The Road to Bosque Redondo: Kit Carson and the Navajo Trail of Tears

The woman knew the old ewe by her chipped horn. On an October morning in 1862, in the Chuska Valley, she cut the animal out of her flock and held her steady while her fourteen-year-old daughter made the kill. The sheep belonged to the woman, as the hogan and the fields did, and one day they would pass to the girl, down a line of women whose names the family could recite. The drought had not lifted in more than a year. That night the camp ate meat for the first time in eleven days.

Within two years, soldiers under Kit Carson had burned the cornfields, cut down the peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly and killed or seized the flocks, and more than eight thousand Diné had been marched at gunpoint to Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River. Hundreds died on the forced marches that became known as the Long Walk, and many more in the camp, where the water was alkaline and the crops failed season after season.

The narrative moves between the Diné and the trapper who never learned to read and rose to command a regiment of New Mexico volunteers, through the roundup of 1863, the campaign into Canyon de Chelly, the Mescalero Apache confined beside the Diné, and the treaty of June 1868 that sent the people home to a reservation inside the four sacred mountains. They walked back into a country stripped almost bare. The flocks that had been the women's wealth had to be built again, nearly from nothing.