The
Jumano people were a prominent
indigenous tribe or several tribes, who inhabited a large area of western
Texas, adjacent
New Mexico, and northern
Mexico, especially near the
La Junta de los Rios region with its large settled Indian population.
Spanish explorers first recorded encounters with the Jumano in 1581; later expeditions noted them in a broad area of the Southwest and the
Great Plains. The last historic reference was in a nineteenth-century oral history but their population had declined by the early eighteenth century.