Jumanos hold important place in West Texas history
Published 12:22 pm, Thursday, August 2, 2012
The grassroots historian Israel Mendoza de Levario recently self-published "A brief chronicle of Presidio del Norte," which is the diary of Don Francisco Colomo, along with De Levario's observations about the dearth of exhaustive research into the history and ethnic backgrounds of many people living in the Presidio-Ojinaga area. His goal is to establish the Jumano Indians, which according to most published works disappeared, live on in the area, in the oil fields of West Texas and elsewhere. There is DNA evidence to show 90 percent of the people in the valley have Indian ancestry. His grandfather was born in the 1830s and is mentioned in the book. I hope a grad student takes the diary and produces an exhaustive annotated version, tracing the names mentioned and discussing what became of them and their families.
The perception that snapped into focus for me as I surveyed the book was once the Presidio at La Junta de los Rios was established in the 1750s, some of the native residents of the area -- Jumanos and Jumano Apaches -- became soldiers at the military fort. Many Jumanos had professed conversion to Christianity in the 1680s when the first missions were established in the region. As the Spanish settled in, the Jumanos took Spanish names.
The Jumanos contributed greatly to the spread of horses after the Pueblo Revolution in 1680 in northern New Mexico, and the inference is they remained in the area as horsebreeders, horsetraders and farmers. When the Spanish arrived, they sought a measure of protection by assisting the Spanish. Few references report anything from the area during that 70 year stretch.
This would indicate the Jumanos continue to trade livestock to Comanches, and might have been the source of the information that led Comanches to ride the famous Comanche War Trail, which was part of an old Jumano trade network of trails from central New Mexico to the panhandle of Texas to far east Texas before the Comanches arrived.
Much of "Chronicle" takes place before the first Anglos in the area. It mentions 70 "rancherias" or hamlets throughout Trans Pecos Texas and northern Mexico where several families banded together for protection from the Apache and Comanche, and farmed along the creeks, hunted the deer, gathered native plant foods and began to run cattle on the landscape -- the famed early rancher Milton Favor had to learn how to manage cattle in the arid lands from someone.
One of the hamlet names is Pecos, supposedly in existence many years before it became a cattle shipping town when the railroad was built in 1881. Until another source is found, historians probably will consider the information unverified; I do not think any archaeological remains have been found to prove the reference.
In the 1770s the Spanish commander Hugo O'Connor attacked "700 Apaches led or influenced by a mestizo from Durango" north of present-day Pecos, as he sought to strengthen the line of Presidios from San Antonio west across northern Mexico. Other historians have posited at that time much of northern Chihuahua had mestizo colonies that remained out of reach of the caste system of land ownership imposed by the Spanish government and inadvertently strengthened by the Catholic church, so the people created an alternative society that took the Spanish and then Mexican governments many years to incorporate as taxpaying, contributing members of the state.
Jumano trading network trails crossed the Llano Estacado in several places, as did later Apache and Comanche routes across its mostly waterless expanses. As I noted in a previous essay, many of the Spanish artifacts found across West Texas may originate from this period of time when both mestizo populations and Indian populations dealt with the vagaries of Spanish laws, procedures and culture. I wonder how much the population of the area around Presidio (La Junta de los Rios) utilized the buffalo during their southward winter migrations on and east of the Llano Estacado. One individual is noted in other references, known as El Cibolero, who left the Presidio area in the early 1800s after killing Spanish soldiers, so there is some evidence of that economic endeavor being performed by folks from La Junta de los Rios.
Seeking to understand the pre-Anglo history of the Llano Estacado and West Texas is challenging.