Navajo The Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo
Navajo are gathered at Fort Sumner, the post that was
built to watch over the Bosque Redondo Reservation.
Photo courtesy Museum of New Mexico.
Officials called it a reservation, but to the conquered and exiled Navajos
it was a wretched prison camp.
- David Roberts, Smithsonian Magazine
The Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo,
was an Indian removal effort of the United States government in 1863 and 1864.
Early relations between Anglo-American settlers of New Mexico were relatively
peaceful, but the peace began to disintegrate following the killing of a respected
Navajo leader by the name of Narbona in 1849. By the 1850s, the U.S. government
had begun establishing forts in Navajo territory, namely Fort Defiance (near
present-day Window Rock, Arizona) and Fort Wingate, in northeast New Mexico.
Further, the Bonneville Treaty of 1858 reduced the extent of Navajo land,
and the relatively pro-Navajo local U.S. Army leader and Indian agent was
reassigned to West Point.
By the 1860s, as more and more Americans pushed westward, they met increasingly
fierce resistance from the Mescalero Apache and Navajo people who fought to
maintain control of their traditional lands and their way of life.
Under the leadership of the new commander of Fort Defiance, William T. H.
Brooks, the Navajo and the U.S. Army began a destructive cycle of raids and
counter-raids culminating in the near-sacking of Fort Defiance by approximately
1,000 Navajo warriors under the leadership of Manuelito and Barboncito on
April 30 1860.
Manuelito
Courtesy the Smithsonian Institution
Despite another treaty signed on February 15 1861, relations quickly got worse when a dispute over a horse race of questionable fairness resulted in the massacre of 30 Native Americans on the orders of Colonel Manuel Chaves, commander of Fort Wingate. Following this massacre, which took place on September 22 1861, military leaders began drafting plans to send the local Navajo on the Long Walk.
Originated by General James H. Carleton, New Mexico's U.S. Army commander,
the plan called for the removal of the Navajo from their native lands, including
areas in northeastern Arizona, through western New Mexico, and north into
Utah and Colorado.
To accomplish their plan, the U.S. Army made war on the Mescalero Apache and
Navajo Indian tribes, destroying their fields, orchards, houses, and livestock.
Before the natives were even defeated, Congress authorized the establishment
of Fort Sumner, New Mexico at Bosque Redondo on October 31 1862, a space forty
miles square.
Though some officers specifically discouraged the selection of Bosque Redondo
as a site because of its poor water and minimal provisions of firewood, it
was established anyway. It was to be the first Indian reservation west of
Oklahoma Indian Territory. The plan was to turn the Apache and Navajo into
farmers on the Bosque Redondo with irrigation from the Pecos River. They were
also to be “civilized” by going to school and practicing Christianity.
The Apache and Navajo, who had survived the army attacks, were then starved
into submission. During a final standoff at Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo surrendered
to Kit Carson and his troops in January 1864. Carson ordered the destruction
of their property and organized the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo reservation,
already occupied by Mescalero Apaches.
Kit Carson
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.
Soon, 8,500 men, women and children were marched almost 400 miles from northeastern
Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to Bosque Redondo, a desolate tract on
the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. Traveling in harsh winter conditions
for almost two months, about 200 Navajo died of cold and starvation. More
died after they arrived at the barren reservation. The forced march, led by
Kit Carson became known by the Navajos as the "Long Walk."
Some Navajo managed to escape the Walk, variously surviving in the territory
of the Chiricahua Apache, the Grand Canyon, on Navajo Mountain and in Utah
.
The ill-planned site, named for a grove of cottonwoods by the river, turned
into a virtual prison camp for the natives. The brackish Pecos water caused
severe intestinal problems in the tribe and disease ran rampant. Armyworm
destroyed the corn crop, and the wood supply at the Bosque Redondo was soon
depleted. Most of the Mescalero Apaches eluded their military guards and abandoned
the reservation on November 3 1865; but, for the Navajos, another three years
passed before the United States Government recognized that their plan for
Americanizing the Navajo had failed.
Bosque Redondo was hailed as a miserable failure, the victim of poor planning,
disease, crop infestation and generally poor conditions for agriculture. The
Navajo were finally acknowledged sovereignty in the historic Treaty of 1868.
The Navajo returned to their land along the Arizona-New Mexico border hungry
and in rags. Though their territory had been reduced to an area much smaller
than what they had occupied before the exodus to Bosque Redondo, they were
one of the few tribes that were allowed to return to their native lands. The
U.S. government issued them rations and sheep and within a few years the Navajo
had multiplied the numbers of their livestock and began to prosper once again.
Today
the Navajo Nation is the largest Native American community in the United States.
"Cage the badger and he will try to break from his prison and regain
his native hole. Chain the eagle to the ground - he will strive to gain his
freedom, and though he fails, he will lift his head and look up at the sky
which is home - and we want to return to our mountains and plains, where we
used to plant corn, wheat and beans."
-- Written
by a Navajo in 1865
Some of the more than 8,000 Navajo who surrendered
to
Kit Carson during his 1864 campaign of destruction
through their homeland. Carson forced his prisoners to
take the "Long Walk" across New Mexico to a barren reservation set
aside for them along the Pecos River at
Bosque Redondo.
Photo courtesy National Archives.
