This was my senior history thesis at U. C. Berkeley, which won the Miller Award in that long-ago year for the best history of the American West.  Besides removing the voluminous footnotes, I have done some minor stylistic editing and added photographs. It is based for the most part on primary historical sources including journals, books, and letters written by the participants, newspaper accounts of the day, as well as reports by government officials to Congress.  

NAVAJO TREATIES:

THE SEARCH FOR PEACE IN NEW MEXICO

During the twenty-two years between 1846 and 1868, the United States made seven peace treaties with the Navajo people of northwestern New Mexico Territory. Not one of the treaties proved an effective instrument for establishing a permanent peace. Although those on both sides of the dispute hoped a lasting peace would result, the treaty terms – based on unappreciated cultural differences – were unrealistic and failed to address key underlying problems. Consequently, neither side was able to live up to the promises made.

To understand why the treaties failed, one must appreciate the culture of the Navajos and their relationship to the other inhabitants of New Mexico. When the United States Army invaded New Mexico in the first months of the Mexican War, its leaders soon learned from the New Mexicans and the Pueblo Indians that “the inhabitants [of the area] are sometimes compelled to retreat, with all their stock, to avoid attacks of the Eutaws and Navajoes, who pounce upon them and carry off their women, children and cattle.” The Americans were told that “in these excursions [the Navajos] take care to leave enough stock to enable the Spaniards to make another start. They have told the Mexicans several times that if it was not for the service they rendered them in raising stock, they would kill them all off.” The Navajo raids, directed primarily at stealing livestock – but also at capturing women and children for slaves – were a severe hardship on the New Mexicans and the Pueblo Indians.

But the Americans were not immediately aware that the Navajos were subject to the same attacks by the New Mexicans. It was several years before the Americans realized that, as a long-time resident of New Mexico noted, the “occasion of hostilities has been, the Navajoes have been inclined to steal from the Mexicans, and when they do not, the Mexicans steal from them. During their forays, on both sides, they kill and rob, taking flocks and herds . . . and cattle and prisoners, and keep them as servants. . . . . This has been a hereditary thing from generation to generation.”

 Canyon de Chelly

Centuries of Conflict

The adversary relationship of the Navajos to the New Mexicans was nearly two hundred years old when the Americans arrived in 1846 to assume control of the vast territories taken in the Mexican War. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Navajos began to herd the sheep and ride the horses brought into the Indian lands that the Spaniards would call New Mexico. The Navajos’ greatly increased mobility and the abundance of sheep, most of which were owned by the Spanish immigrants, led to the emergence of Navajo raiding.

The Spanish also brought with them the custom of using captured Indians as slaves, known as Genízaros. The New Mexico slave trade was supplied by Spanish (and later, Mexican) slave raiders, as well as Ute, Apache, Pueblo, and Navajo Indians, who preyed upon each other and sold their captives to the Spanish, and later to the Mexicans. The Spanish held official slave-trading fairs at Taos, New Mexico during the eighteenth century.

Navajo culture made it possible for each local band to decide where, when, or if to raid at all. Bands of Navajos from the remote areas, distant from New Mexican and Pueblo settlements, often raided them and escaped to the interior of Navajo country, knowing the New Mexican reprisals which would surely follow would be upon the Navajos living closest to the New Mexicans.

In Navajo culture, each band acted on its own and the independence of every individual within the band was fully respected. Each individual Navajo was controlled not by sanctions from the top of a hierarchy but by lateral sanctions. Decisions at meetings had to be unanimous. Certain older and/or wealthy Navajos were recognized as local leaders, or headmen, and as such were occasionally able to influence groups larger than their small local bands, to “The People” (as the Navajos refer to themselves). But it was fundamentally indecent for a single individual to presume to make decisions for a group. Leadership to them did not mean “outstandingness” or anything like untrammeled power over the actions of others. In fact, “it has never been established that there ever was a ‘Navaho Tribe’ in the sense of an organized, centralized ‘political’ entity.”

 Navajo Elder

The culture of the semi-nomadic, pastoral Navajos, with its emphasis on the individual and its leaders’ inability to make decisions for the entire tribe, was utterly foreign to the Americans. The culture of the New Mexicans was, to a lesser degree, foreign to the Americans as well. The New Mexicans had a different religion, different customs, and spoke a different language, though not as foreign to the Americans as Navajo language and culture.

Despite their unfamiliarity with both New Mexican and Navajo culture, the Americans who took control of New Mexico immediately set out to bring peace to the newest acquisition of the expanding United States. They felt omnipotent after their easy victory over the Mexicans and believing as they did in the effectiveness of legal treaties and the superiority of Western civilization, foresaw no trouble in solving the “Navajo problem.”

Doniphan’s Treaty Of 1846

 Santa Fe 1846

Four days after the unopposed entrance of the American Army into Santa Fe in August 1846, General Stephen Kearny made clear his intention “to protect the persons and property of all quiet and peaceable inhabitants within [New Mexico’s] boundaries, against their enemies, the Eutaws, the Navajos, and others.” Before leaving Santa Fe to conquer California a month later, Kearny met with the headmen of the Pueblo, Ute, and Apache Indians and obtained promises that these tribes – all mutual enemies and long-time foes of the New Mexicans – would “be peaceable, orderly, respect the lives and property of the Mexicans and be obedient to the laws of the United States.”

 Stephen Kearny

Despite their assurances that they would come to Santa Fe, the Navajos were the only major tribe which failed to send an official delegation before Kearny departed for California. The General viewed the Navajos’ absence as an unfriendly gesture and ordered Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan, the new commanding officer for New Mexico, to seek out the Navajos in their own country and determine their intentions. Colonel Doniphan was ordered to “cause all prisoners, and all property [the Navajos] hold, which may have been stolen from the inhabitants of the Territory of New Mexico, to be given up [and to] require of them such security for their future good conduct, as he may think ample and sufficient, by taking hostages or otherwise.”

Doniphan and his forward detachments heard numerous accounts of Navajo raids on the Pueblo Indians which resulted in the capture of Pueblo women, children, and livestock, and of the Pueblo reprisals that followed. On at least two occasions, Doniphan and his officers witnessed Pueblo celebrations featuring the scalps of captured Navajo raiders. Doniphan learned that one of three Navajo scalps at the Isleta Pueblo had actually been taken by a Lieutenant Grier, who served in a detachment previously ordered to the vicinity of Navajo country by General Kearny. Grier had been retaliating against the Navajos on behalf of the Isleta Pueblos.

As Doniphan’s expedition left Santa Fe for Navajo country, one of Grier’s fellow officers, Captain Reid, also made contact with the Navajos in their homeland. Reid and his small detachment of thirty men met with about forty Navajo men and women. They spent their first night feasting and dancing with the Navajos. Reid and his out-numbered troops followed the Indians to another location the second day and there found themselves in the midst of another celebration, this time with more than five hundred Navajos. Captain Reid commented on what an enjoyable evening was had by all, noting that his troops and the Navajo warriors particularly enjoyed trying on each other’s clothing.

After a great deal of effort, Reid succeeded in calling a general meeting with the headmen who were present and found that, while some of the leaders failed to see any benefit in dealing with the New Mexicans – for whom they felt a deep hatred – most of the Navajo headmen favored peace. None expressed objections to dealing with the newly arrived Americans. While Reid’s optimistic report likely encouraged Colonel Doniphan, whom he rejoined in early November, Reid’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Congreve Jackson, must have been a bit skeptical about the Navajos’ attitude, since a Navajo raiding party had stolen most of his horses and mules while Reid was away.

Colonel Doniphan reached Ojo del Oso, or Bear Spring, the designated meeting place for the treaty negotiations, on November 21, 1846. The one hundred and eighty American troops were met by five hundred Navajos gathered by Doniphan’s officers to attend the council. Speeches, alternately given by spokesmen for each side, began that day and lasted until sunset. The chief Navajo spokesman, known to the whites as Zarcillos Largos (Long Earrings) and to the Navajos as Naat’aalee (Peace Chanter), was described by a witness as “a young man, bold and intellectual.” Naat’aalee stated that he admired the “spirit and enterprise [of the Americans], but he detested the Mexicans.”

 Alexander Doniphan

On the second day of negotiations, the Americans’ bargaining position was somewhat improved with the arrival of a hundred and fifty more troops. Speeches continued throughout the day. Doniphan stated that the United States had control of New Mexico and its laws, therefore, were now applicable. The New Mexicans were to be protected in rights and property, as were the “red children” of the United States. Doniphan urged the Navajos to work toward concluding a treaty with him, because if they “refused to treat on terms honorable to both parties, he was instructed to prosecute a war against them . . . . He first offered the olive branch, and, if that were rejected, then powder, bullet, and the steel.”

Naat’aalee responded that the United States had a strange complaint against the Navajos, who had also been at war with the New Mexicans for years, and with just cause. Now the United States was turning on the Navajos for fighting a war which the United States was still fighting in other regions. “This is our war. We have more right to complain of you for interfering in our war, than you have to quarrel with us for continuing a war we had begun long before you got here.”

Colonel Doniphan responded that the New Mexicans had surrendered; they no longer wanted to fight. He tried to explain that it was an American custom to treat defeated enemies as friends. Therefore, to hurt the New Mexicans was to hurt the United States.

Naat’aalee must have had difficulty understanding the notion of surrender and the sudden treatment of ex-enemies as friends, since the Navajo language at that point had no word corresponding to the English word “surrender.” Naat’aalee responded on a purely pragmatic level, stating that if the United States really was in control of New Mexico and intended to hold it in the future, the Navajos would “cease our depredations and refrain from future wars upon that people [the New Mexicans]; for we have no cause for quarrel with you, and do not desire to have any war with so powerful a nation.”

On that note of practicality, Naat’aalee and thirteen other Navajo headmen signed Doniphan’s treaty, the simplest of the seven treaties that would be made with the tribe. It declared that a firm and lasting peace existed between the Navajos and the Americans, who also represented the New Mexicans and the Pueblo Indians. A mutual trade was to be established and both signing parties were allowed free travel, without molestation, in the other’s territory with “full protection mutually given.”

The two most significant articles of the treaty, and those which proved the most difficult for either side to comply with, concerned the mutual restoration of all prisoners and property taken since the Americans had arrived in New Mexico. Clearly Doniphan was not yet sufficiently familiar with the relationship of the Navajos to the New Mexicans and the other Indian tribes of the area. A Navajo headman described the situation well when, while making a treaty three days later with the Zuni Indians under the encouragement of Colonel Doniphan, he said the “war between the Navajo and the Zuni has been waged for plunder. You kill, and drive off our flocks and herds, and subsist your people upon them . . . . To resent [sic] this, we have plundered your villages, taken your women and children captives, and made slaves of them. Lately you have been unsuccessful. We have out stole you, and therefore you are mad and dissatisfied about it.”

The Navajo headmen who signed Doniphan’s treaty in November 1846 did not have sufficient authority with all of the Navajos to affect a lasting peace with the New Mexicans. Marcellus Ball Edwards, a member of Lieutenant Colonel Jackson’s battalion, noted in his journal that two Navajos who came into their camp “say the Navajo are divided among themselves – a war party and a peace party – and when they left, there was a possibility of being a civil war with them.” While the idea of a civil war between the Navajos was highly unlikely, a division within the tribe would continue to exist. Such a split may have accounted for the renewal of Navajo raids in 1847.

Newby’s Treaty Of 1848

Whatever the reason for the increase in Navajo raids, the interim governor, Donaciano Vigil, declared in his proclamation to the people of New Mexico – only three months after Doniphan’s treaty was signed – that the Navajos had returned to their old habits of molesting and killing the citizens of the Territory and that, therefore, the government disavowed the treaty. Vigil then urged “that all citizens of the Territory form a volunteer force that takes the war to the homes of said tribe.” All property taken from the Navajos during the campaigns was to be considered spoils of war, to be divided equally among the volunteers, except property stolen by the Navajos during the first month of the campaign, which was to be returned to the original owners.

 Donaciano Vigil

The New Mexicans’ volunteer campaigns met with a good deal of success. Colonel E. W. E. Newby, commander of the Military Department of New Mexico, noted that the volunteers had succeeded “in taking from the Indians by stealth, immense numbers of cattle and sheep, leaving the Indians with about as much as properly belongs to them.” Baptismal records from New Mexico indicate the volunteers were successful not only in taking Navajo property, but in taking Navajos themselves. These records confirm that Navajo children were baptized in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, and other towns during 1847.

The United States military commanders in New Mexico may have intentionally failed to discourage Navajo raids immediately following the New Mexicans’ unsuccessful January 1847 uprising against American rule. This revolt, led by New Mexican and Pueblo conspirators, resulted in the death of Governor Charles Bent and several other American officials. The American response was quick and strong and severely reduced the powers of the already weak local civil government, mainly comprised of wealthy New Mexicans. During 1847 there was, in fact, no effective civil government in New Mexico and the American military government was extremely unpopular with the New Mexicans. The mutual distrust and lack of communication between the Americans and the New Mexicans meant little or nothing was done to halt either the Navajo raids or the New Mexican campaigns against them.

Whether as the cause of, or as a response to, the New Mexican campaigns, Navajo depredations upon the New Mexicans and their flocks continued and increased in the spring of 1848. Public outcry against the Navajo raids and demands for government action were voiced repeatedly in newspaper articles during March and April. Colonel Newby, “having received, for a long time previous almost daily intelligence of the terrible outrages and devastation committed by the Navajo . . . upon the persons and property of the Mexican inhabitants,” left Santa Fe on the first of May with two hundred Missouri and Illinois Volunteers to commence a campaign against the Navajos.

After a brief and militarily ineffectual campaign, Colonel Newby did manage to negotiate a treaty with eight Navajo headmen, including Naat’aalee. Newby’s treaty was based on Doniphan’s eighteen months earlier, with the additional demand that the Navajos pay the expenses of Newby’s campaign with three hundred sheep and one hundred mules and horses. There was also an explicit pledge that the United States would force the New Mexicans to observe the treaty strictly, probably as a result of Navajo complaints about New Mexican raids during the previous year and a half.

Clearly the Navajos who made the treaty with Colonel Newby did so in good faith. Newby reported that the Navajos gave him the sheep and horses stipulated by the treaty and also gave up twelve New Mexicans they held as captives. On August 23, 1848, the Santa Fe Republican reported that a “large party of Navajos came in the other day with more captives, and delivered them over to Governor Vigil.” On the other hand, there is no indication any Navajos held as captives by the New Mexicans were returned to their tribe; in fact, several more baptisms of Navajo children were recorded in New Mexican towns during 1848 and 1849.

Washington’s Treaty Of 1849

Despite Navajo compliance with the treaty up to that point, the Republican expressed lack of confidence the Navajos would uphold the treaty for long, and recommended more troops be sent to the Territory who could “lay [the Navajo country] waste and wage a war of destruction, until they are anxious for peace.”

Colonel Newby’s replacement as military commander of New Mexico, Lieutenant Colonel John M. Washington, shared the view that further demonstrations of American military power would be necessary to insure peace. In an expression of common nineteenth century thinking, Washington believed military force would induce the Navajos to “change from their present roving habits to the pursuit of agriculture – from the savage state to that of civilization. . . . It is hoped that the day is not too far distant when all the Indian tribes will be readily induced to make or accede to such terms as the United States shall dictate.”

 John Washington

Washington’s reports through the spring of 1848 noted an increase in Navajo raids on the ranchers of New Mexico. He recommended the Indians be made aware of American power “by establishing a settled policy and enforcing it by the most active and vigorous measures.” Washington undertook those vigorous measures on August 27, 1849, when he and seven companies of American troops and one company of Pueblo Indians left the Jemez Pueblo for Navajo country.

Eight days later, Washington and his command, accompanied by Indian Agent James S. Calhoun, arrived at the Tunicha Valley in Navajo country. They were met by a group of several hundred Navajos desiring to make a treaty. Washington began the talks by informing the Navajos he had come to chastise them for stealing. Narbona, an aged, frail, and much-venerated headman who had signed Doniphan’s treaty, “replied that lawless men were to be found everywhere, that such secreted themselves during the day, and prowled about at night – that their utmost vigilance had not rendered it possible for the chiefs and good men to apprehend the guilty, or to restrain the wicked.” The Navajos present wanted to make restitution by returning stolen livestock, New Mexican captives, and the murderer of a New Mexican citizen. They discussed and agreed to the outline of a treaty to be concluded within the next few days at the Cañon de Chelly, a nearly impregnable canyon long occupied by Navajo bands. The Navajos proceeded to turn over one hundred head of stolen livestock as a sign of good faith.

 Narbona

At this point, the peaceful negotiations were interrupted by a Pueblo Indian who claimed to have seen one of the Navajo warriors riding a horse that had been stolen from him. Washington demanded the horse be returned to the Pueblo Indian at once. When his order was not obeyed by the Navajos, who had at that point mounted their horses, he ordered a detachment to bring in the horse and rider. When informed the stolen horse and its rider were not to be found, Washington himself ventured out into the tense crowd of Navajos and soldiers and ordered the horse seized, at which time the Navajos “wheeled, and put the spur to their horses.” Washington ordered the troops to open fire on the fleeing Navajos. Headman Narbona was the first to fall. He was scalped by souvenir-seeking troops. About four other Navajos were killed.

From the Tunicha Valley, Washington’s command proceeded to the Cañon de Chelly. As they rode through the canyon, the soldiers were hailed by hidden Navajos, whose voices pleaded for settlement of the conflict by treaty. Deep in the Cañon de Chelly, they were met by a small group of Navajos, one of whom claimed to be the head chief of the tribe and another who claimed to be the second chief – hierarchical positions that did not, in fact, exist. The two headmen agreed to Washington’s conditions and pledged to appear the next day to conclude the treaty. On September 9, 1849, the treaty was signed by the two headmen, who surrendered one hundred and four more sheep, a few horses, and four New Mexican captives as a sign of their good faith.

The treaty itself was the most complicated yet concluded with the Navajos. It was one of only two treaties actually ratified by the United States Senate and proclaimed by the President. Several of the terms agreed to by the two headmen were extremely significant to the Navajos: to forever be under the jurisdiction of the United States; to obey all American laws concerning trade (of which they knew nothing); to recognize the government of New Mexico and the annexation of their territory to New Mexico; to return all American, New Mexican, or Indian captives and property taken – with no reciprocal pledge by the Americans or New Mexicans; to allow the United States to establish military posts wherever and whenever it so desired; and to allow the United States to establish territorial boundaries for them and pass any legislation “deemed conducive to the prosperity and happiness of said Indians;” and, finally, that the treaty was binding upon both parties “subject only to such modifications and amendments as may be adopted by the Government of the United States.” Judging from the scope of the one-sided terms to which they agreed, the Navajos who signed were extremely anxious to settle with the soldiers and see them head back to Santa Fe.

By the early months of 1850, Agent Calhoun reported learning that while the Navajos wished to comply with Washington’s treaty, internal dissention within the tribe prevented full compliance. Several years later, then-Superintendent of Indian Affairs for New Mexico, J. L. Collins, recalled that during talks with American officials in 1851, Navajo headmen “alleged that Washington’s treaty was previously made with Indians who had no authority to treat for the nation.” Navajo dissatisfaction with the lack of true representation in the treaty-making process and internal dissension over the content may account for the increase in Navajo raids on New Mexico ranches during the winter and spring of 1851.

Fort Defiance

 Fort Defiance

In the late summer and early fall of that year, Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner led another campaign into Navajo country in an attempt to stop depredations on New Mexicans. While Sumner’s campaign was a failure militarily, it did have important consequences for the Navajos. The most significant was the establishment of the first military post in the heart of Navajo country, built by Sumner’s forces. It was constructed in an area sacred to the Navajos. The outpost was appropriately named Fort Defiance.

Other consequences of Sumner’s campaign were two verbal agreements made with the Navajos in the late fall. On October 26, 1851, Major Electus Backus, the commanding officer of Fort Defiance, met there with a large group of Navajos, including the influential Naat’aalee. The Navajos agreed, “in their part, to cease hostilities and depredations against the troops of the United States, the citizens of New Mexico, and the pueblas [sic].”

 Edwin Sumner

Two months later, Colonel Sumner and Territorial Governor James Calhoun, the former Indian agent, met with two hundred Navajos at Jemez Pueblo. Colonel Sumner, known to his troops as “Bull-head Sumner,” informed the Navajos that the troops at Fort Defiance would never let them plant another crop until they were at peace. Sumner reported that the Navajos “promised to keep quiet, and to restore all their Mexican prisoners, and as a pledge that they would keep faith they gave up three hostages.”

One very serious handicap undermining the effectiveness of the verbal negotiations between the Americans and the Navajos in 1851, and, indeed, throughout the entire treaty-making period, was the language barrier. From Doniphan’s treaty of 1846 to the final treaty of 1868, all talks between the Navajos and the Americans had to be translated from English to Spanish by one interpreter, and from Spanish to Navajo by another. Navajo responses were then relayed back through the two interpreters. While he was Indian agent, Calhoun noted that “I have not found a single individual in the country, who can render any one of the languages of the Pueblos, or Navajoes, into English.” Of the interpreters the Army did find to use in its dealings with the Navajos, most were illiterate. Those few who could read and write were paid twice as much as the “Common [illiterate] Interpreter.”

The job of translating is extremely important and difficult, especially in the context of drafting legal agreements such as treaties. It is particularly difficult to translate Navajo into Spanish or English, languages which are structurally different from Navajo. “Bewildered by the lack of structural correspondences between the two tongues, most interpreters succumb to one or both of two temptations, either they leave out a great deal in passing from Navaho to English (or vice versa); or they translate all too freely, projecting their own meanings into sentences they ‘translate.’” The interpreters used in all talks between the Navajos and the Americans were hired by the Americans. One can assume that when interpreters deleted passages or supplied their own meanings, those translations may have tended to be what their American employers wanted to hear, rather than necessarily the ideas the headmen were trying to convey.

Although the Navajos committed very few depredations for the next five or six years, they were still being raided by the New Mexicans and other Indians. In the first Assembly of the New Mexican Territorial Legislature, a joint resolution was passed calling for the formation of two volunteer regiments to fight against the Territory’s Indians. Baptisms of Navajo children were recorded in 1850-1852. Antonio Sandoval, the leader of a band of Navajos which had removed itself from the main body of the tribe years earlier, reportedly sold Navajo slaves at the town of Cebolleta in 1851.

In the spring of 1852 Indian Agent John Greiner asked Navajo headman Armijo if it were not true that the New Mexicans were suffering from Navajo raids. Armijo replied: “My people are all crying in the same way. . . . Eleven times have we given up our Captives – only once have they given us ours. My people are yet crying for the children they have lost. Is it American justice that we must give up everything and receive nothing?”

       

The Treaty of 1855

The fourth attempt to establish a permanent peace by treaty came in the summer of 1855, when Territorial Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs David Meriwether met with the tribe at Laguna Negra, a few miles from Fort Defiance. The purpose of the treaty was to establish territorial boundaries for the tribe, rather than to halt a war or depredations, which were not a problem at the time. Meriwether felt that by removing the Navajos from the land nearest white settlements, friction would be reduced and the Navajos would be less exposed to the corrupting influence of the white frontier towns. He also hoped that paying the tribe for ceded land and deducting from that annuity any restitutions due to New Mexican victims of Navajo depredations would “induce one band to watch the others, and all would be made to feel that stealing and robbery had become less profitable.” This was a new approach to dealing with the Navajos, and it reflected Meriwether’s at least limited understanding of the independence of each band of the tribe.

 David Meriwether

On the first day of negotiations, Meriwether, accompanied by a company of dragoons, explained the terms of the treaty to two thousand assembled Navajo warriors and headmen. One of those terms was that any Navajo committing an offense against the citizens of New Mexico was to be surrendered to the Americans for punishment. William Watts Hart Davis, Secretary of the Territory of New Mexico, noted that Naat’aalee “remarked that it was their custom, and they would rather pay a renunciation for offenses, than surrender the offender.” Meriwether refused to change the article and told the Navajos they had until the next day at noon to decide on the treaty. During the night rumors abounded of plans for a Navajo sneak attack on the Americans – and vice versa.

The headmen spent the next morning “in conference with their people, considering the propositions made to them the day before.” At noon, twenty headmen joined Governor Meriwether and they discussed the treaty for two hours. During this time, Naat’aalee said he had no control over his people and resigned his place as the tribe’s head spokesman, a position to which he had been appointed by Meriwether two years earlier, but a position which of course was not recognized by Navajo culture. The headman Manuelito, who had signed Doniphan’s treaty and was in later years to figure as a strong spokesman for the pro-war faction of the tribe, was appointed to replace Naat’aalee.

 Manuelito

While the Navajos discussed the treaty, a battalion of artillery arrived at the camp. The artillery fired a traditional military salute, which the Navajos may have seen as something of a threat. The headmen agreed to the treaty and signed their marks to the document. It was noted by Meriwether that “the Indians became so impatient to depart to their homes as to render it impossible to detain them long enough to enable us to make a more perfect copy [of the treaty]”

Although the Navajos may have felt pressured into signing the treaty, their Indian agent, Henry L. Dodge – probably the most popular agent ever to work with the Navajos – reported that they went home “very much delighted” with the size of the territory that had been reserved for them. The area was quite extensive and even lacked a western boundary.

 Henry L. Dodge

In fact, it was such a generous a piece of land, and the ensuing outcry from the citizens of New Mexico was so great, that the territorial representatives to the Senate made objections which were instrumental in bringing about the United States Senate’s rejection of the treaty. Had the treaty been ratified, $98,000 in cash or goods would have been awarded to the Navajos over the next twenty-five years for the large area of land ceded to the United States. Other articles of the treaty included: the prohibition of liquor on the reserved area; the allocation of small tracts of land to individual Navajos who wished to practice agriculture; and the issue which had troubled Naat’aalee – the surrender of Navajo lawbreakers to the Americans.

The Treaty of 1858

Over the next three years, Navajo raids on the New Mexicans and New Mexican raids on the Navajos gradually increased to their old levels of ferocity. During the winter of 1858, Brigadier General John Garland, military commander of New Mexico, reported an attack by New Mexicans on a small party of Navajos which “greatly exasperated this formidable tribe of Indians.” Superintendent of Indian Affairs Colonel James L. Collins reported that many “thefts are also charged upon Mexicans of property stolen from the Indians. While we were in council several horses were stolen from them by Mexicans. It appeared quite evident that as many causes of complaint existed on one side as the other.”

  John Garland

The general air of tension in New Mexico evolved into direct conflict between the Navajos and the Americans in early June, when Major W. T. H. Brooks, commander of Fort Defiance, claimed the right to use an area of land near the fort for growing hay for the post’s livestock. Navajo headman Manuelito was at that time using the land for grazing his cattle. In the dispute that followed, Manuelito returned his staff of office and medal, which Governor Meriwether had awarded him during the 1855 treaty council. Major Brooks ordered forty-eight of Manuelito’s cattle shot for grazing on the land he claimed for the post. On July 9 at Fort Defiance, Major Brooks’ Negro slave boy was shot in the back with an arrow. The murderer was a relative of Manuelito.

 W. T. H. Brooks

Naat’aalee’s reaction to Major Brooks’ furious demand for prompt surrender of the murderer was that Brooks “ought not to be in such a hurry; that it was six weeks since [Brooks] killed Manuelito’s cattle, and [Brooks] had done nothing yet towards paying for them.” Despite efforts by the Navajo headmen to bring in the murderer and otherwise defuse the situation – including bringing in the body of a dead New Mexican captive and claiming it to be the murderer – war broke out at the end of August when Captain George McLane attacked a party of three hundred Navajos at Ojo del Oso. Ironically, this was the site where Doniphan’s treaty of 1846 had been signed. Captain McLane was himself killed two years later in a battle with a group of Navajos.

In mid-October 1858 a Navajo sent by Manuelito told the commander of the campaign, Lieutenant Colonel Dixon S. Miles, that Manuelito was tired of the war and had not done anything to start it in the first place. Manuelito claimed “the murderer belonged to another band, over which he had no control, that it was hard for the innocent to be made to suffer for the guilty, and that the chiefs had tried to catch the murderer.” Naat’aalee, who had been wounded in the fighting, also sent word that he desired peace and that “there had been war enough for a negro.”

 Dixon S. Miles

The fighting came to a close on November 20, when an armistice was signed by ten Navajo headmen, including Naat’aalee. Included was an agreement that the headmen would appear at Fort Defiance within a month to conclude a peace treaty.

On Christmas day 1858 that treaty was signed by fifteen Navajos, but for some reason was only witnessed, not signed, by American officials. The treaty – never submitted to Congress for ratification – established an eastern boundary line for the tribe, “beyond which they agree that none of the tribe shall graze or plant nor in any other manner occupy.” Troops were allowed to destroy all flocks or crops found east of the line and were also permitted to establish military posts and send troops west of the line. The entire tribe would be held responsible for depredations committed by individual Navajos, and if restitution was not promptly rendered, troops were allowed to “make reprisals from the stock and flocks of the tribe at large.” The treaty also called for a mutual exchange of prisoners and specified that the Navajos were to return or pay in kind for all property stolen since August 15 of that year.

Soon it became clear the Americans had little confidence in the treaty and the Navajos considered it unfair. In Superintendent Collins’ report for 1859, he noted that the Navajos had returned some stolen livestock, as stipulated in the treaty. But Collins was sure the Navajos would break the treaty anyway. He recommended that “each violation of law or treaty stipulation should be followed by prompt and immediate chastisement. They deserve no mercy at our hands, and should be taught to expect none.”

Indian Agent Silas Kendrick reported to Collins that the Navajos were indeed unhappy with the treaty. He said the Navajos had understood during the treaty discussion that the restitution for stolen property was to be mutual, not solely on their part. This misunderstanding could have resulted from the language problems inherent in all dialogs between the Americans and the Navajos.

So many Navajos were dissatisfied with the treaty of 1858, and with the general relationship of the tribe to the Americans, that a tribal council, or Natch’it, the first since the early 1850s, was convened in the summer of 1859. The tribe was equally divided between pro-war and pro-peace factions, twelve headmen representing each side. Manuelito was the most vocal advocate for a warlike policy, while Naat’aalee spoke for the peace faction. Manuelito declared the Americans could never defeat the Navajos. Naat’aalee told the tribe the Americans were a “great and powerful tribe. They have magic that makes me fear for The People.” Naat’aalee then described to the tribe a dream he had in which the Navajo country was completely void of Navajos. Although many were frightened by Naat’aalee’s vision, subsequent events indicate the pro-war faction remained large and militant.

Canby’s Treaty of 1861

Navajo raids on the New Mexicans resumed in late 1858. Whether those raids were the cause of, or a response to, New Mexican slave raiding forays is, again, a matter of conjecture. But New Mexican slave raiding did increase dramatically in 1859, and even more so in 1860, which has been described as “a year unequalled since Spanish rule for frenzied citizen engagement.”

In December 1859 a raiding party of New Mexicans, Utes, and Jicarilla Apaches captured nearly four hundred head of livestock, killed four Navajos, and captured twenty-three Navajo children. The raid had been sanctioned by the Indian agent for the Utes. In the summer of 1860 a group of New Mexicans from Santa Fe burned the Navajo harvest, captured a large number of livestock, and took one hundred Navajos captive. Although many high-ranking Americans actively encouraged New Mexican slave raiding, others recognized the problem. Colonel Thomas T. Fountleroy, military commander of New Mexico, understood their problems with the Navajos “may be justly attributed in part to a system of retaliatory and predatory incursions which has been carried on by the people of this Territory against the Navajos for some time past, and which has been sanctioned by the territorial governor.” For example, the Ninth Assembly of the Territorial Legislature of 1859-1860, passed an act “authorizing any men to raise 200 or 250 volunteers and engage in [Indian] campaigns.”

 Thomas T. Fountleroy

In January 1860 Navajo hostility took the form of two attacks on the Fort Defiance beef herd. Then, one hour before dawn on April 30, between one and two thousand Navajo warriors attacked Fort Defiance itself. Such an attack was unheard of from the Navajos, who preferred surprise hit-and-run tactics. Their inexperience with this kind of battle, and the ineffectiveness of their bows and arrows and muzzle-loading rifles – which they had not yet become adept at firing – against troops armed with the best rifles and artillery, forced a Navajo retreat after less than two hours. While only one soldier was killed and several others wounded, the Navajos succeeded in emptying the post’s storage shed, a tactic of warfare with which they were much more familiar.

It was not until the following September that enough troops and supplies were available for the Army to retaliate for the attack on Fort Defiance. In late September, Lieutenant E. R. S. Canby led a force into Navajo country with the assistance of New Mexican, Pueblo, Zuni, and Ute volunteers. During the six weeks of the campaign, Canby’s troops killed twenty-eight Navajos, wounded many, took five women and children captive, and seized more than 2,000 sheep and horses. The Ute auxiliaries – who fought separately and clearly had different objectives – killed only six, took nineteen captives, and seized 5,500 sheep and horses.

In October, Naat’aalee, the Navajo headman who had worked for peace on so many occasions, was killed by a raiding party of New Mexicans and Zunis.

In November, with winter fast approaching, an armistice was agreed to which called for the conclusion of yet another treaty in February 1861. Canby’s treaty, the sixth in fifteen years, was signed by forty-eight Navajos and called upon the headmen to destroy or control the unruly members of the tribe.  If the headmen were unable to do so, troops were allowed to come and help. The sale or purchase of stolen property was prohibited and the Navajos were again required to return or pay for stolen property, with no reciprocal obligation on the New Mexicans. The Navajos also agreed to stay west of Fort Fountleroy, which lay seventy miles due west of Albuquerque. The most unusual, and least realistic, article of the treaty was the Navajos’ agreement to establish Pueblo-style communities – so contrary to their traditional culture – as soon as practicable.

 E. R. S. Canby

The treaty of 1861 was neither ratified by the Senate nor taken seriously by the citizens of the Territory. Only days after the treaty was signed, a group of New Mexican slave raiders arrived at Fort Defiance seeking shelter and food. Colonel Canby reported that the raiders “by their own statement had no complaints to make of the Navajoes, and yet they openly vow their intention to disregard the treaty and on their return home to organize a new expedition to capture Navajoes and sell them.”

The Fearing Time

New Mexican and Navajo raids increased dramatically after July 1861, when the troops at Fort Defiance were withdrawn to join the Civil War. Confederate troops from Texas occupied parts of New Mexico from the winter of 1861 through the summer of 1862. Brigadier General James H. Carleton, who replaced Canby as military commander of New Mexico in September 1862, noted that during the Confederate occupation the Navajos, “aware that the attention of our troops could not, for the time, be turned toward them, commenced robbing the inhabitants of their stock, and killed, in various places, a great number of people.”

 James H. Carleton

To restore order to the Territory, General Carleton ordered his old friend, Colonel Christopher (Kit) Carson, to lead a campaign to the Navajo country in June of 1863, during which he was to collect the entire tribe so they could be sent to a reservation established at the Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River – three hundred miles southwest of their homeland. Kit Carson’s brutal campaign would forever change the course of Navajo history.

 Kit Carson

After rebuilding the abandoned Fort Defiance, and renaming it Fort Canby, Carson attacked the Navajos in August 1863 with the assistance of Ute, Pueblo, and New Mexican auxiliaries. Unlike previous military campaigns, Carson ruthlessly destroyed the Navajos’ means of subsistence. In the Cañon de Chelly, Carson and his troops cut down nearly three thousand peach trees. To quote Carson, “I took twelve hundred sheep from them at one time, and smaller lots at different times. It took me and three hundred men most [of] one day to destroy a field of corn.” General Carleton offered an incentive to Carson’s troops: twenty dollars a head for each horse and one dollar for each sheep taken from the Navajos.

To make matters worse for the Navajos – fleeing in all directions from Carson’s troops and the bands of Utes, Pueblos, and New Mexicans who were also taking a heavy toll – the winter of 1863-1864 was especially bitter.  One Navajo survivor of Carson’s scorched earth campaign later recalled that the “starvation became terrible, those who went about with nothing but what they had on were very hungry. And then plants of any kind became their means of subsistence. . . . The different enemy groups came to trouble us. There was not a safe place left. . . . In some places, abandoning their children, they went to seek safety. [Their children] were taken forcibly from them. The Utes did so, the Mexicans did so, the Pueblo Indians did so, the Hopi did so . . . .”

So began what the Navajos called the Nahondzod, the Fearing Time.

In February 1864 the first large group of Navajos surrendered to Carson and made what became known as The Long Walk to the reservation at the Bosque Redondo, Fort Sumner, New Mexico. As one Navajo later described the Long Walk, “If there was room the soldiers put the women and children on the wagons. Some even let them ride behind them on their horses. I have never been able to understand a people who killed you one day and on the next played with your children. . . .”

The rest walked three hundred miles through country inhabited by their traditional enemies, the Pueblo Indians and New Mexicans. Many died along the way from dysentery or from attacks on them by the citizens of New Mexico. By July 1864 more than six thousand were crowded onto the Bosque Redondo’s forty square miles, along with more than three hundred Mescalero Apaches, another of their enemies, who Carson had captured in the spring of 1863. The Bosque Redondo’s maximum population was eventually to hover at about eight thousand Navajos – many thousand more than its intended capacity.

 The Long Walk

General Carleton, who devised the plan for concentrating the Navajos on the Pecos River reservation in eastern New Mexico, was a man of his times. He was neither guided by purely humanitarian nor purely brutal and mercenary intentions. Carleton’s decision to remove the Navajos from their homeland derived from often contradictory reasons. On several occasions, greed for Navajo land seemed to be the driving force behind Carleton’s plan: “Now the Navajos have yielded up their whole country, a country larger than the State of Ohio, for a few acres set apart for them upon the Pecos River.” Concerning the supposed mineral wealth of Navajo country, Carleton referred to the a area as “a real, tangible El Dorado, that has gold that can be weighed by the steelyards – gold that does not vanish when the finder is awake.”

Yet in other writings Carleton sometimes displayed apparently sincere – though paternalistic and ethnocentric – concern for the Navajos. The purpose of the reservation, he asserted, was to remove the tribe from their old hiding places “and then to be kind to them: there teach their children to read and write; teach them the Arts of Peace; teach them the truths of Christianity. Soon they will acquire new habits, new ideas, new modes of life. Until they raise enough to be self-sustaining, you can feed them cheaper than you can fight them.” Carleton misguidedly considered the Bosque Redondo internment camp a great service to the Navajos: “For pity’s sake, if not moved by any other consideration, let us, as a great nation, for once treat the Indian as he deserves to be treated. It is due to ourselves, as well as to them, that this be done.”

Whatever General Carleton’s intentions – misguidedly altruistic or despicable – the effect on the Navajos of four years’ incarceration at the bleak Bosque Redondo was utterly devastating. Carleton’s greatest hope was for the Navajos to become sedentary farmers like the Pueblo Indians, but the tribe’s first agricultural efforts at the Bosque Redondo ended in failure: the crops of 1864 and 1865 were destroyed by worms (dubbed “army worms”); the crop of 1866 was destroyed by hail and floods; and the crop of 1867 was destroyed by hail. The Navajos were so demoralized they did not even plant a crop in 1868. The nearest source of abundant firewood was twenty-five miles away. The water on the reservation made the Navajos sick and was as “black and brackish, scarcely bearable to the taste.” By summer 1867 one-fourth of the Navajos had reportedly died from disease, such as the smallpox epidemic in the winter of 1866-1867. Navajo women were reported to be aborting most of their pregnancies. In addition to the natural disasters attributable to weather and disease, the Navajos – who were to be shot if found outside the reservation without a pass – were attacked on the reservation by Comanches, Kiowas, and other hostile tribes on several occasions.

In 1865 a congressional hearing was held at the Bosque Redondo to determine the condition of the Navajo tribe and the status of the “Navajo problem.” During the hearings, a major aspect that problem – the New Mexican enslavement of Navajos – was discussed. State Chief Justice Kirby Benedict testified it “is notorious that natives of this country [New Mexico] have sometimes made captives of Navajo women and children . . . . Those who hold them are exceedingly sensitive of their supposed interest in them, and easily alarmed to any movements in the civil courts or otherwise to dispossess them of their imagined property.” The Chief Justice went on to say the rich and powerful citizens of New Mexico used their influence “to retain their grasp upon their Indian slaves.” Among those rich and powerful slave-owning citizens were the family of the Territorial Governor, an Associate Justice of the Territorial Court, and the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for New Mexico.

 Kirby Benedict

The custom of the New Mexican government to uphold the institution of Navajo slavery was reinforced by the composition of the territorial legislature. “[A]bout twenty family names include a very large majority of the membership for the whole period; and indeed, a few wealthy and influential families in each county, in connection with the few American residents controlled the election of representatives and all other matters of territorial government.” The upper-class citizens of New Mexico, known as ricos, enjoyed the long-established cultural tradition of controlling both the economic and political spheres of New Mexican society. It is not surprising the territorial government took no action to halt enslavement of the Navajos when the government was controlled by the very social class that held Navajo slaves.

When New Mexico eventually sided with the Union in the Civil War (after initially supporting the Confederacy), the territorial government began to see the issue of Navajo slavery was bound to surface in the near future. In 1862 the territorial governor stated that if the Navajos held captive by New Mexicans were to be freed, then the United States Congress should pay their owners for that freedom, “since the people could hardly be expected to lose their value, and at the same time add them to the unmanageable [Indian] population.” While the New Mexican delegates to the United States Congress agreed to the 1865 constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, it took actions by the Congress, rather than the territorial legislature, to directly address the problem of Navajo slavery in New Mexico. In 1866 Congress passed a bill abolishing all involuntary servitude in the Territory. The governor of New Mexico responded that Navajo servitude might well be voluntary and that “it would be inhuman to remove [the Navajos] from the protection of the families for whom they have worked.” The issue was finally settled by the United States Congress in 1868, when both houses passed a resolution calling for the release of Navajo captives held as “peons” by the New Mexicans.

Concerning the actual number of Navajos held by the New Mexicans, Dr. Louis Kennon, a twelve-year resident of New Mexico who had served as the Fort Defiance surgeon during the campaign of 1858, stated: “I think the number of Navajo captives held as slaves to be underestimated. I think there are from four to six thousand. I know of no family which can raise one hundred and fifty dollars but what purchases a Navajo slave, and many families have four or five – the trade in them being as regular as the trade in pigs or sheep.” Four to six thousand people – or even two thousand, as the more conservative estimates ran – was a large percentage for an entire Navajo population estimated to be from twelve to fifteen thousand.

The Treaty of 1868

  Bosque Redondo

But the enslavement of their loved ones was not at this point the major problem facing the Navajos; at the Bosque Redondo they were fighting for their very survival as a people. Considering the appalling living conditions, it is little wonder that when a special commission arrived at Fort Sumner in May 1868 to decide the fate of the tribe, the Navajos – without exception – literally begged to be allowed to return to their homeland.

Barboncito, the headman chosen by the tribe to speak for them, swore to the commissioners that if “we are taken back to our own country, we will call you our father and mother, if you should only tie a goat there we would all live off it, all of the same opinion. I am speaking for the whole tribe, for their animals from the horse to the dog, also the unborn. If we go back to our own country, we are willing to abide by whatever orders are issued to us, we do not want to go to the right or left, but straight back to our own country.”

 Barboncito

On June 1, 1868 twenty-nine Navajo headmen signed the final treaty ever concluded between the Navajos and the United States. Before the Navajos made their marks on the document, Commissioner William Tecumseh Sherman read the articles to the delegation of ten headmen unanimously approved by the tribe to act as their representatives. A reservation of 5,200 square miles was established in the heart of Navajo country, within which the tribe was to settle. Fort Canby was to be the location for the Indian agency. Only authorized non-Navajos were permitted to enter the reservation. Individual Navajos could officially claim tracts of land through their agent and those doing so were to receive annual supplies of goods, seeds, and farm equipment for the first three years. The tribe was to receive five dollars’ worth of clothing, goods, or raw materials for each Indian for the next ten years, and 15,000 sheep and goats, five hundred beef cattle, and one million pounds of corn were to be purchased and distributed to the tribe during the first year. The Navajos agreed to send their children to schools which the government promised to provide for them. The article which must have been the easiest for the Navajos to comply with stated they were to leave the Bosque Redondo as soon as the treaty was signed.

 William Tecumsah Sherman

From the Navajo perspective, the treaty of June 1, 1868 was the best of the seven treaties made with the United States. Unlike the other agreements, the 1868 treaty contained positive articles aimed at helping the tribe become economically self-sufficient in the way it knew best: raising sheep in country well-suited to pastoral activities and well-known by the Navajos. With the exception of the clause calling for Navajo children to be sent to American schools, the treaty did not force the Navajos to make promises contrary to their own cultural norms. Every other treaty had demanded the Navajos change their culture in one way or another: several had called for strict social control of all members of the tribe by their leaders; others had demanded the surrender of those Navajos who broke American laws to the American authorities who, in turn, meted out punishments far more harsh than those called for by Navajo culture; one had even called on the Navajos to completely give up their way of life – which consisted of constant wandering in search of better forage for their flocks – and to establish themselves in concentrated Pueblo type villages.

Although the treaty of 1868 did have more positive, and fewer negative and unrealistic, terms than the previous treaties, it cannot be judged the reason a permanent peace was achieved in that year. Like all the others, the treaty of 1868 failed to deal with one of the basic causes of the dispute between the Navajos and the other people of New Mexico: New Mexican enslavement of Navajos.

In the discussions before the treaty’s signing, the Navajos again brought up the issue of slavery. Barboncito asserted that “over half the tribe” was still being held as slaves by the New Mexicans. The American Peace Commissioners told the assembled Navajos that the Civil War had just been fought over the issue of slavery and that the Congress had only recently passed a law specifically outlawing slavery in the Territory of New Mexico. Yet, the Commissioners told the Navajos they would have to work through the courts of New Mexico to have Navajo slaves emancipated, since it was “a matter with which we have nothing to do.” The notion that Navajos could actually use the New Mexican court system to obtain freedom for their family members was far-fetched, to say the least.

Once the treaty was signed, the Navajos returned to their homeland. Concerning their return, Indian Agent N. M. Davis noted that “the Navajos stole and destroyed less, while passing through the settlements [of New Mexico] to their new reservation west of the Rio Grande, than would a column of the same number of soldiers.” Once back in their homeland, the Navajos were “living peaceably, happy and contented.”

Although it was many years before the Navajos reached their old levels of economic prosperity, in 1868 two hundred years of raiding by the Navajos and by their enemies came to an end.

Conclusion

While the predatory relationship between the Navajos and the New Mexicans effectively came to an end after the tribe returned from the Bosque Redondo, it was not the treaty of 1868 or any of the other six treaties which ended Navajo-New Mexican warfare. To the extent enforced, the 1868 treaty provision prohibiting the New Mexicans from entering Navajo country surely helped reduce conflict. But the physical and psychological shock the Navajos experienced during the Bosque Redondo internment years, along with increasing United States control of New Mexico and its tribes following the Civil War, and then passage of the first legislation banning slavery of Indians in New Mexico must be considered the major factors ending the Navajo-New Mexican conflict. And because of the humiliation and suffering of the Bosque Redondo years, the Navajos simply could no longer afford to be at odds with the United States Army, which had exerted a destructive force so devastating it brought the tribe to the brink of total elimination.

The seven treaties between the United States and the Navajo Indians failed to establish peace for many reasons, the most obvious of which was the inability of the two sides to effectively communicate with each other linguistically. But the inability of the Navajos and the Americans to clearly understand each other’s language was just one aspect of their greater failure to understand each other’s culture. When the Americans arrived in New Mexico they learned of the hostile relationship between the Navajos and the New Mexicans. The Americans chose to side with the New Mexicans, who had a culture different from that of the United States, but much more similar than Navajo culture.

The Americans (like the New Mexicans) viewed the Navajos as heathen, barbaric, and inferior to Western people. Mid-nineteenth century Americans commonly believed Indian culture was destined to expire under the influence of what they firmly believed was the superior culture of the West. General Carleton, for example, observed that it was God’s will “that one race of men – as in races of lower animals – shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race. . . . The races of the mammoths, and mastodons, and the great sloths, came and passed away: the red man of America is passing away!”

Thus, both from ignorance of Navajo culture and from their own ethnocentricity and racism, the Americans who wrote the Navajo treaties placed virtually all of their emphasis in attempting to solve the problem of Navajo raiding on the Navajos alone; they failed to deal with the critical flip side of the problem, New Mexican raiding. Unrealistic and unreasonable demands were forced upon and agreed to by Navajo headmen who personally favored peace. The Americans did not understand the limited authority of the headmen to speak for or control their people, nor did they appreciate that Navajo culture could not be transformed overnight to better suit it to deal with a new, alien culture and government like that of the United States.

The Americans demanded the Navajo leaders control their people, while no serious efforts were exerted to control the other citizens of New Mexico, people supposedly under the control of the United States government and for whom it was negotiating. The Americans were not sufficiently familiar with New Mexican culture and society to understand that solemn declarations by the Americans were not enough to end the centuries-long New Mexican custom of enslaving the Navajos. As long as the Americans failed to see, or chose to ignore, the part of the problem directly attributable to the aggressive actions of the New Mexicans, it was impossible to bring peace to New Mexico.

When permanent peace eventually came to pass – twenty-two years after the Americans’ arrival – it came despite the failure of seven treaties concluded between the United States and the Navajos. The treaties failed because they were based on incomplete understanding of the problem, ignorance of the conflicting cultures, and racist ethnocentricity. Only the Navajos’ devastating experience at the Bosque Redondo, which stilled any fight left in them, and the banning of Indian slavery in New Mexico, finally ended the violence and brought lasting peace to the mesas and canyons of New Mexico.

     

 

Copyright © 2014, Daniel W. Hager. All Rights Reserved.