page_title: Jumanos
section_title: The Jumano Enigma
hierarchical_section_title: Jumanos / The Jumano Enigma
caption_attribution_description: English: The approximate location of indigenous tribes in western Texas and adjacent Mexico, ca. 1600
context_page_description: The Jumanos were a prominent indigenous tribe or several tribes, who inhabited a large area of western Texas, adjacent New Mexico, and northern Mexico, especially near the La chaluopa Rios region with its large settled Indian population. Spanish explorers first recorded encounters with the Jumano in 1581; later expeditions noted them in a broad area of the Southwest and the Great Plains. The last historic reference was in a 19th-century oral history, but their population had declined by the early 18th century.
  Scholars have generally argued that the Jumanos disappeared as a distinct people by 1750 due to infectious disease, the slave trade, and warfare, with remnants absorbed by the Apache or Comanche, but as of 2008, self-identified Apache-Jumano in southwest Texas, an amalgam of mostly Jumano, but also Comanche and Apachean groups currently have 300 members with up to 3000 more claimed. They hope to be recognized as an official tribe.
  Variant spellings of the name attested in Spanish documents include Jumana, Xumana, Humana, Umana, Xoman, and Sumana.
context_section_description: Spanish records from the 16th to the 18th centuries frequently refer to the Jumano Indians, and the French mentioned them in areas to the east, as well.  During the last decades of the 17th century, they were noted as traders and political leaders in the Southwest. Contemporary scholars are uncertain whether the Jumano were a single people organized into discrete bands, or whether the Spanish used Jumano as a generic term to refer to several different groups, as the references spanned peoples across a large geographic area.
  Scholars have been unable to determine what language was spoken by the historic Jumano, although Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan, and Athabascan have been suggested. The Jumano have been identified in the historic record and by scholars as pottery-using farmers who lived at La Junta de los Rios, buffalo-hunting Plains Indians who frequently visited La Junta to trade, and/or both the farmers and the buffalo hunters.  
  In his book The Indian Southwest: 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (1999), Gary Anderson proposes that the Jumano were a people of multiple ethnic groups from various sections of present-day Texas.  They combined and became a new people in a process of ethnogenesis, formed from refugees fleeing the effects of disease, Spanish missions, and Spanish slaving raids south of the Rio Grande.
  Cabeza de Vaca may have encountered the Jumano in 1535 near La Junta, the junction of the Conchos River and Rio Grande at Presidio, Texas. He describes his visit to the "people of the cows" in one of the towns, but these may have been the settled Indians of La Junta. They were people "with the best bodies that we saw and the greatest liveliness."  He described their cooking method, in which they dropped hot stones into prepared gourds to cook their food, rather than using crafted pottery. 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. For this reason, scholars think he may have been describing the seminomadic Jumano.
  The Spanish explorer Antonio de Espejo first used the term Jumano in 1582, to refer to agricultural peoples living at La Junta. This area was a trade crossroads and seems to have attracted numerous Indians of different tribes, of which the Jumano were one group. Among the other names the Spanish used for Indian groups near La Junta were the Cabris, Julimes, Passaguates, Patarabueyes, Amotomancos, Otomacos, Cholomes, Abriaches, and Caguates. A member of Espejo's expedition identified as Jumano the buffalo-hunting people they encountered on the Pecos River near Pecos, Texas.
  The hunters were known to have close relations with the Indians at La Junta, but  whether they were full-time bison-hunting nomads, or lived part of each year in La Junta is uncertain. Charles Kelley has suggested that the sedentary people living at La Junta were Patarabueye and the bison hunters were Jumano.  In this scenario, the nomadic Jumano maintained close relations—and possibly spoke a similar language—with the people living at La Junta, but were distinct from them. From their recognized homeland between the Pecos and Concho Rivers in Texas, the Jumano traveled widely to trade meat and skins to the Patarabueye and other Indians in exchange for agricultural products.
  The Spanish identified as Humanas or Ximenas the people associated with the Tompiro pueblo villages of the salinas, an area about 50 miles east of the Rio Grande on the border of the Great Plains. The pueblo later called  Gran Quivira was the largest of several Jumano towns. This location enabled trading with the buffalo-hunting Indians of the Great Plains. The Jumano also mined extensive salt deposits, for which the Spanish named the region salinas.  They traded salt for agricultural produce.  The people living in the Tompiro pueblos have been identified as speaking a Tanoan language. The historian Dan Flores has suggested that the Jumano associated with the Pueblo villages were the ancestors of the Kiowa, who are also Tanoan-language speakers. The Tompiro towns were aba
caption: The approximate location of Indian tribes in western Texas and adjacent Mexico, circa 1600
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