Antonio de Espejo
In February 1583, Espejo arrived at the territory of the Piros, the most southerly of the Pueblo villagers. From there the Spanish continued up the Rio Grande. Espejo described the Pueblo villages as "clean and tidy". The houses were multi-storied and made of adode bricks. "They make very fine tortillas," Espejo commented, and the Pueblos also served the Spanish turkeys, beans, corns, and pumpkins. The people "did not seem to be bellicose". The southernmost Pueblos had only clubs for weapons plus a few "poor Turkish bows and poorer arrows". Further north, the Indians were better armed and more aggressive. Some of the Pueblo towns were large, Espejo described Zia as having 1,000 houses and 4,000 men and boys. In their farming, the Pueblos used irrigation "with canals and dams, built as if by Spaniards". The only Spanish influence that Espejo noted among the Pueblos was their desire for iron. They would steal any iron article they could find.
Payaya people
The Payaya (and Coahuiltecan) were a hunter-gatherer culture. The Spanish recorded their nut-gathering activities. Historians have speculated that the band's movements in the Edwards Plateau is an indication that pecans were a substantive diet source to the Payaya. The band are known to have inhabited the areas of the San Antonio River, the Frio River to the west, and Milam County to the east, where they lived among the Tonkawa. By the year 1706, the Spanish had converted some Payaya among the indigenous converts baptized at Mission San Francisco Solano, from the Rio Grande in Coahuila, Mexico. Today's municipality of Guerrero is the approximate location of Mission San Francisco Solano. The Payaya were a small band of sixty families by 1709.