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9 Settlements and Settlers at La Junta de los Ríos, 1759–1822 Oakah L. Jones “La Junta de los Ríos del Norte y Conchos,” as Spanish officials frequently called the region, was indeed an appropriate title for it. Located where the Río Conchos empties into the Rio Grande in the vicinity of today’s Ojinaga, Chihuahua, and Presidio, texas, it has been the center of human habitation along the Rio Grande in the borderlands between del Rio and El Paso for thousands of years, from the pre-Columbian era to the present-day. However, the descriptive term “La Junta de los Ríos,” used by the Spaniards from the late seventeenth century until the separation from Mexico in 1821, did not refer solely to the point where the two rivers met. instead it embraced a region of hundreds of square miles, roughly extending along both banks of the Río Conchos from Cuchillo Parado to present day Ojinaga, and along both the eastern and western banks of the Rio Grande, approximately from today’s Lajitas, texas, to the village of Pilares in Chihuahua. the purpose of this study is to review the sporadic attempts made by Spain to establish the region of La Junta, and to examine in some detail Spanish settlers there in the period from the foundation of the first presidio at the junction of the two rivers (1759–60) to the end of the Spanish period, or a total of approximately sixty years—the two generations in which there was continuous close contact between Spanish soldiers and vecinos1 on the one hand with Amerindians living in villages on the other. it is evident that the two groups did not remain apart in this period and region, but practiced mestizaje (racial mixing) openly and frequently. Using the La Junta church records from El templo de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno in Ojinaga, photographic copies of which are in the Archives of the big bend at Sul Ross State University,2 one can determine from marriage and baptismal records the presence of soldiers and officers (both on active duty and retired), their marriages to local residents, and their offspring. Since “indians” are occasionally mentioned in these baptismal and marriage records, perhaps their apparent assimilation into the 178 | Jones prevailing society may explain the disappearance upon Spanish contact of the Amerindians from the villages they inhabited. Fortunately, to supplement these records, there are occasional references to the size of the La Junta garrison and other presidios established in the region. However, no detailed numbers or family listings in Spanish census returns for the period 1760–1821 have been found to date. More importantly, for background on the area there are some published studies available. One of these, Col. Russell J. Gardinier’s “the Physical Geography of a Significant border Region, La Junta de los Ríos,”3 describes the mountains, river basins, climate, soils, flora, and fauna of this region in the Chihuahuan desert. With an elevation of about 2,500 feet, a terrain of gravel, bolson deposits, and alluvium soil, annual rainfall of just over eight inches, and sustained high summer temperatures ten to fifteen degrees above 100° F,4 La Junta seems unfit for human occupancy. As Colonel Gardinier observes: “too hot, too dry, too remote, too poor, too wild, too far from God, too close to the devil, ignored by governments and forgotten by history, the land in the area of Presidio, texas and Ojinaga , Chihuahua, bears with stoic resignation its unheralded role in the development of several human cultures in a harsh physical environment of northern Mexico and the American Southwest.”5 it is these human cultures to which archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians have addressed themselves, one, J. Charles Kelley, for the past sixty years. Kelley’s extensive archaeological investigations began in the 1930s, resulting in a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in 1947, publication of numerous articles in professional journals, and finally, in 1986, the publication of his Jumano and Patarabueye: Relations at La Junta de los Ríos.6 Kelley’s meticulous research in archaeological and historical primary sources enabled him to differentiate between nomadic Jumanos on the plains north of the Rio Grande and the village-dwelling agricultural Patarabueyes (a term used in the Luxán journal of the Espejo expedition of 1582–83) in the region of La Junta de los Ríos, where the two Amerindian cultures came into contact, and also to identify the archaeological sites of...

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