The Long Walk Of The Navajo
Date: August 15, 1864
Location: Between Fort Defiance (western Arizona Territory, USA) and Fort Sumner (eastern New Mexico Territory)
*Unfortunately, the actual start date(s) of the Long Walk are not known, but most historians agree that it began sometime in mid-August, with August 15th being an estimated guess.
Prior to the American Civil War, tensions ran high between the Navajo and the American colonizers in the New Mexico Territory, then comprising the modern states of Arizona and New Mexico. Americans encroached on historically Navajo land, and treaties meant to assuage the Navajo were repeatedly broken, reneged, or ignored. What followed was an increased US Army presence in the forts bordering their land, an incident in which a Navajo messenger was flogged, horrifically botched peace talks during which a tribal leader was shot, the takeover of Navajo grazing land near Fort Defiance, and finally, the subsequent punitive raiding and butchering of Navajo livestock. Tribal leaders Manuelito and Barboncito finally had enough, and declared war on the US Army, attacking and nearly capturing Fort Defiance on April 30, 1860.
After nearly a year of skirmishes and guerilla warfare, another treaty was signed on February 15, 1861 in which they ceded over a third of their native land in return for peace and protection. The killing and enslavement of their people, theft of their livestock, and settlers illegally encroaching on their land continued nearly unabated, however, and tensions began to rise again.
The American Civil War erupted on April 12, 1861, and the war came to the New Mexico Territory on July 25th 1861, when Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor won a first victory in a series of victories over the Union Army for a campaign that led to the creation of the Arizona Territory (CSA), a Confederate domain consisting of the southern halves of the modern states of Arizona and New Mexico. Thus, the Union Army sent Bureau of Indian Affairs Agent John Ward into Navajo territory to request that they move further north into Union-controlled territory for protection and material aid, but those who remained would be seen as enemies and Confederate sympathizers.
Most Navajo complied and moved north into the pueblos surrounding the village of Cubero, but after receiving little of the promised protection and aid, Navajo raids began occurring with increasing regularity.
Since the Confederate victories of 1861, 1862 had seen Baylor's army repeatedly repelled from western Arizona by the massive Union force arriving from California, the California Column. 1862 had also seen Confederate General Henry Hopkins Sibley attempt to invade the remainder of the New Mexico Territory, only to have his army decisively defeated at Glorieta Pass by Union forces from New Mexico and Colorado.
Military Governor James Henry Carleton
With the threat of Confederate domination of the southwest neutralized and after the establishment of the New Mexico and Arizona Territories in February 1863, Military Governor James Henry Carleton, the General of the California Column that defeated the Confederates in Arizona, and now governor of New Mexico, issued an order to the Navajo: Surrender to the Union Army, leave your homeland, and relocate to the reservation at the Bosque Redondo by July 20,, 1863. Noncompliance would be dealt with, severely. Anticipating resistance, Carleton ordered Colonel Kit Carson to begin a scorched earth campaign against the Navajo, as well as the Mescalero Apache, Kiowas and the Comanche, his soldiers skirmishing with war parties, burning their dwellings and crops, and rounding them up to forcibly send to the Bosque Redondo.
Following the Battle of Canyon de Chelly in January 1864, in which entire villages and fields were torched, thousands of Navajos began to surrender rather starve or freeze to death during the harsh winter.
Canyon de Chelly c. 1873
By spring 1864, plans had been drawn up to forcibly relocate the remaining Navajo from their homeland to the Bosque Redondo. Starting in August, the Union Army began the first of what would be 53 marches, taking the Navajo in groups from staging areas at Fort Defiance across 400 miles of mountains and open desert to their destination at Fort Sumner, where they would be processed and moved to the Bosque Redondo.
The Bosque Redondo
Multiple firsthand accounts describe the brutal, horrifying, and disturbing nature of these forced walks: ragged, starving, and dehydrated men, women, and children, many without shoes, marching through the unforgiving desert at gunpoint, scores dropping dead from exhaustion, and those unable to keep up shot or bayoneted.
Hundreds of Navajo died along the routes between the forts.
By spring 1865, over 9,000 Navajo along with thousands of Apaches, their old enemies, had been relocated to the Bosque Redondo, which was originally intended to hold 5,000 at most. Nearly undrinkable groundwater, floods, consistent crop failure, lack of promised supplies from the US Army, lack of game to hunt, starvation, outbreaks of disease, scorching summers, icy winters, and continued raids onto their reservation land were endured by the Long Walk survivors for years to come, their numbers diminishing by the day.
Fort Sumner c. 1868
Three years later, after the end of the American Civil War, the Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed on June 1, 1868 at Fort Sumner, allowing the Navajo to return to their ancestral homelands and granted them the protection of the US Army, but with multiple restrictive provisions and contingencies.
Before the scorched earth campaigns of Carleton and Carson in 1863 and 1864, the Navajo population was estimated to have numbered around 25,000. After years of war, attempted extermination, forced removal, and hellish conditions in the Bosque Redondo, the few thousand survivors began their walk back home on June 18, 1868.
Comments