The Long Walk Returns West

The people walking west in the summer of eighteen sixty-eight had already survived something the United States government had designed to destroy them.

Four years earlier, the United States Army under Kit Carson had burned the Diné Nation's cornfields, cut down their orchards, and shot their livestock in a deliberate campaign of starvation. Beginning in August of eighteen sixty-four, Army forces marched between eight thousand and ten thousand Navajo people three hundred miles east across New Mexico to a flat alkaline basin called Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner. The march happened in winter. People who could not walk were left. Hundreds died on the road. At Bosque Redondo the conditions were worse: the water was contaminated, crops failed in the alkali soil, disease spread through the camps. The Diné were not prisoners of war in any formal legal sense. They were the inhabitants of a homeland the federal government had decided to occupy.

The Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed in June of eighteen sixty-eight. The Diné were allowed to return to a portion of their homeland. The surviving people gathered their remaining possessions and walked west. The journey covered the same terrain they had been marched across four years before, through the high desert basin that would later be graded and paved as Route Sixty-Six. Contemporary Navajo accounts describe the moment when the people crested the rise east of Narbona Pass and could see the Chuska Mountains, the western edge of Diné Bikeyah, their homeland. People wept.

The highway between Gallup and Flagstaff runs through this landscape. The trading posts that Route Sixty-Six made famous grew up in the years after that return, on land the Diné had just walked back to recover.

The road tourists drive today follows the path of a people who had no choice but to walk it.