The Navajo Long Walk

In the summer of eighteen sixty-three, the United States Army gave the Navajo an ultimatum: report to Bosque Redondo, a military reservation in eastern New Mexico, or be treated as enemies. The Navajo homeland, Dinetah, spanned the canyon country of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. The Navajo had farmed it, grazed it, and built their lives in it for generations. They did not go.

Army Colonel Kit Carson's response was a scorched-earth campaign designed not to fight the Navajo but to starve them. His forces burned cornfields. They destroyed peach orchards that Navajo families had tended for decades. They slaughtered livestock. They burned hogans. The strategy was to remove every means of subsistence until surrender was the only option that did not mean dying. By the winter of eighteen sixty-three to eighteen sixty-four, it was working.

The forced removal that followed is remembered in Navajo history as the Long Walk. Approximately ten thousand people were marched up to three hundred miles southeast to Bosque Redondo, in groups, across desert and mountain terrain, in winter. The elderly, the ill, and small children walked or were left behind. The exact number who died during the march is not fully established in the documentary record. Once at Bosque Redondo, the conditions did not improve. Crop failures, disease, and violence killed an estimated two thousand to three thousand people over the four years of confinement. The soil at Bosque Redondo was alkaline and would not sustain Navajo agriculture. The promised rations were inadequate and frequently corrupt.

In eighteen sixty-eight, the United States signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo with the Navajo, acknowledging that the experiment had failed. The Navajo were permitted to return to a reduced version of their homeland. The treaty established the reservation that would grow, through subsequent additions, into the largest tribal land base in the United States. It exists in its current form because the survivors of the Long Walk came home and rebuilt.

The Long Walk is not peripheral to Navajo history. It is its center of gravity.