The cause of the disruption between the French and the northern Jumano in 1700 does not appear, but the breach seems to have been healed by 1719, in which year Governor Antonio Valverde y Cossio led an expedition northward and northeastward from Santa Fé against the Ute and Comanche. On a stream called Rio Napestle (probably the present main Arkansas river), the Governor met the Apache of Quartelejo (i. e. the Jicarillas), and found men with gunshot wounds “received from the French and their allies, the Pananas [Pawnees] and Jumanas.” Here[31] again we have definite evidence that a branch of the Jumano was still in the north during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. It should be noted also that the Jumano here mentioned were allies of the Pawnee.
No definite reference to the northern Jumano between 1719 and 1750 has yet been found. The members of the ill-fated Villazur expedition from Santa Fé to the northeastern plains, and probably as far as the Missouri river, in 1720, saw nothing of them, so far as the meager account of the expedition[32] shows, although other tribes are mentioned.
In 1750, however, definite and important testimony was offered by one Pedro Latren, a Frenchman at Santa Fé, who spoke of a tribe, evidently the Tawehash (Taovayas), called by the French “Panipiques (Panipiquets) alias Jumanes.” Latren referred to these Indians as “parciales de los Franceses con los Cumanches.” He also called them Piniques and said they were four or five days from the French fort “Canes” or Arkansas.[33] Here we have more definite information regarding the affiliation of the Jumano than has yet appeared, and accounts to a greater or less extent for the persistent references to the existence of a Jumano band in the north during a period of many years, as well as explains the mention of the Jumano and the Aijaos together in 1650. Now, the Paniques, Panipiquets, etc., as they were designated by the French, were the Wichita, the tribe which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was known to the Spaniards as “Quiviras.” The French designation, of course, had allusion to their common practice of tattooing the face, and indicates also relationship with the Pawnees; that is, they were “pricked, or tattooed, Pawnee,” a designation recalling the Jumanos or “Rayados” of Oñate in 1598, and the alliance between the Jumano and the Pawnee mentioned by Valverde y Cossio in 1719. The name Jumano, it will also be seen, was applied to both the Wichita and their immediate relatives the Tawehash, or Taguayazes, as they were called by the Spaniards, a southern or Texas branch of the tribe, long before the Wichita drifted southward from Kansas to the vicinity of the mountains in Oklahoma that still bear their name.
Another important item in the historical testimony dates from 1778, on June 15 of which year a junta de guerra was held in Chihuahua, at which were present most of the military authorities of the province. The report of the junta says: “The Taguayazes [Tawehash] ... are known in New Mexico by the name of ‘Jumanes’ also.”[34] The “Taguayazes” were then on upper Red river, hence not far from the region of the Wichita mountains, their subsequent and present home.
A few years later, in 1789, M. Louis Blanc, commandant at Natchitoches, Louisiana, wrote General Ugarte urging the opening of trade between New Mexico and Louisiana by establishing a presidio among the Jumano;[35] and in 1812, or thereabouts, it was said (probably an inspiration due to the exploit of Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike in 1806–7) that the Americans had established “gun factories” among the Jumano and Caigues (Kiowa), and that muskets and powder from this source were obtained for New Mexico.[36] The item is interesting as being probably the first reference to the association of the Wichita-Tawehash and Kiowa, who from 1866 occupied the same reservation in Indian Territory and Oklahoma until a large part was allotted and the remainder sold in 1901.
Reference has been made to the settlement of the Wichita in the country of the Wichita mountains in the present Oklahoma, after having occupied the so-called Quivira country of Kansas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Further evidence of the connection of the Wichita-Tawehash people with the Jumano is afforded as late as 1844 by Josiah Gregg, who was engaged in the Santa Fé trade and was personally familiar with the plains and their aboriginal occupants. Gregg says that the northern portion of the Wichita mountains was known to Mexican ciboleros and comancheros as Sierra Jumanes,[37] which recalls the name still applied to the mesa in the Salinas region of New Mexico. In the same connection Gregg makes the interesting statement that the range of hills known as the Wichita mountains are also sometimes called Towyash by hunters, “perhaps from Toyavist, the Comanche word for mountain.” Gregg evidently was unaware that Tawehash, or Towyash as he calls it, was the name of a Wichita division, evidently for the reason that by his time the entire group had become generally known to the whites as Wichita, while at the same time Indians of other branches of the Caddoan stock, to which the Wichita belong, designated, as they still designate, the entire Wichita group as the Tawehash.[38]
The name Jumano, as applied to the tribe, had disappeared by this time, so far as the written record goes; but a trace of the name, dating from the middle of the century, lingered in the memory of an informant of Bandelier about 1890.[39] Of these people he says: “I have found ... a trace dating as late as 1855. They were then living in Texas, not far from the Comanches, and the characteristic disfiguration of the face through incisions which they afterward painted, was noticed by my informant who visited them about thirty-three years ago.” The facial decoration was plainly tattoo, and their proximity to the Comanche accords with information previously given.
We may now summarize the testimony as follows:
In 1535 and again in 1582 the Spaniards found a semi-agricultural tribe living in more or less permanent houses, some of them built of grass, on the Rio Grande at the junction of the Conchos in Chihuahua and along the former stream northward for a number of leagues. They subsisted partly by hunting the buffalo, and raised beans, calabashes, and corn. At the date last mentioned they were called Jumano, and the Spaniards named them also Patarabueyes. A distinguishing feature of the tribe was its tattooing, for which reason, when found east of the Rio Grande in New Mexico in 1598, they were called “Rayados” by the Spaniards. They were erratic in their movements. The Franciscans established a mission among them in New Mexico in 1629, but it does not seem to have been successful, for the Indians appear to have been here to-day but elsewhere tomorrow. In the seventeenth century they were found on the plains of Texas, and again living on the prairies to the northward, evidently in Kansas, the name seemingly being applied to each of two divisions of the same tribe or confederacy. Their custom of tattooing, the character of their houses, and their semi-agricultural mode of life during the century they were first known, suggest relationship, if not identification, with the Wichita people. References in unpublished Spanish documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicate that the Jumano of the Spaniards of New Mexico were the Tawehash of Texas; and it is known that Tawehash, the name of a division of the Wichita, was also the term by which other Caddoan tribes knew the Wichita tribe proper. There is direct information from the beginning of the nineteenth century that the Wichita mountains, which received their name because the Wichita tribe dwelt thereabouts, were also called “Jumanes mountains” and “Tawehash mountains,” thus further substantiating the testimony that the Jumano and the Tawehash were one people. The Tawehash have been absorbed by the Wichita proper, and their divisional name is now practically lost. Likewise the term Jumano, which, originating in Chihuahua and New Mexico, passed into Texas, but seems to have been gradually replaced by the name “Tawehash,” which in turn was superseded by “Wichita.”