Down the road a few hundred feet, past a small grocer, I could see a large sign for a small Bealls department store. When I was a child, I used to get my school clothes at the Bealls in Del Rio. Palm and cypress trees held the skyline, and I thought I could see Mexico in the hot, hazy distance.
I drove around for a while, trying to find a way to the river without venturing too near the port of entry. I found a dirt road perpendicular to O’Reilly Street, and it seemed to lead toward the river, so I followed it across some railroad tracks that had not seen recent use, through old grown-up fields lined with neglected fences clotted with brush. I was searching for intimations of the ancient peoples who once inhabited this narrow fertile crescent where two rivers deposit their silt and sweep all else before them. What I found was an agricultural ruin scattered with shacks, collapsing barns, forlorn homes stripped and salvaged and bare of copper or any metal worth scrapping, defunct tractors and farming implements, curling barbed wire. A land ill-used, disrepaired, fertile yet fallow. Fence posts soaked in creosote will long outlast the rusting steel alloys of this ruin, but they too will give way to the rushing waters. This land has been farmed, irrigated, and largely abandoned to idle panting dogs and bored horses swatting flies with their tails, one of whom rubbed his cruel halter on a post as he stood, lonely and hopeless, his back nearly bald with scars of long-ago travails, staring vacantly at the overgrown rail line as if waiting for the mild diversion of a passing train.
People will tell you that the fields around Presidio and Ojinaga have been under continuous cultivation for thousands of years. I’ve seen claims that farmers were here as far back as 1500 B.C. And perhaps they were. Archaeologists who study such things tend to be more circumspect. We know that humans came into the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas more than fourteen thousand years ago, but they were hunters following the great herds of Paleolithic megafauna. They hunted the elephants, giant bison, and horses into extinction. Farmers began cultivating the rich alluvial deposits along the juncture—la junta—of the Rio Grande and the Conchos at least eight hundred years ago, that much we can say. La Junta was a confluence not only of rivers but of peoples. Villages naturally sprang up and then pueblos, close towns made of adobe. Patarabueye settled here, and Jumanos came and went. They traded with one another and with the travelers who were always passing through. Cabeza de Vaca and his companions made an appearance, and over the next two hundred years the Spanish several times established presidios and missions here, and so the town came to be known as Presidio del Norte. With the Spaniards came the horses, forever transforming the culture of the Plains Indians. In time the raiders came. But more fearsome than the horse Indians, the Comanches and Kiowas and Apaches, were the rivers.
That seemed to be the point of a very long disquisition by David Lewis, a park ranger at the Fort Leaton State Historic Site just west of Presidio, one of the welcome centers for Big Bend Ranch State Park.
“What was the life span of a Native American ten thousand years ago?” he asked me. Probably thirty years, I responded. “Exactly,” he said. “Twenty-five maybe thirty years. Well, these floods happen every twenty-five years like clockwork. They call ’em hundred-year floods, but they’re about every twenty-five. Grandma saw it, and then she dies, and the kids have never seen a flood. Most of the generations, once they’d seen it, they didn’t build down there on the river.”
He was talking about the flood of 2008, when a big storm got pulled in off the Pacific and dumped thirty inches of rain in Chihuahua over five days.
“The Conchos drains the entire state of Chihuahua, did you know that?” I had to admit that I didn’t. “Texas has seven rivers that drain it. Chihuahua has one.”
All that water came roaring down and took out the levees. Fortunately, there’s that big wide floodplain, so that spreads the floodwaters out a bit. Over the millennia, those floods have scraped away much of the archaeological evidence for human agriculture here. There are still sites going back eight hundred years, but they’re well back from the river, and there are sites in the state park that are far older. Lewis estimated there were five to ten thousand archaeological sites in the park, and only a very small fraction have been studied.
Lewis, who like me graduated from Del Rio High School, kept going on about that flood in 2008, pulling out scrapbooks and showing me photographs he took. At Lajitas, about fifty miles east, the photo showed twenty-two feet on the flood gauge. “Had some of our river rafters thought it’d be cool, so they put in at Lajitas. They ended up in Boquillas, in something like eight hours. That’s a three-day boat ride normally.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I didn’t say they were smart.” Then Lewis laughed his wild laugh and assured me that these guys were friends of his, that he didn’t mean any harm, but you know what they say, he said, “Terlingua’s the world’s largest outdoor asylum.”
I thanked Lewis for his time and nosed around the historical exhibits. I eyeballed the displays about the Jumanos and Cabeza de Vaca and the Apaches, then I left the shade and cool of the old adobe structure and walked out into the triple-digit heat.
Fort Leaton was built in the late 1840s, just after the Mexican War, by a desperado named Ben Leaton and his wife, Juana. Doña Juana, surname either Pedrasa or Pedraza, depending on the source, held a disputed title to the land, and she had some money. Leaton was a former scalp hunter turned trader—which is to say that he was a trader who once also trafficked in scalps. He’d been running wagons between Santa Fe and Chihuahua, and during the Mexican War he rode with Colonel Alexander William Doniphan and his Missouri Mounted Volunteers. Leaton thought La Junta would be a good location for a trading post, because it was on one of the old roads to Chihuahua, and he hoped that the new road from San Antonio to El Paso would pass through here as well. Ben and Juana set up housekeeping and built an adobe compound. Ben sold guns to the Apaches and attempted to set himself up as a lawman. The authorities in Chihuahua weren’t happy about his activities, and they complained to the Americans. The San Antonio–El Paso road ended up bypassing La Junta for a more northerly route, but Leaton didn’t live long enough to suffer many regrets.
Various legends circulate about the circumstances of Leaton’s demise. One story has it that he was murdered by his neighbor, a rancher named John Burgess. Another story says he died of malaria in New Orleans. Yet another story, supposedly based on documentary evidence, has him expiring in San Antonio in 1851. Regardless of the where, when, or how, Leaton’s friend Ed Hall ended up marrying Juana and raising his sons. A feud developed with John Burgess, and a series of murders followed, with sons and grandsons of Burgess and Leaton killing one another in vengeance.
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I left Presidio and was headed east toward Terlingua, passing through a tiny village called Redford, when I noticed that I was driving on the Esequiel Hernández Memorial Highway. Esequiel was a teenager, a high school student who was shot and killed by U.S. Marines in 1997. He was out tending his goats when the marines, who were on patrol as part of a military-civilian joint task force, tracked him, targeted him, and shot him dead. It never occurred to the marines, apparently, to learn about the community they were supposedly protecting from Mexican drug smugglers. The marine who killed Esequiel was never tried; investigators concluded he was just following orders. Local Border Patrol agents would never have made that mistake; they knew Esequiel and they knew that he had a habit of carrying his old .22 with him when he was out herding his family’s goats. The politicians who pound their podiums and scream for troops to patrol the Mexican border, to protect the “homeland” from economic refugees and Honduran and Salvadoran children who just want to be reunited with their parents, should think about Esequiel Hernández in his last moments, dragging himself along the gravel, after an American soldier put a bullet through his body.
Just then I saw something that caused me to pull over and grab my camera. It was a ramshackle house along the side of the road with a broad awning across the front. Across the awning the word
“JUMANO” was spelled out in cedar branches, then two words I couldn’t make out. I was excited, because here was the first sign of the Jumanos, aside from the Fort Leaton museum, that I had come across in the La Junta area. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. Later, after studying my photograph and digging around online, I realized that the branches spelled “JUMANO APACHE PEOPLE.”
The Jumano people were probably first encountered by Europeans in 1535, by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, right here at La Junta de los Ríos, after he walked barefoot and naked from the Gulf of Mexico along with his three surviving companions from the 1527 Narváez expedition. After years of slavery and misfortune, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, including an African slave named Estebanico, walked some twenty-four hundred miles, surviving on pecans, prickly pear fruit, and the occasional dog. Whenever the Indians gave him a piece of meat, he writes, he ate it raw; when they gave him skins to scrape, he ate the scrapings. The land was extremely rugged, and all the plants had thorns, which tore his flesh and caused him to bleed whenever he gathered firewood. Cabeza de Vaca writes that he shed his skin twice a year like a serpent. His only consolation was the thought that Jesus had suffered far worse.
Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his journey, published in 1542, stands as the greatest of all first-contact narratives, and he is an eloquent witness of the West Texas landscape. His entrada, though involuntary, established the pattern of suffering that would mark almost every subsequent overland journey through Texas. The first wetback, illegal alien, undocumented migrant, and mojado was also the first European invader. His countrymen followed with their horses and their crosses and their maps, with their guns and knives and Bibles. They ministered the souls of the people they found and administered their bodies.
Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative is a treasury of geographical and ethnographic detail. He describes crossing a great river coming from the north that sounds very much like the Pecos, after which he and his companions crossed fifty leagues of dry, rugged, and uninhabited country. They crossed a deep river, possibly the Rio Grande. Eventually, they came to a settlement that he says “looked like houses,” which probably belonged to the Patarabueye, a pueblo people who lived at La Junta de los Ríos, where the Río Grande del Norte flows into the larger Río Conchos at present-day Presidio. Several distinct groups lived at this fertile crossroads, through which passed a major Native highway connecting the peoples who lived south along the Conchos and far down into the interior of Mexico with the pueblos in the upper Rio Grande valley, the Great Plains, and beyond. Here Cabeza de Vaca describes meeting a group of Indians he calls la gente de las vacas, the people of the cows, because they were such accomplished hunters of buffalo. The Cow People had no pottery, and they cooked by filling a pumpkin with water, heating stones in a fire, and placing the hot stones in the pumpkin, causing the water to boil. He marvels at “how diverse and strange human ingenuity and industriousness are.”
Jumano Apache People, Redford, Texas
Finally, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions came to a permanent settlement where the people raised corn, squash, and beans and possessed cotton blankets. These Indians wore clothes and treated their women with kindness. And they described bearded men who came from the sea, men with horses and lances and swords, who had raided their villages, killed their people, and taken many people as slaves. Cabeza de Vaca and his companions rejoiced, for surely these men were Christians.
Some scholars seek to quibble with the identification of the Jumanos with the Cow People, but we know from later Spanish accounts that the Jumanos were buffalo hunters and they were often found at La Junta. Historians also disagree among themselves about Cabeza de Vaca’s route, as they do about most questions concerning the Jumanos. In fact, this mysterious Native people has been an object of particular scholarly debate. In the literature, which is highly specialized and technical, one often sees reference to the “Jumano problem.”
Whether or not Cabeza de Vaca’s Cow People were Jumanos, they do enter the historical record by name with the expedition of Antonio de Espejo, which in 1582 passed through La Junta on its way to the pueblos of New Mexico. The people Espejo encountered at La Junta said they remembered a group of naked Spaniards who had passed that way long ago.
Espejo was a cattleman who moved to Nueva Vizcaya, as the Mexican state of Chihuahua was then known, to avoid paying a fine for murdering one of his workers. He was thus an ideal borderlander and proto-Texan. Espejo had some difficulties with the natives. His chronicler, a man who probably had not bathed in months, wrote that the pueblo Indians did not stink quite as much as other Indians they had encountered, and he observed that the pueblo women were whiter than the Indians in Mexico. Espejo found it necessary to burn a town; he also garroted sixteen Indians for insolently mocking him and refusing to provide food for the expedition. Indians were not supposed to mock Spaniards. Here is a sentence found in the expedition diary, one that could serve as epigraph for any number of Spanish entradas in the New World: “The Lord willed this that the whole land should tremble for ten lone Spaniards, for there were over twelve thousand Indians in the province with bows and arrows.” On his return trip the following year Espejo traveled south along the Pecos River, mistakenly believing that the river would lead him back to La Junta. After several days in which they saw buffalo without number, Espejo and his men traveled for almost three hundred miles without seeing any buffalo or natives whose food they might appropriate. They were “greatly troubled,” and probably quite hungry. Near the confluence of Toyah Creek and the Pecos, they came upon three Jumanos, who kindly guided the Spanish back to their ranchería and fed them catfish and “sardines” as well as squash and prickly pear. “The food,” wrote the expedition’s diarist, “was delicious.” Unlike the reception Espejo had received among the pueblos, the Jumanos celebrated the coming of the Spanish and greeted them with dancing and song. Then they led the hapless tourists by a familiar and level trail back to La Junta.
Over the next century and a half, the Jumanos remained closely associated with the Pecos River, but it’s also clear that the Jumanos were well traveled. They followed the buffalo and made frequent appearances at the eastern pueblos of the people who were called the Humana, because they were very friendly with the Jumanos, with whom they seem to have intermarried. The Jumanos, also called the Juman, Jumanes, Jumanas, Xumanos, Xumanas, and Xoman by the Spanish (the J and the X being interchangeable, as in Tejas/Texas) were also called the Choumane or Chouman by the French, who encountered them in East Texas, among the Hasinai, a Caddoan people who were also called the Tejas, which means “friend.” The Jumanos were rayados, or “striped,” which is to say that they wore tattoos on their faces and thus were distinctive in appearance. The inhabitants of the Humana pueblos also decorated their faces with the ray-like tattoos. Sometimes the Spanish referred to any Indian with such markings as a Jumano, thus providing grist for more than one doctoral dissertation.
Jumanos are known to have attended the great summer trade gatherings in Central Texas. They were found along the Pecos and along the Concho River, a tributary of the Colorado River of Texas, near contemporary San Angelo. They apparently ranged down the Devils River, along the Rio Grande from Del Rio and Eagle Pass into South Texas and northern Mexico. They hunted buffalo in the eastern plains of New Mexico and the Big Bend and across the Edwards Plateau into Central and East Texas. No other group of Indians, prior to the Apache invasion, appears to have ranged so widely across the Texas landscape during the first two centuries after contact.
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Other Spaniards penetrated north into Tejas and crossed the stream called Río Bravo or Río Grande del Norte in brief sorties and entradas: Franciscan friars with their crosses and catechisms, and enterprising soldiers with manacles. Slave raids were often the most common mode of first contact. Because the slavers were not subject to the king’s Laws of Settlement, because their activities were officially illegal, records of such raids are scarce. Northern Mexico, rich in
minerals, was quickly if sparsely settled with small mining camps, and missionaries began to penetrate farther northward. Slavers pushed even faster, seeking labor for the mines. Applications were submitted from ambitious would-be conquerors of the north for permission to found the colony that all believed to be inevitable. The king’s council was taking its time, though by 1586 the viceroy of New Spain was instructed to “endeavor to carry out the discovery, pacification, and settlement” of the north. Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, the new lieutenant governor and captain general of Nuevo León, had his own plans, and he provides some of the best and earliest descriptions of the Devils River and the Juno country.
Because he had “a proud heart” and wanted to make a great discovery, as a Spanish historian wrote fifty years later, Castaño, after he heard about “a country to the north with people who wore clothing,” tricked the people of the mining village of Almaden into believing that a fabulous new silver mine had been found. So the villagers took everything they had—oxen, plowshares, tools, weapons, food—and left the town deserted. Castaño marched north out of Nuevo León in 1590 with more than 170 colonists and soldiers, wagons loaded with supplies, and beef on the hoof. After revealing his true plans and, using both persuasion and threats, prevailing upon the skeptics in his party to follow him, Castaño, with his expedition, continued north, crossing the Rio Grande near Del Rio. Castaño’s plan was to follow the Pecos River, known to him as the Río Salado, north to the pueblos of New Mexico that had been described by explorers such as Coronado and Antonio de Espejo, who followed the Pecos south to the Rio Grande. What Castaño did not realize, however, was that Espejo had left the Pecos before it entered into the steep canyons of its lower reaches. Nor was he aware of the Devils River, which also presented an intimidating canyon at its juncture with the Rio Grande. At last, after finding a place to ford the Devils, which he called the River of Rocks, Castaño was confronted with the great canyon of the lower Pecos.
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