Article by Martha Quillen
Kit Carson – October 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
SOME OF THE TRAGEDY of the Navajo story rests in its inevitability once peace treaties were signed. The Navajo were a widely scattered people living in small bands across northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah when the first peace agreements were negotiated at the end of the Mexican War.
At that point, the Navajo did not actually exist as a political organization. Among the Navaho there were many leaders, but there was no one who could speak for more than a relatively small band of people. Thus, the Navajo were always perceived as having broken settlement agreements.
Before their internment at the Bosque Redondo, the Navajo hunted and gathered, farmed, herded goats, sheep and horses, made painted pottery, wove, and raided — and by about 1850 some of them had taken up silversmithing.
In terms of their environment in the mid-nineteenth century, the Navajo, or Diné as they call themselves, were a wealthy and growing population, with many enemies — including the Mexicans who had suddenly become designated protected Americans at the conclusion of the Mexican War in 1848.
For generations the Mexicans had stolen Navajo women and children for slaves, and the Navajo had taken Mexican hostages and built their herds by raiding Mexican stock. The enmity between the Navajo and Mexicans could not easily be resolved by treaty; so, not too surprisingly, confrontations between them persisted regardless of treaties.
The Navajo did not understand how the Americans could recognize their old adversaries, the Mexicans, as Americans — and would thereby protect the Mexicans from retaliatory raids — yet fail to protect the Navajo.
The military, of course, presumably did not approve of raids by anyone. But peace agreements between the U.S. government and Indians throughout the west meant that if an Indian committed an infraction the tribe could be held accountable. Whereas when an American committed an offense it would be deemed a crime and only the perpetrator could be punished — if he could be caught.
This drawback of peace agreements led to significant problems, usually because the civilian population — aware of appalling Indian transgressions — wanted something done, (and often weren’t too picky about what Indians it was done to).
One of the most horrific episodes in American history that can be attributed to just such a peace agreement fiasco happened in Colorado. In 1864, Governor John Evans of Colorado was getting fed up with the Indians. In that same year, Colonel John Chivington of the Third Colorado Calvary announced that the Cheyenne “will have to be soundly whipped before they will be quiet,” and the Rocky Mountain News,” urged “a few months of active extermination against the red devils.”
That summer Governor Evans encouraged Colorado citizens to kill any hostile Indian found outside a reservation, and thus violent encounters between Indians and Coloradans escalated. Out on the Colorado plains, Indians who wanted peace grew alarmed.
Finally, in late September, under the escort of Major Edward Wyncoop, seven anxious chiefs (Arapaho and Cheyenne) went to see Governor Evans to pledge their peaceful intentions and beg his help. But Evans accused them of being hostile and of supporting the warring Sioux to the north. At the end of their meeting, Evans told the Indians that the matter was in the hands of the military authorities and to go back to their reservations.
THE INDIANS were confused by Evans speech, but many of them did as they were told (some, more wisely headed south out of Colorado — and a few, headed north to join the Sioux War). Wyncoop and others who were there, however, assumed that since the governor had ordered them back to their reservations, they would be safe there. (At subsequent congressional hearings, it was determined that the Indians who had stayed on their reservation along a dry Bend of Sand Creek believed themselves to be at peace and under the protection of the government.)
In November, the Third Regiment of Colorado Calvary commanded by Colonel Chivington attacked the Indians at Sand Creek. Soldiers butchered the men, raped and mutilated the women, shot at children for sport, and then carried souvenir scalps and body parts back to Denver where they were prominently displayed. Three living children were also carried back to Denver and put on display in a carnival — until they were found and ransomed by the government.
After that, the plains exploded in war, peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho were sent to a reservation outside of Colorado (where it was deemed that they would be safer), and Chivington was condemned by a congressional committee for having “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre…”
Despite that decision, Chivington was allowed to resign his commission. He thereby escaped punishment and many Coloradans continued to support his actions at Sand Creek. Captain Silas M. Soule, an outspoken critic and witness against Chivington wasn’t so lucky, however; he was murdered on the streets of Denver, but the crime precipitated little investigation and no charges were ever brought.
Obviously, it didn’t pay to be peaceful unless other members of your tribe were peaceful, and universal peace was probably never a possibility for the loosely organized Navajo.
The Navajos not-very-peaceful peace negotiations, however, actually started out badly long before the disaster at Sand Creek.
In the midst of the Mexican War (1846-1848), the newly conquered New Mexico territory was a mess. This region included Colorado south of the Arkansas (from Salida in the north), and was a place where numerous tribes came together: among them the Utes, Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, Apache, Navajo, Comanche, and Pueblo. Unrest during the war was endemic, and most residents of New Mexico — including Anglo traders, Hispanic New Mexicans, numerous Indian bands and the U.S. government — were clamoring that Charles Bent, the newly appointed territorial governor, do something to quell civil upheaval and marauding Indians. Victory in this endeavor was not Bent’s fate, however.
It should be noted that Kit Carson was Charles Bent’s brother-in-law; because Carson had married Josefa, the younger sister of Bent’s wife, Maria Ignacio Jaramillo Bent.
The Rocky mountain scouts, traders and mountain men of the pre-civil war era were pretty closely tied. Many of them occasionally worked for the Bent brothers who had built a fort on the Arkansas River near the present-day site of Las Animas, Colorado in the early 1830s. Bent’s Fort was set up to do business with the Indians and Mexican traders in those old days when New Mexico was still Mexico.
The Bents and their compatriots, however, thoroughly supported the Mexican War, even though — unbeknownst to them — it would mark the end of the trapper/trading era and the inauguration of general Indian warfare in New Mexico and on the plains of Colorado.
THOUGH NEW MEXICO had been taken without resistance at the very onset of the Mexican War, many citizens were not happy with events. And they were particularly unhappy about the persistent Navajo raids that occurred while the infant government of New Mexico struggled with paperwork, property and organization issues.
In January of 1847, the beleaguered Governor Bent was killed and scalped in his home in the presence of his wife and children by a group of irate Mexicans and Pueblo Indians. Pinning Bent’s scalp to a board, his attackers went off in search of other prey — while friendly Mexicans buried the body of Charles Bent and escorted his shaken family to safety.
The American west was changing, swiftly, violently and irrevocably. In the next few years, ’49ers poured into California, Mormons settled in Utah, and wagontrains forged west. In his book, The Rockies, David Lavender tries to capture the Indian view of all this progress:
“Other portents unsettled the mountain tribes. They knew how swiftly and brutally the scattered bands in California were being displaced by the gold rushers. They listened to tales of the wars in southern Oregon and to reports of the growing rebelliousness among the tribes of the Columbia Plateau. With grim joy they heard of the success of the Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico, where red warriors raided the settlements with such impunity that angry citizens of Santa Fe hanged their territorial governor to the flagpole in the central plaza in protest.”
As the turbulent 1840s drew to a close in the newly American New Mexico, there were numerous complaints of Navajo raids, so the new governor and his troops marched west into Navajo country to sign a treaty. Whereupon a very old and venerable Navajo named Narbona came forward. He explained to the governor that there were lawless men everywhere but that he would do his utmost to apprehend the guilty and restrain the wicked. Narbona then offered the officials 150 sheep and several horses and mules to show his serious intent.
THUS A TREATY of “perpetual peace and friendship,” was signed. But before that initial gathering broke up, a New Mexican demanded another horse, and the Navajo wheeled away on their ponies in disgust. At that point, the governor ordered his troops to fire, and several Navajo were killed, including the octogenarian Narbona.
Although it may not seem possible, the Navajo situation deteriorated even more after Fort Defiance was built in 1851 in the middle of what the Indians considered to be their finest pasturelands. Although conflicts were still sporadic, the Navajo weren’t happy. The soldiers told the Navajo to keep their stock off the fort’s meadows, but the Navajo had no fences. There were several skirmishes between Navajos and soldiers over pastureland in the 1850s. But still, on the whole, those quarrels tended to be minor incidents.
And then the soldiers started killing the Navajo’s horses. In 1860, Navajos led by Manuelito and Barboncito attacked Fort Defiance, determined to reclaim their land once and for all, but they were unsuccessful. The Indians fled, and the soldiers gave chase, but the combat dissolved into occasional clashes.
In 1861, many Navajo leaders agreed to meet with General Canby at the new Fort Fauntleroy, south of Fort Defiance, but the festivities included a horse race. The race had barely begun when Manuelito’s horse faltered, then ran off the track; the bridle had apparently been cut. The Navajo demanded a rematch, but the judges — all soldiers — refused, and the Navajo stormed them. The soldiers retreated into the fort to regroup.
Captain Nicholas Hodt wrote an account of the ensuing battle:
“The Navahos, squaws, and children ran in all directions and were shot and bayoneted … I saw a soldier murdering two little children and a woman; I ran up as quick as I could, but could not get there soon enough to prevent him from killing the two innocent children … Meanwhile the colonel had given orders to the officer of the day to have the artillery brought out to open upon the Indians. The sergeant in charge of the mountain howitzers pretended not to understand the order given, for he considered it an unlawful order…”
After that, all pretense of peace ended.
In 1862, General James Carleton replaced Canby as departmental commander in New Mexico, and shortly afterwards he prohibited all councils with the Indians. That fall he issued orders that “the men are to be slain whenever and wherever they can be found.”
Kit Carson knew full well the problems that had led to the decision to remove the Navajo to the Bosque Redondo reservation, and he entered into that campaign reluctantly. Carson complained that he had signed on to fight a Civil War, not to fight Indians, and at one point, he even resigned his commission. But then he went back.
MOST HISTORIANS agree that Carson was only partially literate at best, and some believe that he could not read nor write at all and could only sign his name. The famed scout, Indian agent, and mountain man was not a commander nor a creator of policy.
Whether Carson would have protested Carleton’s heavy-handedness to higher authorities if he’d been a more literate and bureaucratically savvy officer can only be guessed upon, although, of course, there are historians who do guess upon it. It’s doubtful though, since Carleton was not — by the standards of the time — much more brutal than many others. About Sand Creek, however, Carson’s record is clear. He labeled Chivington and his men cowards and dogs for killing woman and children.
By fall of 1863, employing a scorched earth policy, Carson destroyed the Navajo herds and farms between Fort Canby and Canyon de Chelly. In the winter, he turned his troops on Canyon de Chelly ordering that all Navajo property there be destroyed — which included about 3,000 fruit trees.
According to Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Navajo contemporaries of Carson, who were warriors themselves, could forgive Carson for ravaging their farms, destroying their food, attacking their men, and making prisoners of them, but they never forgave him for destroying those peach orchards — which they had tended “since the days of the Spaniards.”
THE LONG MARCH to the Bosque Redondo actually happened in four stages. The first Indians were sent to the reservation that winter with the best possible rations and superior provisions, whereupon their leader was encouraged to return and tell his friends that interment was far better than risking starvation and freezing in their devastated homeland.
Good rations soon gave out, however, and by February many Navajo were huddled together at Forts Canby and Wingate without sufficient food or adequate clothing. In March, they left for the Redondo in three separate groups, and more than 300 died on route.
In 1864, Kit Carson was ordered by General Carleton to battle about 3,000 Indians — Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa. Officers were ordered to use whatever means were necessary, but according to The American Heritage Book of Indians, “some officers — such as Colonel Kit Carson and Colonel John C. Cremony, who had known the Apaches for years, simply ignored the orders to kill all men and take the women and children prisoner and accepted Apache surrenders.” Perhaps, at this point, the old Indian fighter had had enough of Carleton’s orders.
There is little controversy over the conclusion that the Bosque Redondo reservation was gravely inadequate — unfit for herding or cultivation, with alkaline fields and brackish water, prone to cycles of drought and flooding, devoid of sheltering vegetation. On the Bosque some Indians ended up living in burrows dug in the ground; disease prevailed; crops failed again and again.
Because many Navajo braved the soldiers and escaped the Bosque Redondo, in 1865 Carleton ordered the post commander to kill any Navajo found off the reservation without a pass. But over the years, General Carleton’s tyrannical policies had become a source of dispute in New Mexico, and the costs of containing the Indians on that barren reservation were also questioned. Finally Carleton was relieved of command, and investigators and officials streamed in from Washington to view the site.
The new superintendent, A.B. Norton wrote: “The water is black and brackish, scarcely bearable to the taste, and said by the Indians to be unhealthy, because one-fourth of their population have been swept away … The sooner it is abandoned and the Indians removed the better … Would any sensible man select a spot for a reservation for 8,000 Indians where the water is scarcely bearable, where the soil is poor and cold, and where the muskite roots 12 miles distant are the only wood for the Indians to use?”
Finally, in the summer of 1868, General William Tecumseh Sherman arrived at the Bosque Redondo to send the Navajo home.
Martha Quillen edits Colorado Central in Salida when she’s not gardening or reading.
