Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  Under questioning, the man revealed that his mother had received the boy from a group of Cabesas, who had taken him along with some other captives, including a girl. Another young boy had been killed with arrows. “When the boy realized he was about to die,” the diarist recounts, “he picked up a cross which he held while he prayed. He prayed until he died.” The Cabesas kept the Spanish girl as a slave. After some of their warriors were killed in a raid, they killed the girl with arrows. Two years passed, and they returned to the place where they had left the girl’s body and discovered the body just as they had left it, uncorrupted and unmolested. That was all he knew, “except that the girl had long hair.” He affirmed that all he said was the truth.

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  In 1680, the pueblos of New Mexico rose up and drove out the Spanish; those who did not escape were slaughtered. The Apaches, who had been raiding the pueblos and harassing the Spaniards, took part. The colonists and their Native allies fell back across the Jornada del Muerto to El Paso del Río del Norte. It was sixteen years before the Spanish were able to reconquer New Mexico.

  Three years after the uprising, in 1683, a Jumano captain named Juan Sabeata came before the governor of New Mexico in El Paso. It’s no exaggeration to say that he was the first great political leader of early Texas. Not one in a million Texans have heard his name.

  Sabeata reminded the governor of the long friendship and trade relations between the Spanish and his people since the time when they first came to New Mexico and that Spaniards came every year from New Mexico to trade in their rancherías. He said that he had come to find out whether it was true, as the Apaches claimed, that because of the rebellion of the apostate Indians in New Mexico the Spanish were finished. Sabeata was very happy to learn that his Apache enemies were lying. He offered to help the Spanish people in El Paso, who were suffering from great want and hunger. He offered to bring food to the Spanish, and he invited the Spanish to come visit the Jumano rancherías and to help them against their mutual enemies the Apaches. He said that within six days’ travel there were Indians who were growing wheat, corn, and beans in abundance and that they had deer and buffalo hides that they would give to their friends the Spanish. He also said the Jumanos’ friends the Tejas would come and that the Tejas, who lived in the east, had brought news of other Spaniards who were very white with red hair and came over the sea in wooden houses that walk on water. These other Spaniards had brought earrings and other marvels and traded with the Tejas and the Jumanos for deer and buffalo skins and other goods. He also spoke of a River of Nuts where shells containing pearls could be harvested.

  In October, Sabeata returned and spoke of ten thousand souls who were asking for baptism. He asked for Spanish settlers to come and live among them and for Spanish soldiers to protect them from the Apaches. He spoke of other nations as well, and he praised the quality of the nuts that are so numerous they will feed many nations. And buffalo were there as well. And he spoke of “the nation of the long penis which is a very widespread nation without a number,” and the nation that grinds, and the nation of the ugly arrows, and those who are called the people of the fish, and the people of the dirty water, and those who make bows, and many others, including the people of the great kingdom of the Tejas. He said that he had no doubt that all these nations would come to the friars to be baptized, because all the nations have been waiting for them to come. He said that in the kingdom of the Tejas, where the Spaniards with the wooden houses that walk on water have been trading, there are acorns the size of large eggs and abundant grapes. Sabeata said there is a king there who never travels and that his land is so rich with food that even the horses, of which there are great herds, feed on corn.

  The strange white Spaniards were actually French, led by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who in 1685 had established a colony in East Texas, but the Spanish did not pick up on this important piece of intelligence. For the Native people of the Texas borderlands, all Europeans were Spaniards.

  Juan Sabeata apparently knew his audience, so he told the story of a miraculous event. Four years previously, he said, when his people were sitting peacefully in their houses and in their fields, they saw a cross coming down from the sky, floating in the air. The people were amazed and understood that the God of the Spanish wanted them to be Christians. His people painted the cross on their bodies and carried the cross into battle before them and defeated their enemies, and it was the greatest victory the Jumanos had ever enjoyed. Since that time nothing bad had happened to them.

  Except of course now there were Apaches moving into their territory, and Sabeata very much wanted to enlist the power of Spain against these new invaders, who were pushing down out of the high plains of the Llano Estacado.

  The Spanish governor was sufficiently impressed by Sabeata’s story to order an expedition into the Jumano lands. It did not go particularly well. He sent a disaffected and troublesome New Mexican refugee named Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, who had lost a fortune during the 1680 uprising, along with Friar Nicolás López. Both men were unhappy with the situation in El Paso and were interested in finding new areas for settlement. Mendoza, who had traveled through the Jumano lands before, took twenty men with him, including three friars. They traveled southeast along the Rio Grande and found large numbers of the Suma people, who were very poor and drank a great deal of mescal and asked for help against the Apaches, who they said would not leave them alone. Mendoza left crosses for the Suma and promised to return and help them, but he never did.

  As they traveled, the Spaniards found plenty of good land and abundant supplies of water from fresh springs running into the river, and they left a cross on a hill that resembled a church. They met with Julime Indians who already had many crosses planted on the hills around their ranchería. More than one hundred Julime were baptized. After arriving at La Junta, the expedition turned north toward the Jumano lands. In early January, about one month into their journey, they came upon the first buffalo tracks. Three days later they killed three bulls, which greatly relieved everyone’s hunger. Soon they crossed the Pecos River and arrived at the ranchería of a Jumano group called the Gediondos, the Stinking Ones.

  In what appears to have been a carefully choreographed encounter, the Gediondos fired harquebus shots in salute, and Juan Sabeata fired his harquebus in answer. The Spanish returned the salute. These Indians had horses as well as European weapons, but they were afraid the Apaches were going to raid them and take their horses. They begged the Spanish to protect them. There were people here from other nations as well as the Jumanos. A large, heavy wooden cross was revealed, evidently made some time ago, painted yellow and red. Attached to it was a flag made from white taffeta that bore two crosses in blue. This was the cross that was supposed to have fallen from the sky. The friars dismounted and kissed the cross, but the soldiers remained on their horses. The women and children from the ranchería came forth and kissed the frocks of the friars. The expedition stayed at the ranchería, which they named San Ygnacio de Loyola, camped for seven days a prudent distance from the Indians, and killed twenty-seven buffalo.

  A meeting was called by the Indian captains from all the different nations who were present. Juan Sabeata spoke for the group, and he asked Mendoza, “for the love of God, to make war on their common enemy, the Apache.” Mendoza agreed to do so. The next day Sabeata presented Mendoza with seventeen deerskins. Mass was celebrated, and buffalo were slain. It seemed that a bargain had been struck.

  Over the next several months, the Spanish traveled through the Jumano country east of the Pecos, apparently following the buffalo, which they slaughtered in great numbers. They passed through land that had been burned and land that was filled with good pastures and abundant game. Sabeata told Mendoza that his spies were tracking Apaches who had stolen some horses. They found the tracks of an Apache ranchería and met a group called the Arcos Fuertes, or Strong Bows. They ate catfish and turkeys and wild grapes and mulberries and pecans and other wild game on the win
g. And of course buffalo. On some days they killed as few as seven; on others they killed as many as two hundred and then celebrated Mass. Apaches stole more horses. The Spanish came to what the Indians called the River of Pearls.

  During this time, the Spaniards grew to distrust Juan Sabeata. They did not believe what he was saying about the Apaches. Finally, Mendoza expelled Sabeata from the camp and continued hunting as they traveled toward the great gathering of nations that had been promised. In mid-March, the expedition came to a particularly lovely spot on the San Saba River, near Menard, Texas, where they stayed for forty-six days. This country was bountiful, with abundant game, including bear and antelope, and wild grapes, mulberries, and plum trees. “The buffalo were so many that only God could attempt to count them.” The expedition killed 4,030 buffalo, but those were only the ones that were brought to camp. Others were simply skinned and left in the field.

  Here the Spanish waited because they were expecting people from forty-eight different nations. Not all showed up. Mendoza said he would return in a year, and he built a small fort on a hill that included two rooms, one of which was used as a church. The Spaniards celebrated Easter, and all the natives who were there asked for baptism.

  Apaches attacked three times, as did another group called the Salinero. The expedition diary states that Juan Sabeata tried to enlist some of the nations who were gathered there to kill the Spanish but that the conspiracy was unsuccessful.

  No great alliance was cemented at this gathering, but Mendoza and López returned to El Paso convinced that Texas should be settled. Meanwhile, the Suma, Patarabueye, and other natives along the Rio Grande rebelled. Conditions at El Paso continued to deteriorate, and the colonists sent petitions to the viceroy asking for permission to leave or to settle in Texas. Both Mendoza and López traveled to Mexico City and attempted to persuade the viceroy to authorize a settlement in the lands of the Jumanos and their allies. López wrote in his petition that he had made friends with seventy-five Indian nations; he described the great numbers of buffalo; he explained that he had learned the Jumano language and was able to preach in it. He intimated that an alliance with the Jumanos and a settlement in their country would be useful to prevent the hated French from gaining influence there. Nothing came of it.

  Despite his failure to secure an alliance with the Spanish against the Apaches, Juan Sabeata continued to lead the Jumanos and their allies. He surfaces again in documents connected with the French in East Texas. The records of the La Salle party reveal that the “Choumans,” allies of the Tejas, were “always at war with New Spain.” The account describes Chouman ambassadors who demonstrate their knowledge of Christianity by kneeling, clasping their hands, and kissing the habit of a French priest. “One of them sketched me a painting that he had seen of a great lady, who was weeping because her son was upon a cross. He told us that the Spaniards butchered the Indians cruelly, and, finally, that if we would go with them, or give them guns, they could easily conquer them, because they were a cowardly race, who had no courage, and made people walk before them with a fan to refresh them in hot weather.”

  Sabeata and his allies were apparently playing a complex game, attempting to set these strange invaders against one another and strike a profitable alliance. Their home range, which encompassed much of the Trans-Pecos and the Edwards Plateau, extending eastward off the Balcones Escarpment and down the Pecos and the Devils River through Del Rio and Eagle Pass into the coastal plains of South and East Texas and northeastern Mexico, was being pressed on all sides—by Apache aggression from the northwest, by the Spanish from the west and the south, and by the French from the east. It is a pity that we do not know what Sabeata was telling the Apaches during this time. The picture that emerges, however fragmentary, is of a sophisticated foreign policy, orchestrated by the Jumanos and their Native confederacy, aimed at preserving their continued autonomy in a complex and highly mobile society based on foraging, hunting, and trade. Their homes and their whole way of life were under mortal threat. American anxieties over immigration pale somewhat in comparison.

  By the time the Spanish had finally caught on to the presence of the French along the Gulf Coast, the La Salle expedition had ended in disaster; mutineers had murdered its leader. Those who remained at Garcitas Creek were massacred by natives in 1688. The Spanish did not know this, however, and they did their best to obtain intelligence through their friends the Jumanos, who were highly selective with their news and chose not to reveal the presence of a surviving Frenchman who had assumed leadership of a sizable ranchería not far north of the Rio Grande in South Texas. He was taken into custody by soldiers sent north from Monclova about the time General Juan Fernández de Retana was sent into Texas to investigate the reports of the French colony. Retana was in contact with Juan Sabeata, who eventually brought him word that the French settlement had been wiped out; he brought with him papers written in French and a drawing of a ship on parchment, all wrapped in a lace scarf.

  In 1691, the Spanish established eight missions among the Caddos, whom the Spanish called Tejas, in a short abortive push into East Texas. Again Sabeata and his allies tried to persuade the Spanish to stay with the Jumanos. He was unsuccessful, and so were the Spanish. The Tejas were not friendly to the Spanish, and even though they were already farmers and slept in proper beds, they were not inclined to be converted and reduced.

  Juan Sabeata disappears from the historical record after 1692. By 1693, there were rumors that the Jumanos were planning to attack Spanish soldiers, and that was the year the Spanish essentially abandoned Texas and withdrew to the Rio Grande. By 1716, when the Spanish returned to Texas, the Jumanos were allied with their former Apache enemies. Apache raids commenced on the new Spanish settlements along the San Antonio River and elsewhere as soon as they were established. By the 1730s, the Jumanos had been absorbed into the Apaches; thereafter, one sees references only to the Apaches Jumanes.

  The River Road, looking west toward Presidio, Texas

  Whatever happened to the Ervipiame or the Yorica or the Bobole, all of whom were associated with the Jumanos at one time or another? Or the Gueiquesale, a large group of foraging people (also known as Coetzale, Gueiquesal, Gueiquechali, Guericochal, Guisole, Huisocal, Huyquetzal, Huicasique, Quetzal, and Quesale) who lived in the southern Edwards Plateau and the canyon lands along the Pecos and the Devils River? The enormous diversity of peoples with their mellifluous and peculiar names who inhabited Texas and northern Mexico came to an end as groups were reduced and lost their cultural identity. Most of those who remained free either perished of disease, died in battle, or were absorbed into greater Apachería. Soon the Comanches would arrive.

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  I was musing on the Jumanos, the Apaches, and the Comanches as I pulled out of Redford and continued eastward. I had rented a small cabin in Terlingua and hired a guide with a Jeep to take me into Fresno Canyon, on the east side of Big Bend Ranch State Park, to seek out Homer Wilson’s old mercury mine. In front of me lay one of the most sublime stretches of roadway in North America, Texas Farm-to-Market Highway 170, known as the River Road. Winding through the many canyons that open onto the Rio Grande, FM 170 runs between a small ghost town called Candelaria, on the west, through Presidio and Redford to Terlingua and Study Butte in the east. The road sticks close to the meanders of the muddy Rio Grande for the most part, occasionally rising over the mountains to provide spectacular views of the river canyon. I stopped along a wide bend in the river to gaze at magnificent hoodoos made of volcanic tuff that stand like giant mushrooms or biomorphic sculptures fashioned out of wet sand. I hiked Closed Canyon, a stunning narrow slot canyon formed by a stream that cut right through a mesa on its way to the river. It was barely wider than the trail, with vertical walls more than a hundred feet high. The temperature at the trailhead was 102 degrees, according to a handy thermometer posted there; inside the canyon it dropped at least 15 degrees. Closed Canyon wasn’t a good place to ride out a sudden thunderstorm, though, and I knew
more rain was likely, so I was slightly nervous until I reemerged and continued on my way.

  I pulled in to Terlingua and located my lodgings. My key was taped to the front door of the office of the local outfitter, Far Flung Outdoor Center. I found my cabin out back, a pleasant little casita with a red metal roof, one of several arranged in a compound surrounded by a desert garden, barbecue pits, and picnic tables. I was hot and tired from hiking and desperate for a shower. I stripped off my clothes and turned the shower knobs. A gasp of air and a few tablespoons of water trickled out. Then nothing. I tried the bathroom sink and the kitchenette. No water. I went outside and wandered around. I found an ice machine, and it was working, so that was something.

  A few minutes later I was sitting on the back porch of my casita, watching an approaching line of thunderstorms over the mountains in Mexico, sipping a bourbon. I was filthy but content.

  I walked next door to a Mexican restaurant and discovered that the entire town of Terlingua was without water. I ate tacos under a metal awning (and tried not to think about how the kitchen staff was washing their hands) as a wild desert storm blew in, then I walked slowly through the rain back to my casita, my boots crunching the gravel, my ears still ringing from the airborne liquid attack on the aluminum shelter. That was the closest I came to a shower. I opened the windows on both sides of the cabin and let the wind blow through my room. The next day, I learned that the problem was a broken pipe. Terlingua’s water originates from a very deep well, and the water comes out of the ground hot, with a high sulfur content, so it’s hard on the pipes and other equipment. Nobody I spoke to in Terlingua seemed all that surprised to be without running water for a day or two. Just part of life in the wildest little corner of the Big Bend.