Episode 97: La Junta de los Ríos, Before There Was a Border

La Junta de los Ríos, Before There Was a Border (Partial Transcript....) If you stand near Presidio, Texas, and look across the Rio Grande toward Ojinaga, Mexico, you're looking at a border. At least that's what the maps tell us. There is Texas on one side, Chihuahua on the other. The United States here. Mexico there. But if you could stand in that same place five hundred years ago, none of those things existed. There wasn't a Texas. There wasn't a United States. There wasn't even a border. What you would have seen instead was one of the most important human crossroads in this part of North America. A place where two rivers came together. And where people had already been coming together for centuries. This is the Hidden History of Texas. And today we're going to La Junta de los Ríos. The meeting of the rivers. The geography explains why people came here. We're in the Chihuahuan Desert, a country where water determines almost everything. But near present-day Presidio and Ojinaga, the Río Conchos flows northward out of Mexico and joins the Rio Grande. Around that junction lies a broad ribbon of fertile floodplain surrounded by desert and mountains. It's an oasis. And people recognized its value a very long time before Europeans arrived. Archaeologists have found evidence of human occupation in the region stretching back thousands of years. By around the year 1200, if not earlier, people were living in established villages along the rivers. They farmed. They hunted. They gathered wild plants. They made pottery. And they traded. La Junta wasn't some isolated little settlement sitting alone in the desert. It was connected to a much larger world. Trade and cultural influences linked the people here with communities toward Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, the Pueblo world farther north and west, the buffalo plains to the northeast, and eventually communities extending deep into what we now call Texas. Archaeologists have even found pieces of East Texas Caddoan pottery at La Junta. Think about that distance for a moment. Long before highways, railroads, or maps showing Texas as a political entity, goods, and presumably the people carrying them, were moving across enormous distances. La Junta was part of that network. And this is where we meet one of the most interesting—and frustrating—people in early Texas history. The Jumano. Except there's a problem. We're not entirely sure exactly who the Jumano were. That's not because nobody wrote about them. The Spanish certainly did. The problem is that Spanish explorers, missionaries, and officials used names for Indigenous peoples according to their own understanding. Sometimes a name described how people looked. Sometimes where they lived. Sometimes what another Indigenous group called them. Sometimes the Spanish apparently invented the name themselves. And sometimes the same name seems to have been applied to different groups. That makes the word “Jumano” considerably more complicated than it first appears. The earliest known Spanish use of the name dates to the late sixteenth century. Over the following century, Spaniards described people they called Jumanos across a huge geographical area—from northern Mexico and the Rio Grande into West Texas, the Pecos country, the Southern Plains, and as far east as the Caddo communities. These people were widely known as traders and travelers. Some Spanish observers called them rayados, the striped people, because of distinctive lines or markings on their faces. They hunted buffalo. They carried goods between communities separated by hundreds of miles. And they became important intermediaries between very different Indigenous worlds. But were the farmers living permanently at La Junta also Jumano? For a long time, many historians said yes. Partial Transcript......