In 1535 and again in 1582 the Spaniards found a semi-agricultural tribe living in more or less permanent houses, some of them built of grass, on the Rio Grande at the junction of the Conchos in Chihuahua and along the former stream northward for a number of leagues. They subsisted partly by hunting the buffalo, and raised beans, calabashes, and corn. At the date last mentioned they were called Jumano, and the Spaniards named them also Patarabueyes. A distinguishing feature of the tribe was its tattooing, for which reason, when found east of the Rio Grande in New Mexico in 1598, they were called “Rayados” by the Spaniards. They were erratic in their movements. The Franciscans established a mission among them in New Mexico in 1629, but it does not seem to have been successful, for the Indians appear to have been here to-day but elsewhere tomorrow. In the seventeenth century they were found on the plains of Texas, and again living on the prairies to the northward, evidently in Kansas, the name seemingly being applied to each of two divisions of the same tribe or confederacy. Their custom of tattooing, the character of their houses, and their semi-agricultural mode of life during the century they were first known, suggest relationship, if not identification, with the Wichita people. References in unpublished Spanish documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicate that the Jumano of the Spaniards of New Mexico were the Tawehash of Texas; and it is known that Tawehash, the name of a division of the Wichita, was also the term by which other Caddoan tribes knew the Wichita tribe proper. There is direct information from the beginning of the nineteenth century that the Wichita mountains, which received their name because the Wichita tribe dwelt thereabouts, were also called “Jumanes mountains” and “Tawehash mountains,” thus further substantiating the testimony that the Jumano and the Tawehash were one people. The Tawehash have been absorbed by the Wichita proper, and their divisional name is now practically lost. Likewise the term Jumano, which, originating in Chihuahua and New Mexico, passed into Texas, but seems to have been gradually replaced by the name “Tawehash,” which in turn was superseded by “Wichita.” Thus is accounted for the disappearance of a tribe that has long been an enigma to ethnologists and historians. BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. FOOTNOTES: [1] The neighborhood here referred to was not the immediate vicinity, and the stream alluded to was much more likely to have been the Pecos than the Rio Grande, up which they were now journeying, the former river having been named “Rio de las Vacas” by Espejo in 1583. [2] The rude Indians of the eastern coast of Texas.