Long Walk of the Navajo
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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.
The plan called for the removal of the Navajo from their native lands, which were called, in the Navajo language, Dinetah. (Dinetah included land from northeastern Arizona through western New Mexico, and north into Utah and Colorado.) The Navajo cultivated crops on the fertile floors of canyons, including Canyon de Chelly, home to the ancient Anasazi people.
Early relations between Anglo-American settlers of New Mexico were relatively peaceful, but the peace began to disintegrate following the killing of respected Navajo leader 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 (originally Fort Fauntleroy), the Bonneville Treaty of 1858 reduced the extent of Navajo land, and the relatively pro-Navajo local U.S. Army leader and Indian agent exited the scene (reassigned to West Point and killed by Apache while on a hunting trip, respectively).
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 about 1,000 Navajo warriors under the leadership of Manuelito and Barboncito on April 30, 1860.
Despite another treaty signed on February 15, 1861, relations quickly soured further when a dispute over a horse race of questionable fairness resulted in the massacre of 30 Native Americans on the orders of Col. Manuel Chaves, commander of Fort Fauntleroy. Following this massacre, which took place on September 22, 1861, military leaders began drafting plans to send the local Navajo on the Long Walk.
The plan was originated by Gen. James H. Carleton, the U.S. Army commander for the New Mexico region, and executed by Kit Carson, who used a scorched earth campaign to divide the Navajo people, and starve them out of their traditional homeland, Carleton also asked Carson to kill all the Mescalero Apache men. Gen. Carleton sought primarily to "pacify the natives," but also believed Navajo land to be rich in gold, and it was thought the presence of hostile Indians would impede mining.
Led by the United States Army, thousands of Navajo (along with Mescalero Apaches from the Sacramento Mountains) were relocated from their native lands in eastern Arizona Territory and western New Mexico Territory to a former trading post called Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River Valley, also called Fort Sumner. Bosque Redondo means round grove of trees in Spanish. Some officers specifically discouraged the selection of Bosque Redondo as a site because of its poor water and minimal provisions of firewood.
At least 200 died along the 300-mile (500 kilometer) trek, and the reservation itself was little more than a prison camp. Between 8,000 and 9,000 people were settled on a 40 square mile (104 km²) area, with the peak population being 9,022 in spring 1865.
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.
By 1868 the experiment—meant to be the first Indian reservation west of Indian Territory—was declared a miserable failure, the victim of poor planning, disease, crop infestation and generally poor conditions for agriculture (harvests failed in each of the successive years of 1864, 1865, 1866 and 1867). Having survived the ordeal, the various peoples interned at the camp were permitted to return from whence they came, and the Navajo were granted a 3.5 million acre (14,000 km²) area where they had previously resided. On June 18, 1868, the once-scattered bands of people who called themselves Diné, now united as one, set off on the return journey, the Long Walk Home.
See also
Sources
- Bailey, Lynn R., Bosque Redondo: An American Concentration Camp, Pasadena, California: Socio-Technical Books, 1970.
- Bial, Raymond, Great Journeys: The Long Walk--The Story of Navajo Captivity, New York: Benchmark Books, 2003.
External link
- New Mexico State University: The Long Walk (http://reta.nmsu.edu/modules/longwalk/default.htm)