ONEOFMANYFEATHERS'
Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo
Forced Removal of the Navajo
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 Navajo called themselves the Dine, or the People. They called their land the Dinetah. The Navajos, a diverse, widely scattered and profoundly spiritual people had lived for centuries in the arid region bounded by the San Francisco Peaks in north central Arizona, the Hesperus Peak in southwestern Colorado, Mount Blanca in south central Colorado and Mount Taylor in northwestern New Mexico. They lived as shepherds, farmers, hunters, wild plant gatherers and enterprising and far-ranging raiders.
In late 1862, Carleton ordered Kit Carson and his regiment to attack the Mescalero Apaches, already a dispirited and defeated people, and to kill all the men "whenever and wherever you can find them… …you are there to kill them."
Early in 1863, Carleton sent a force to crush the Chiricahua Apaches in the Gila Mountains of southwest New Mexico. After his troops had treacherously murdered and beheaded the great old chief Mangas Coloradas, he would later issue his infamous Order No. 15 for Kit Carson to strike the Navajos, who, like the Mescaleros, were already a disheartened, beaten people. "…prosecute a vigorous war upon the men of this tribe until it is considered at these Head Quarters that they have been effectually punished."
Kit Carson, took up the cudgel against the Navajos in the late summer of 1863, launching a scorched earth campaign in the Dinetah. As fall came on, he sent forces from Fort Defiance to burn the Navajos’ crops, destroy their food caches, raze their hogans, poison their water, and shoot their horses and sheep. As the first snows fell, he dispatched patrols to harass Navajo bands, preventing them from hunting game or gathering wild food plants. With their children and elderly dieing from starvation and exposure, ragged and emaciated Navajos surrendered first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, primarily at Fort Defiance and Fort Wingate.
In the year of 1864, thousands of Navajos were forced to leave their land and travel on foot to a reservation at a place called Bosque Redondo. Some of them had to travel more than 450 miles by foot, and many died along the way from cold, starvation, or murder. This relocation of the Navajo would later be known as "The Long Walk." The trips lasted about 20 days each.
Officials called it a reservation, but to the conquered and exiled Navajos, it was a wretched prison camp.
They left behind a vast mosaic of sacred mountains, spectacular canyons, colorful desert plains, scattered pasturelands, riverine farmlands, oak/juniper/pinyon woodlands, open ponderosa pine forests, pure streams and significant game. They took up a new life on an overcrowded and gloomy prairie with no building materials, short grass, limited arable soil, few trees, minimal firewood, alkaline water and little game.
The trail of the Long Walk was marked by the frozen corpses of Indians, who, too fatigued to go on, had crawled to the wayside to die.
Clothed with no more than rags, they froze in the snows of winter. Weak and exhausted, they drowned in crossings of swollen streams. Defenseless, they lost their belongings to thieves and their children to slavers. On some marches, they watched scavenging coyotes, vultures and crows, harbingers of death, track the caravans, waiting for the next victim. Sometimes, after they left a relative dying beside the trail, the Navajos heard the crack of a soldier’s rifle back towards the rear of the column.
Along the grueling 300-400-mile march to the Bosque Redondo, about 200 people died of cold and starvation. Many more people died after they arrived at the barren reservation. Some of the luckier ones managed to escape along the way.
Following a roughly 400-mile-long route eastward, the forced march of the Navajos ran southeast across the Colorado Plateau, through mesas and canyons of sandstone, past mountains with timbered slopes, and around and across sheets and rivers of frozen lava and then at the Rio Grande, it turned northeastward, through basin and range country up to the southern foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. They then turned southeastward, passing from the southern tip of the mountains down into the western edge of the Great Plains’ short grass prairie lands. The march ended at the Bosque Redondo, "Round Wooded Area", a grove of cottonwoods near the site of Fort Sumner, on the Pecos River.
There they feuded with the Mescalero Apaches, their neighboring prisoners at the Bosque Redondo and Fort Sumner camp, and suffered attacks by the Comanches and Kiowas, their traditional enemies from the plains. They lost women and children to predatory Hispanic and Anglo settlers, the last slavers in America.
It was thought by the U.S. Government that the Navajos would engage in agriculture at the reservation, but because the land was unsuitable for raising crops, and the people had no farming experience, their plan failed. Four years later, in 1868, partly as a recognition of their mistake, the US government allowed the people to return to their homeland.
On June 18, 1868, the once-scattered bands of people who called themselves Diné, set off together on the return journey, the "Long Walk" home. This is one of the few instances where the U.S. government relocated a tribe to their traditional boundaries. The Navajos were granted 3.5 million acres of land inside their four sacred mountains. The Navajos also became a more cohesive tribe after the Long Walk and were able to successfully increase the size of their reservation since then, to over 16 million acres).
On the march to Bosque Redondo, there were actually three groups each taking their own path. They each had taken a different path but were on the same trail. When returning to their traditional Navajo homelands, they formed into one long group ten miles long.
"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 ~
"I am under the impression that the Navajo nation, numbering 8,000 or 10,000 people were so severely pressed by Kit Carson, that they surrendered to him, and were put on a government reservation, where they remained under military control, for several years." (H.R. Tilton, "The Last Hours of Kit Carson," quoted in Christopher Carson by John S. C. Abbott, 1874.)
"After New Mexico and Arizona came into the possession of the United States, a series of unsuccessful military expeditions directed against the Navajos culminated in the campaign of 1863. During this year Kit Carson invaded the Navajo country, killed the sheep, burned the cornfields, and took possession of water holes, thereby forcing the surrender of the whole tribe. The number of prisoners held at Bosque Rodondo was 7,300 which was believed to include the whole tribe and doubtless was 90 per cent of all the Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. (Herbert E. Gregory, "The Navajo Country," 1915.) To Kit Carson under a flag of truce
"You have killed most of us. There are no more Dine now. They are gone. Maybe a few are alive in other areas. You have killed us, and there is nobody left for you to kill. Besides, we have nothing; we are suffering very much from hardship. We want to stop here; we want peace." Hastiin Biighaanii (Mr. Backbone) Navajo
"On the journey to Hweeldi… the people had to walk. There were a few wagons to haul some personal belongings, but the trip was made on foot. People were shot down on the spot if they complained about being tired or sick, and if they stopped to help someone. If a woman became in labor with a baby, she was killed. There was absolutely no mercy." Curly Tso, Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period
"If a rat was killed, the meat, with the bones and intestines, would be chopped into pieces, and twelve persons would share the meat, bones and intestines of one rat." ~ Mose Denejolie ~ Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period
"I beg to congratulate you and the country at large on the prospect that this formidable band of robbers and murderers have at last been made to succumb.."
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