The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I doubt that even the doting author thought this book would make the best seller lists. The Jumanos, for the 99.9 percent of readers who have never heard of them, were a tribe of Texas Indians who lived on the Rio Grande and Pecos Rivers. By 1700 they had pretty much disappeared. So shadowy are they that some authors have even doubted their existence as a tribe. I got interested in the southwestern Indians and kept running into references to the Jumanos, so I read this book -- the only one that's every been written on the Jumanos, I would guess. If you -- like me -- enjoy truly obscure Americana -- especially southwestern Americana -- you might like reading this. The writing is professorial, but the author constructs the history of a vanished people and their contacts with early Spanish and French explorers. She makes a persuasive case that the Jumanos were a Tanoan people, related to many of the Pueblo Indians. Previous writers had considered the Jumanos as Uto-Aztecan, Caddoan, or Athabaskan. If you comprehend those last two sentences, you might like this book.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains