But we have definite knowledge that the Jumano lived in the present New Mexico at least as early as the time of Oñate, i. e. in 1598, for on October 6 of that year he departed with the father commissary “to the salinas of the Pecos, which are of many leagues of indefinite salt, very beautiful and white; and to the pueblos of the Xumases or Rayados, which are three: one very large, and they saw the others.”[6] There were in reality four instead of three important villages of the Jumano in New Mexico at the close of the sixteenth century, their names, according to Oñate, being Atripuy, Genobey, Quelotetrey, and Pataotrey.[7] These, with many villages of the Pueblo Indians from Pecos southward through the country known as the Salinas, were placed under the ministration of Fray Francisco de San Miguel; but there is no evidence that the friar visited all of them, and it is quite certain that no churches were built in this immediate region at so early a date.[8] The _Salinas_ referred to are situated in the central portion of that part of Valencia county, New Mexico, lying east of the Rio Grande. Bounding the salt lagoon area on the south is the Mesa de los Jumanos, or, as it is termed on present-day if not altogether “modern” maps, “Mesa Jumanes.” This land-mark of course derived its name from the tribe which formerly occupied the vicinity, a fact illustrating the persistency with which aboriginal names are sometimes retained in the Southwest, even where good excuse may exist for forgetting them. The Salinas country, although known far and wide for its generally inhospitable and forbidding character, was inhabited at the opening of the seventeenth century and for twenty-five years later, by the eastern divisions of the Tigua and Piro (the latter sometimes being known as Tompiro), as well as by the Jumano. The former two groups belong to the Tanoan linguistic family and inhabited several pueblos similar to those of their Rio Grande congeners. When, in 1626, Fray Alonso Benavides, the Father Custodian of the missions of New Mexico, appealed for additional missionaries, he had particularly in mind the conversion of the tribes of the Salinas region, especially the Jumano, among whom Fray Juan de Salas had already been. Says Benavides, writing in 1630, “I kept putting off the Xumanas who were asking for him [Salas], until God should send more laborers.”