A Journey to the Desert's Edge, Part Four

Note: this is the fourth in a series of occasionally appearing entries focusing on deserts in general and the drylands of West Texas in particular

West Texas desert grasslands and their counterparts in New Mexico provide the setting for one of the stranger incidents during Spain's colonial experience in North America.  Leaving aside the question of whether we should use the dominant buffalo grasses and blue grama of our nation's shortgrass prairies to separate them from desert grasslands where courser tobosa grass flourishes for a later day, we briefly note a tale touching on a kinship possibly existing between mystical experience and drylands...

Pueblo Jumanos watch the arrival of
Spanish conquistores

  

In 1629, a group of Jumano Indians traveled to the friary at Ysleta, south of present day Albuquerque.  They came to this remote religious outpost desiring to tell its residents, they said, about a mysterious white woman dressed in blue who periodically appeared at their encampments.  She came to them from thin air.  In their language,  she spoke of the Spaniards' faith, advising them to seek out the friars of Ysleta to receive further instruction...  

Fray Alonso de Benevides, custodian of the Franciscan order in New Mexico, returned home to Spain to inform his superiors of this unusual visit.  There he learned of Sister Maria de Agreda... 

Mission at Ysleta, circa 1900

This good woman wore a blue cloak as did other nuns of the Conceptionist order.  But, unlike them, she'd experienced bizarre episodes, first related to her confessor .  She told an awe-struck Benevides of going into a trance from time to time.  When this happened, Maria de Agreda found herself in a primitive land where three rivers met to become a single pecan-lined stream.  An audience of tattooed people with flattened heads listened to her speak of God and salvation... 

Maria de Agreda: Uncorrupted By Death

Benevides knew just such a location and people much like those in her story.  He and friar Diego Lopez traveled with three soldiers and those Jumanos who came to Ysleta when the tribesmen returned home--  across five hundred miles of despoblados, empty and unpopulated places, to an oasis-like valley in the midst of burning desolation, a place where three pecan-lined streams joined to form a one river... 

The two missionaries reported to church authorities in Spain that a thousand tribesmen greeted them, demonstrating the greatest reverence and humility.  Many carried crude crosses.  They fell to their knees upon seeing a picture of the infant Jesus.  All became converts to Catholicism near present day Bell Street in San Angelo.  If subsequent historians are correct in their record keepings and analysis, these Jumanos were the first Native Americans to do so in the future state of Texas... 

Concho River passing through downtown San Angelo

Fray Benevides knew the risks Sister Maria took in relating these odd experiences to either him or the priest who took her confessions.  Seventeenth century Spain was a dangerous place to be suspected of witchcraft or demonic possession.  It would not matter to those tasked to discover heresy that King Philip IV himself considered her a trusted confidant and had exchanged over 600 letters with her, soliciting her advice on both political and spiritual matters...

[Maria de Agreda's visions, incidentally, are embraced today by many of the faithful.  They have become the focus of an annual celebration in the dusty town where the wandering Jumano bands once camped.  However, they proved problematic to the Roman Church.  In 1681, her account of experiences, The Mystical City of God, landed (briefly) on the Index of Prohibited Books.  The hint of sinful thought immediately stalled the process of her beatification.  Sister Maria remains neither beatified nor canonized, despite a reported incorruptibility of her body.]   

Maria de Agreda's Mystical City

Skeptics have another version of the tale told at Ysleta mission by the Naked Indians.  Recognizing the power of the Spaniards and the likelihood of their continued presence in the area, the Jumano wisely allied themselves with a superior military force against enemy tribes by cleverly concocting a pious story taken from bits and pieces of the newcomers' religion...

Whatever the motives of the Jumanos, there is little actual doubt Sister Maria described people like them and a place akin to the junction of the Rios Conchos long before she met Alonso de Benevides.  The reasons for her visions remain as unknown as the truth behind the Jumanos' request for instruction in the Spaniards' faith.  Coincidence or delusions cobbled together from stories she'd overheard about the New World or mystical forces unknown to modern science-- the answer depends on the one preferred by the questioner...

As for the Naked Indians, they earned this sobriquet from a tendency of some bands to go nude during the warmer months.  They were, apparently, blissfully unaware their bare breasts and uncovered genitals were infinitely more sinful in God's eyes than the European lust for gold.  Jumano clothing tended to be practical-- moccasins, cloaks to protect against wind and cold, aprons and tunics when it was more sensible to be clothed than not.  Spanish accounts say they marked their faces with horizontal stripes...

"Naked Indian" in non-naked state

The native people who traveled to Ysleta Mission in New Mexico belonged to one of several groups collectively referred to as Jumanos by the Spanish between the years 1500 and 1700 BCE.  Our band likely hunted buffalo, lived in skin tipis, and were among the first to acquire horses after the conquistadores introduced them to the region.  Their territory, centered between the Colorado River and upper Pecos River of Texas, permitted them to act as middlemen transferring goods from tribes in the more fertile east to people living in the arid western country.  We know little else of Jumano social structure or folkways... 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Jumano fade from the historical record and other Native American tribes move in to occupy their territory.  First come Apaches.  In turn, they are forced westward by Comanches who remain until an influx of white settlers after the Civil War overwhelms them...

Jumano Territory in Concho Valley and Upper Pecos Valley

Note: All images located through Google Images without source information except as follows: Maria de Agreda and frontispiece to "Mystica ciudad de Dios" from Wikipedia; Jumano Brave, Jumanos watching conquistadores, and map of Jumano territory from texasbeyondhistory.net; Ysleta Mission from "Abandoned" by Ronald Boutelle; Concho River by Louis R Nugent