Kit Carson's Shadow: The Navajo Long Walk Starts Here

The forest bears his name. Kit Carson is buried in Taos. His house is a museum on Kit Carson Road. The mythology of Kit Carson as a frontier hero was manufactured largely after his death, built on dime novel exaggerations of a man who was, by the documented record, a skilled frontiersman, an Army officer who followed orders, and a man who carried out one of the most brutal military campaigns against Indigenous people in New Mexico history.

In eighteen sixty-three, General James Carleton ordered Carson to subdue the Navajo and bring them to the Bosque Redondo reservation near Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. Carson's method was total warfare. His troops destroyed crops, cut down peach orchards, killed livestock, and burned settlements across the Dinetah, the Navajo homeland. The Chuska Mountains, the Canyon de Chelly, the sacred terrain of the Navajo Nation were systematically emptied by starvation and force. By eighteen sixty-four, an estimated eight thousand to twelve thousand Navajo men, women, and children were marched three hundred to four hundred fifty miles to Bosque Redondo. Hundreds died on the walk from cold, hunger, and exhaustion. The Navajo call it the Long Walk, the Naahondzod, the fearing time.

At Bosque Redondo, conditions were catastrophic. The promised food and supplies did not materialize consistently. The water was alkaline. The soil would not grow crops. Diseases spread through the encampment. Thousands died during the four years of confinement.

In eighteen sixty-eight, a treaty was signed at Bosque Redondo allowing the Navajo to return to a portion of their homeland. The chiefs Barboncito, Manuelito, and ten others signed for the Navajo Nation. Barboncito's speech at the treaty negotiations is preserved in the record. He said: "I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own." The treaty gave the Navajo a reservation. It was a fraction of the original homeland. It was home.

Carson died in eighteen sixty-eight, the same year the treaty was signed. The forest named for him sits in the mountains the Navajo passed through on the way to and from Bosque Redondo.