The Diné, Long Walk and Return

The Diné, the people Americans call the Navajo, call their homeland Dinétah, and they describe its boundaries by four sacred mountains: Blanca Peak to the east, Mount Taylor to the south, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona to the west, and Hesperus Peak in Colorado to the north. They have lived within those boundaries for centuries, and the story of what it cost them to stay there is one of the most painful in the history of the American West. In the eighteen sixties, the United States government decided that the Navajo had to go.

After years of raiding and counter-raiding between Navajo bands and New Mexican settlers, Washington ordered a final solution. Colonel Christopher Carson, Kit Carson, the celebrated frontiersman, was sent to force the Navajo into submission not by direct battle but by starvation. In the winter of eighteen sixty-three to sixty-four, his troops swept through Canyon de Chelly, cutting down peach orchards planted generations earlier, slaughtering sheep, and burning hogans.

Thousands of Diné surrendered rather than watch their families starve. Beginning in eighteen sixty-four, the United States Army marched approximately ten thousand Navajos roughly three hundred miles east to a desolate internment camp on the Pecos River called Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner. The journey took eighteen days; people walked in the cold.

Elders, children, and the sick who could not keep up were sometimes killed or left to die. The records are incomplete on exact numbers, but historians estimate between twenty-five hundred and thirty-five hundred Diné died during the march and the four years of confinement that followed. Bosque Redondo was a catastrophe.

The soil was alkaline, the water brackish, the crops failed repeatedly. The Mescalero Apaches confined there alongside the Navajo had fled by eighteen sixty-five. In eighteen sixty-eight, the government acknowledged the experiment had failed and signed a treaty allowing the Navajo to return home.

On June first, eighteen sixty-eight, the Diné began walking back. It was, by their own testimony, one of the most joyful moments in their history. The reservation established by that treaty is today the largest in the United States, and the Navajo Nation remains a sovereign government with its own courts, schools, and capital at Window Rock, Arizona.