. 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 Jumano were first visited by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition, while making their marvelous journey across Texas and Chihuahua in 1535. The name of the tribe is not given by them: they are called merely the “Cow Nation”; but the relation of an expedition nearly half a century later makes it evident that no other people could have been meant. The narration of Cabeza de Vaca is so indefinite that from it alone it would be difficult even to locate the place where the Jumano were found; but the testimony, meager though it be, tends to indicate that in 1535, as in 1582, they lived on the Rio Grande about the junction of the Rio Conchos and northward in the present state of Chihuahua, Mexico.
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The first Jumano seen by Cabeza de Vaca was a woman, a captive among an unknown tribe, members of which were guiding the forlorn Spaniards across the desolate and broken country toward the west in southwestern Texas. Reaching the Rio Grande, Castillo and the negro Estevanico, who had journeyed ahead, came to a town at which the captive woman’s father lived, “and these habitations were the first seen, having the appearance and structure of houses.” The inhabitants subsisted on beans and squashes, and the Spaniards also had seen maize. 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. “Those who knew of our approach,” he says, “did not come out to receive us on the road as the others had done, but we found them in their ho