At the beginning of 1863, the Navajos, a diverse, widely scattered and profoundly spiritual people had lived for centuries in the arid region bounded by the San Francisco Peaks in north central Arizona, the Hesperus Peak in southwestern Colorado, Mount Blanca in south central Colorado and Mount Taylor in northwestern New Mexico. They lived as shepherds, farmers, hunters, wild plant gatherers and enterprising and far-ranging raiders. They called themselves the Dine, or the People. They called their land the Dinetah.

The Long Walk Trail Route

To the Dine, their expulsion from Dinetah and the forced march - the "Long Walk" - to Fort Sumner must have seemed like the descent into Dante's Inferno, with the famous words "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" inscribed above the gate at the entrance. They left behind a vast mosaic of sacred mountains, spectacular canyons, colorful desert plains, scattered pasturelands, riverine farmlands, oak/juniper/pinyon woodlands, open ponderosa pine forests, pure streams and substantial game. They took up a new life on an overcrowded and gloomy prairie with no building materials, short grass, limited arable soil, few trees, minimal firewood, alkaline water and little game. They feuded with the Mescalero Apaches, their neighboring prisoners at the Bosque Redondo and Fort Sumner camp. They suffered attacks by the Kiowas and the Comanches, their traditional enemies from the plains. They lost women and children to predatory Hispanic and Anglo settlers, the last slavers in America.

In general, the Long Walk Trail began at Fort Defiance, a concentration camp located in northeast Arizona at the mouth of Canyon Bonito (meaning, ironically, "Pretty Canyon"), at an elevation of more than 6800 feet, in the heart of the Dinetah. It followed a roughly 400-mile-long route eastward. It ran southeast across the Colorado Plateau, through mesas and canyons of sandstone, past mountains with timbered slopes, and around and across sheets and rivers of frozen lava. At the Rio Grande, it turned northeastward, through basin and range country up to the southern foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. It turned southeastward, passing from the southern tip of the mountains down into the western edge of the Great Plains' short grass prairie lands. The trail ended at the Bosque Redondo - "Round Wooded Area" - a grove of cottonwoods near the site of Fort Sumner, on the Pecos River.

More specifically, from Fort Defiance - a hateful place of appropriated grazing land, bitter conflict and Navajo suffering - the trail led east-southeast for some 100 miles past Fort Lyon and Bluewater Creek to Fort Wingate, according to Frank McNitt in his book The Long March: 1863-1867. (In 1868, the Army moved Fort Wingate lock, stock and name from its original location, just southwest of the 11,300-foot-high volcano Mount Taylor, to Fort Lyon, a few miles east of Gallup.) According to Neal W. Ackerly in his study "A Navajo Diaspora: The Long Walk to Hweeldi [Fort Sumner]," the trail continued east-southeast from the original Fort Wingate, passing the community of Cubero and the pueblo of Laguna. It followed the Rio San Jose downstream to its juncture with the Rio Puerco. It crossed basalt-strewn desert land to the Rio Grande and the community of Los Pinos, or Peralta. It turned upstream, following the left bank of the Rio Grande past the Isleta Pueblo to Albuquerque, completing a segment of another 100 miles. From a site called Sheep Springs, on the Rio San Jose, the trail apparently forked, with a shortcut heading almost due east directly into Albuquerque, bypassing Los Pinos.

From Albuquerque, the trail divided into four branches, although only two, the "Santa Fe Route" and the "Mountain Route," served as primary trails, according to Ackerly. The Santa Fe Route followed the old Chihuahua Trail-the northernmost segment of the fabled Camino Real de la Tierra Adentro (the Royal Road of the Interior Land). This well-traveled roadway led upstream past the pueblos of Sandia, San Felipe and Santo Domingo. It then veered from the Rio Grande, following a tributary into Santa Fe. From there, the branch followed the Santa Fe Trail to a point a few miles southeast of Glorietta, a Civil War battle site. Meanwhile, the Mountain Route ran eastward out of Albuquerque through Tijeras Pass, between the Sandia and Manzano mountain ranges. It turned northeast, passing through San Antonito, Golden and Galisteo, meeting up with the Santa Fe Route at the point southeast of Glorietta. From there, the reunited branches followed the Santa Fe Trail eastward past the Pecos Pueblo, a prehistoric and historic trade center. A few miles farther east, the route forked and forked again, into several new branches. One branch continued northward, on the Santa Fe Trail, following it past Las Vegas, an 1835 Mexican land grant community, clear into Fort Union. From there, it doubled back southward, toward Fort Sumner. All the branches followed the Pecos River drainage downstream into Fort Sumner.

The Canon Blanco (White Canyon) and Piedra Pintada (Painted Rock) routes out of Albuquerque ran through Tijeras Pass. The Canon Blanco Route bore northeast then due east across arid grasslands to the Pecos River. The Piedra Pintada Route bore southeast then due east across the grasslands to the Pecos. Both followed the river downstream to Fort Sumner. According to Ackerly, the Canyon Blanco Route "does not appear to have been used extensively during the Long Walk period." The Piedra Pintada Route may have been used during the Long Walk period only by Navajos trying to flee westward, away from the Bosque Redondo and Fort Sumner, back to their homeland.

The longest route from Albuquerque to Fort Sumner approached 250 miles, the shortest route, about 150 miles. By any route, the Long Walk Trail led to hardship and misery.

The History

Brigadier General Carleton, commander of the Department of New Mexico (which at the time encompassed both New Mexico and Arizona) during the Civil War, aimed the weapon and pulled the trigger in the campaign to expel the Navajos from their homeland. Kit Carson served as his bullet.

Carleton, a vainglorious man denied the opportunity for fame in the Civil War, "decided he would win it in New Mexico by getting rid of the Indians and opening their lands - which he was convinced contained uncountable riches in gold and silver - to prospectors," said Raymond F. Locke in his The Book of the Navajos. In late 1862, Carleton ordered Kit Carson and his regiment to attack the Mescalero Apaches, already a dispirited and defeated people, and to kill all the men "whenever and wherever you can find them… …you are there to kill them." The "complete savagery of this order shocked and embarrassed Kit Carson," said C. L. Sonnichsen in his book, The Mescalero Apaches, "but he could do nothing but follow orders." Early in 1863, Carleton sent a force to crush the Chiricahua Apaches in the Gila Mountains of southwest New Mexico. He applauded his troops after they treacherously murdered and beheaded the great old chief Mangas Coloradas. Carleton felt confident that he had defeated the Chiricahuas. (In fact, they would fight stubbornly and savagely for another 25 years.) He then issued his infamous Order No. 15 for Kit Carson to strike the Navajos, who, like the Mescaleros, were already a disheartened, beaten people. "…prosecute a vigorous war upon the men of this tribe until it is considered at these Head Quarters that they have been effectually punished...," Carleton ordered.

Honored in the marching song of the 1st New Mexico Cavalry, Carleton must have felt like Alexander the Great:
Here's a health to Gen'l Carleton that wise and brave hero
His arrival was a blessing great, to speed New Mexico;
May he win unfading laurels and sorrow never know
And live to see the country free from Johnny Navajo.

Johnny Navajo-O Johnny Navajo.
We'll first chastise, then civilize, bold Johnny Navajo!
Santa Fe Gazette, December 8, 1863

Provided to the author by Scott Smith, Manager, Fort Sumner State Monument

The dutiful Kit Carson, a naturally modest man now suffering from failing health, took up the cudgel against the Navajos in the late summer of 1863, launching a scorched earth campaign in the Dinetah. As fall came on, he sent forces from Fort Defiance to burn the Navajos' crops, destroy their food caches, raze their hogans, poison their water, and shoot their horses and sheep. As the first snows fell, he dispatched patrols to harass Navajo bands, preventing them from hunting game or gathering wild food plants. "There is hardly a Navajo family that cannot remember tales of an aged grandfather, a pregnant mother or a lame child that had to be left behind when a camp had to be quickly deserted…" said Locke. "Mothers were sometimes forced to suffocate their hungry, crying babies to keep the family from being discovered and butchered by an army patrol or taken captive by the slave raiders." In January, Carson and his forces invaded Canyon de Chelly, a Navajo stronghold, where they attacked scattered groups and decimated cornfields, peach orchards, food caches and hogans. His soldiers watched livid but helpless Navajo warriors scream epitaphs from distant ledges. (Ladders of ponderosa pines, which the warriors used to ascend canyon walls, and piles of stones, which they meant to use as missiles, remain in place to this day.)

Meanwhile, the Utes, Hopis and Zunis capitalized on the Navajos' vulnerability. They attacked Navajo bands, capturing women and children for slaves. Smelling blood, the Comanches and Kiowas came all the way from the southern Great Plains to raid and pillage the Navajos. While the war to end black slavery took its terrible toll in the east, Hispanic and Anglo slaving parties in Arizona and New Mexico stole Navajo women and children like plunder from the harried bands and bought Navajo women and children from the Utes. "They are bought and sold by and between the inhabitants at a price as much as is a horse or ox…" said Kirby Benedict, Chief Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, as quoted by Ackerly. "A likely girl of not more than eight years old, healthy and intelligent, would be held at a value of four hundred dollars, or more."

Thousands of Navajos, typically the more prosperous, fled with their horses and cattle. Many headed westward to remote chasms in the Grand Canyon area; and others, eastward to sanctuary at traditionally friendly pueblos such as those of the Jimez people. Thousands of other Navajos, despairing and impoverished, began to believe that confinement at Fort Sumner could not be worse than the awful siege they endured in their beloved Dinetah.

Near the end of the rampage through Canyon de Chelly, a Navajo man named Hastiin Biighaanii (Mr. Backbone), came to Kit Carson under a flag of truce. "You have killed most of us," Biighaanii told Carson, according to Clifford E. Trafzer in his book The Kit Carson Campaign: The Last Great Navajo War. "There are no more Dine now. They are gone. Maybe a few are alive in other areas. You have killed us, and there is nobody left for you to kill. Besides, we have nothing; we are suffering very much from hardship. We want to stop here; we want peace." Honored in the marching song of the 1st New Mexico Cavalry, the humble and ill Carson, longing for home and family, would not have felt like Alexander the Great:

Here's a health to Col. Carson whose swift and crushing blow
Brought terror to the Savage, and reduced the Navajo,
May promotion raise him to the stars and may his country show
She holds him as the conqueror of Johnny Navajo.

Johnny Navajo-O Johnny Navajo.
We'll first chastise, then civilize, bold Johnny Navajo!
Santa Fe Gazette, December 8, 1863

Provided to the author by Scott Smith,
Manager, Fort Sumner State Monument

Part 2 will appear in April edition of Gazette.

Photos: Left, Canyon de Chelly, Spider Rock Right, Canyon de Chelly