The Long Walk: Exile and Return

In the winter of eighteen sixty-four, United States Army soldiers swept through Navajo country burning hogans, slaughtering livestock, and destroying orchards and cornfields. The campaign was ordered by General James Carleton and carried out by Colonel Kit Carson. Its purpose was not just military defeat but the elimination of any reason to stay.

What followed was called the Long Walk. Between eighteen sixty-four and eighteen sixty-six the Army conducted more than fifty forced marches, driving nearly ten thousand Navajo men, women, and children three hundred miles east to Bosque Redondo, a barren camp on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. People who fell behind were sometimes shot or left to die. At least two hundred people perished on the march itself.

Bosque Redondo was a catastrophe. The water was brackish. Crops failed year after year in alkaline soil. Smallpox, dysentery, and starvation moved through the camp season after season. In four years of captivity, between twenty-five hundred and thirty-five hundred people died.

In eighteen sixty-eight, Navajo leaders Barboncito and Manuelito negotiated the Treaty of Bosque Redondo with the United States government. When Barboncito addressed the peace commission he said: "I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own." The treaty allowed the Navajo to return to Dinétah, the land between the sacred mountains. The column of returning people stretched ten miles long. The land you are driving through now was what they walked home to.