Fort Wingate: Three Names and the Long Walk
Near Gallup, New Mexico
The military post near present-day Gallup, New Mexico, has carried three different names, each reflecting the politics of its moment. Established in August of eighteen sixty, it was first called Fort Fauntleroy, after a U.S. cavalry colonel. When that officer resigned to join the Confederacy, the Army renamed it Fort Lyon, then abandoned it entirely during the Confederate advance into New Mexico.
The post was renamed Fort Wingate in eighteen sixty-two, in the middle of the Civil War, and it became the staging point for one of the most devastating episodes in Navajo history. In eighteen sixty-four, the Army used Fort Wingate as headquarters for a campaign that forced roughly nine thousand Navajo people from their homeland on a four-hundred-fifty-mile march to a reservation at Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner. The Diné call it the Long Walk. Thousands died. The survivors were allowed to return to their homeland in eighteen sixty-eight. Fort Wingate continued as a military depot until nineteen ninety-three. The site near Gallup is now a National Register Historic District.
