Fort Sumner and Bosque Redondo

This town near the Pecos River carries two enormous stories, one of the worst episodes of forced removal in American history, and one of the most mythologized outlaws of the frontier West.

In eighteen sixty-three, the United States Army conducted a scorched-earth campaign against the Diné, the Navajo people, burning their orchards, killing their livestock, and destroying their food stores. Then came the Long Walk: soldiers marched roughly ten thousand Navajo men, women, and children up to four hundred fifty miles across New Mexico to a military reservation called Bosque Redondo, built around Fort Sumner on the Pecos River. The walk itself killed hundreds, those who fell were sometimes shot, and pregnant women who could not keep pace did not survive. At Bosque Redondo, conditions were catastrophic. The water from the Pecos caused intestinal disease. Armyworms destroyed the corn. Wood ran out. Disease spread. An estimated one in four to one in three of the internees died and were buried in unmarked graves along the river.

The reservation was declared a failure in eighteen sixty-eight. On June first of that year, Navajo leaders signed a treaty that finally allowed the people to return home. When the column began moving west, elders cried at the sight of the Carrizo Mountains on the horizon. The Diné call this experience H'weeldi, the place of suffering.

A decade and a half later, Fort Sumner became famous for a very different reason. On July fourteenth, eighteen eighty-one, Sheriff Pat Garrett tracked Billy the Kid to the town and shot him dead in the bedroom of a darkened house. Billy was twenty-one years old. He was buried the next morning in the old military cemetery between his fallen companions Tom O'Folliard and Charlie Bowdre.

The Bosque Redondo Memorial now stands on the original fort grounds, telling the Navajo story with the dignity it has always deserved.