By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
Note: This article on the settling of the Tabuk Valle was first published in the July-December 2008 issue of the Tabuk Life publication of the Tabuk City LGU.
(First of a series)
From the research on the advent of the Christian religion in Tabuk published in this magazine, it can be gleaned that at one time or another prior to the Philippine Revolution, some parts of the Tabuk Valley which was a hotbed of the killer malaria disease have already been inhabited. Felix Keesing believes that Alioc where the Spaniards settled some natives in 1772 is the place which would later be known as Laya and then there were also the parishioners of the Roman Catholic church built in 1891 on the plateau overlooking the present headquarters of the Vicariate of Tabuk in Bulanao.
There is also the story of the Gamonangs, a native Kalinga tribe, inhabiting the place now called Nasgueban located in the present barangays of Appas and Magsaysay. There are two versions as to how they vanished from the valley. One says that the Tobogs and Guilayons, both original Tabuk tribes, got fed up with their hostility and drove them out of the valley. Another says that the Spaniards sent Cagayan Valley tribes to invade the Tabuk Valley and that was how the tribe was dispersed in different directions.
The history of Tabuk published in the souvenir program commemorating the 46th anniversary of the town in 1996 repeats the first version. Citing old men as sources, the account described the Gamonangs after whom the place used to be called “Valley of the Gamonangs,” were hostile and malevolent and that this proved to be their undoing as it prompted neighboring tribes who were fed up with their attitude to form an alliance and attack them. The account further said that the tribe was decimated by the allied tribes and to further compound the tribulations of the Gamonangs, “an epidemic followed which almost wiped out the Gamonang tribe” with the few survivors “believed to have fled to the southeastern hills bordering the provinces of Isabela and the old Mt. Province.”
The account went on to say that since then, the valley has become a no man’s land as the Kalinga tribes living in the area avoided the “Valley of the Gamonangs” for superstitious reasons and contended themselves living in the hills surrounding the valley. It added that the repopulation of the valley began shortly before the First World War when then Lieutenant Governor for Kalinga Walter Hale sent six people three of whom from Tobog of what is now the barangay of Balawag of the city and the three others from Lubuagan, a southern town of Kalinga.
At any rate, the purpose of this article is merely to recall the migration of people into Tabuk specially the Tabuk Valley in the 1920s to the late 1930s.
Tobogs
The Tobogs whose ancestral village is the present-day Balawag, this city, were the first settlers of the Tabuk Valley after the Philippine Revolution. It is a historical fact that they were the only people in the valley when the first immigrants arrived in the place.
According to Ernesto Baac, Sr., in an undetermined date which could be in the 1910s or 1920s, some Tobog families decided to look for new place to live. Old man Pukin and his family went to the east to Babalag (now in Rizal town) and Gullit, Baac’s grandfather, along with his cousin Galanto and Ducayag came to the Tabuk Valley and settled in lower part of the plain now called Laya.
Isabel Balanay Bullongan, 85, of Dagupan Centro, a daughter-in-law of Galanto, relates that she was born in Calanan where her parents Balanay and Awwa temporarily stayed enroute to joining the Tobog colony in Laya. She claims that she was a baby when the family arrived in Laya. According to her, they place was uninhabited by humans when they arrived and that the Laya during her childhood was covered with thick forests and tall grasses called ledda.
Malaria killed people but she could not remember anyone in her family dying from the deadly disease.
Isabel remembers that Tobog children including her future husband Severo Bullongan, son of Galanto, used to attend school in Tuga or the so-called Cervantes Colony across the Chico River to the west. One time while they were coming home, three of them drowned while swimming across the swollen Chico River. This prompted Baac, son of Gullit, who was then the municipal district president or mayor, to initiate the establishment of a school in Laya. The first teacher was Inocencio Bitanga, a native of Tuao, Cagayan but married to Unggay, a Tobog woman. She was among the first graders when the school opened. Her future husband was in grade three, the highest grade during that school year.
Isabel says that it was while she was in grade five that a non-Tobog family aside from Bitanga came to live with the Tobogs in Laya. According to her, she could remember very well the arrival of the family of Saturnino Moldero, Sr., then Mt. Province assemblyman, because the Molderos went to their house to borrow rice as they had no food to eat. “It so happened that we had plenty of rice harvest so we gave them,” Isabel recalls. When I checked with Dr. Emilia Miranda, niece of Moldero, she said that the family came to Tabuk in 1941.
The Tobogs planted rice in bangkags (clearings) because it was only after the survey and parceling of the lands to settlers in the late 30s that wet farming was introduced as each settler turned the land into paddies. They had problems with wild animals like the wild carabaos and will pigs who came to eat the plants. Isabel also remembers that sometime after the war, they had to eat corn which they bought from Tuao after hordes of rats attacked their rice crops.
Back in those days, they also went to Taribubo, Tuao for their salt. Their mode of transportation was the horse.
Ernesto Baac, Sr. claims that it was his uncle Baac who assigned areas to the Bagos and Cervantes people who first arrived in the valley. He said that with the arrival of the Bago and Cervantes settlers, the task of making the valley productive began in earnest as each settler constructed paddies. **To be continued
