The Nations at the Junction

Holbrook stands at a remarkable junction of sovereign nations. The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States by land area, begins just north and east of town and stretches across three states covering more than seventeen million acres. The Hopi Reservation, an island of land nearly surrounded by the Navajo Nation, lies to the northeast.

The White Mountain Apache Reservation begins to the south. Three distinct peoples, three distinct histories, all converging at this railroad town on the Little Colorado River. The Navajo presence in this region is ancient and layered with tragedy.

In eighteen sixty-four, the United States Army under Kit Carson drove the Navajo people from their homeland in a campaign that destroyed their crops, their orchards, and their livestock. Thousands of Navajo were then marched hundreds of miles east to a compound on the Pecos River called Bosque Redondo, an event the Navajo remember as the Long Walk. The experience was catastrophic.

Hundreds died on the march and thousands more in the years of confinement that followed. The Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight permitted the Navajo to return to a portion of their original homeland, and their descendants have lived here ever since. The Hopi people trace their presence on these high mesas back further still, their villages at the tops of three rocky outcroppings among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on the continent.

Holbrook has served as a commercial center for both nations for generations, a place where the economies of the reservation and the road have always met.