A Rainbow in Paradise (10 page)

"In most cases, there isn't," Logan
acknowledged. "The rez is always painfully short of water, and most
areas are pitifully dry, but because of the streams that flow
through the canyon, there's water here all year long, and the
families who keep homes here take full advantage of that. The
canyon hosts many fruit orchards, and there used to be many more,"
Logan said. "In fact, in the days before the Long Walk, the People
prided themselves on the peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly. Some
of those orchards had been carefully tended for more than five
hundred years—old stock replaced by new over the generations,
mothers handing down the orchards to their daughters who passed
them along to their daughters throughout half a millennium. In fact
there were more than eight thousand peach trees in this canyon
then."

"Eight thousand?" Eden mused, once again
feeling staggered by the size of the numbers. She looked at the
wide, flat fields in the canyon's bottom and imagined them filled
with peach orchards, all in blossom. The canyon must have been
something to see in those days! "What happened?" she asked.

"Kit Carson happened." Logan's voice was
flat, without emotion.

"Not
the
Kit Carson, the famous
explorer who helped to open the West?"

"One and the same," Logan answered. "Colonel
Christopher 'Kit' Carson—but whether he 'opened the West' or not
may be up to some debate. From the point of view of my people, the
West was plenty open before he showed up and brought the
blue-coated pony soldiers with him."

"I suppose that's true." Eden hadn't realized
she was walking into a verbal minefield, but now that she knew she
was in one, she determined to watch her step. "I always thought he
worked farther east, like Texas and New Mexico."

"He did, to begin with. He had a big career
as an Army scout, got a more literate friend to help him write up
his adventures, and then quit. By the time the Confederacy split
from the Union and the United States went to war against itself,
Carson was comfortably retired from active military service and
working as the government's Indian Agent for the Utes up in the
Utah Territory. Then in 1861, when the war in the East broke out,
he reenlisted, expecting to be sent back East to fight for the
Union." Logan paused meaningfully. "I've often wondered if he would
have bothered to sign up again, if he'd known he was going to be
sent down here to put down 'the Navajo uprisings.' I rather doubt
he would have."

Once again, Eden was surprised by the tone of
his voice. "You sound like you feel sorry for him."

Logan considered that for a moment. "In a
way, I suppose I do. He had been a friend of many of the native
people he encountered. He even married a native woman and had
children with her. Among my people, he had earned the name Rope
Thrower, and a reputation as a caring, honest man." Logan sighed.
"I'm sure he signed up expecting to be sent to the East. I know he
didn't want to get stuck rounding up 'wild Navajos.' "

Logan looked up at Eden and grinned broadly,
one of those quick smiles she had learned to expect when he was
about to make a joke at his own—or his people's—expense.
"Unfortunately for us," he said, "Carson went all-out on any job he
was asked to do. When he was given the task of rounding up the
Dineh for transport to a prison camp in eastern New Mexico, he
decided to do it right." He looked very sad as he added, "The man
who had been among our greatest friends became our greatest
enemy."

Logan pulled the truck up beneath a spreading
sycamore. There was a small, neat patch of grass there, alongside
the stream. "I thought this would be a good place for lunch," he
said as he set the parking brake and turned off the engine.

"Looks great," Eden answered, lumbering out
of the high cab of the truck. As they spread a blanket on the shady
grass beneath the tree, she asked, "Tell me about Kit Carson and
the peach trees."

"It's not a lunchtime story," Logan
warned.

"That's okay. I have a strong stomach."

"Well, all right then. But remember I warned
you." Logan set out the roasted ears of corn, the fresh peaches
beside them, and offered her a seat beside him on the blanket. He
handed her a canteen, took a long drink from a matching one he kept
for himself, and began talking again.

"The Utes and the Dineh were traditional
enemies. I suppose we had been fighting each other since we both
came to this area centuries ago. Anyway, that made the Utes, and
the Utes' agent, well qualified to work for the Army in bringing
the People to heel. By then, the war Colonel Miles had declared was
well into its third year and he hadn't succeeded in rounding up
more than a couple of hundred men. When he did capture a few, they
just slipped away again and disappeared back into the canyon. I
expect it was fairly frustrating for the colonel."

Eden tried to keep a straight face. "I expect
it was."

"The Utes weren't afraid of the canyon, and
neither was Carson. From the outset of his involvement against the
Dineh, he warned the Army that the Navajo nation would not fall
until our canyon hideaways had all been routed. He started his
campaign with a march through the canyon, he and his troops coming
in from one end, a second command marching in from the opposite
direction, intending to meet in the middle."

"Was he chased away by signal fires?" Eden
husked an ear of roasted corn as she listened.

“He knew better, and he prepared his command
to know better. Besides," Logan paused, "by then even the weather
had turned against us. During the growing season, the Army harried
the People so they were scarcely able to plant a crop anywhere;
during the winter, the cold was so severe, it challenged their
survival. The Dineh weren't able to mount an army under such
conditions. About the best they could do was run and hide, and keep
running and hiding."

He paused, looking up the canyon. "The only
reason that first march through the canyons was unsuccessful was
Carson didn't really know where he was. I guess he was in good
company. Columbus was lost when he found us, too."

Eden chuckled. "I guess that's true."

"You bet it is. He only called us Indians
because he thought he was in the Indies. The poor fellow died
without ever figuring it out."

"You sound like you feel sorry for him,
too."

"In a way, I guess I do, though what his
adventures did to the indigenous people of Hispaniola is one of the
great shames of history."

"Of course you're right," Eden said, then,
trying to get back to the subject of Kit Carson and his assault up
the canyon, she added an exaggerated "Anyway..."

"Anyway," Logan went on. "It turned out the
group Carson had sent to come in from the opposite side and meet
him halfway was actually in a connecting fork of the canyon, the
part we call
Caňon del Muerto
. The two groups never
connected because they passed each other unseen."

"
Caňon del Muerto
," Eden repeated.
"Canyon of the Dead?"

Logan nodded. "It's a fork that splits off to
the east not far from here. I can take you up that way on another
trip, if you'd like."

"And will you tell me why they call it
that?"

"If you're certain you want to hear it. It's
another unhappy story," Logan warned.

"I'd assumed so," Eden answered, and husked
another roasting ear.

"Making a long story short," Logan continued,
following her lead to shuck another ear of corn, "that first attack
didn't amount to much, but Carson was undeterred. He decided the
only way to force the Navajos to surrender was to starve them out,
then to be sure it worked, he'd burn them out, too, so they had
nothing to return to."

"Like Sherman's march to the sea," Eden said
with a shudder.

"If anything, Carson was more thorough."
Logan added his shucked ear to Eden's two and began stripping
another. "Whenever his men overtook a
rancheria
, they burned
it to the ground—all the buildings, outbuildings, corrals, all the
fields and crops and personal possessions, all the pasturelands and
orchards. Then they topped it off by slaughtering the livestock and
leaving the carcasses to rot in the sun. In most cases, the
soldiers weren't even allowed to eat the meat of slaughtered Dineh
animals."

No wonder Logan had warned me this was not
a lunchtime story
, Eden thought.

"Would you like me to stop so you can eat?"
he asked with a look of sympathy.

"No, it's okay," she said. "I want to hear
the rest, and I have a hunch the end is not far off."

"No, not far," he answered, peeling the last
of the roasting ears. "Carson knew that the People's heart was in
Dinehtah, and that this canyon was the heart of the homeland. He
continued his campaign of burning, driving the People ahead of him,
while the soldiers in Fort Defiance and elsewhere offered food as
an incentive for surrender. In time, some of the People began
surrendering to the forts, just so their innocents—their children
and old ones—could be fed, but the holdouts kept running into the
canyons to hide." He paused, and then he took a deep breath. His
look seemed far away when he continued.

"The winter of 1864 was the coldest ever
recorded. At Fort Defiance, near the mouth of the canyon, the
mercury fell to almost forty degrees below zero."

Eden gasped. "I can't imagine that! I don't
think I've ever seen it fall much below zero, even in the coldest
winters."

"It hasn't ever gone below minus ten in my
lifetime," Logan answered, "and that only once, but that one
winter, all nature seemed to side with the Army and against the
Dineh. By then most of the People had been marched to Bosque
Redondo and only a few hundred were holed up in the canyon, but the
fields and the orchards were still here." Sorrow tinged his
voice.

“By then, Carson had discovered his earlier
mistake. He began at one end of the canyon and worked his way
through, torching everything as he went, and particularly targeting
the peach orchards. He knew that if they were gone, the Dineh would
have nothing to return to." Again he paused. Eden could hear the
pain in his voice, as if he spoke from his own memory. "It's said
that between January 15 and 17 of 1864, he burned more than eight
thousand peach trees—"

"All of them!"

"—pretty much wiped out everything left in
the canyon, and rounded up almost all the final holdouts, marching
them all off to their prison camp in New Mexico."

"That's what your people call the Long Walk,
isn't it?"

He nodded. "More than four hundred miles with
little water and poor provisions, and when they got there, they
found the Army's promises of food were well intentioned, but poorly
provided. The Army was fighting a huge war in the East—"

"You mean, the American Civil War?"

"Right, and didn't have the means to support
a war against the southern rebels and feed the Dineh, too. The
People were starving in Bosque Redondo—as well as dying of cholera
and smallpox and such. The Army records show that of the first
party of four hundred to reach the camp, one hundred twenty-six
died within the first week. It was a terrible time." Again his eyes
seemed to drift to sights Eden could not see, almost as if he
remembered them, though they had taken place more than a century
before.

Still moved by the horrible waste of that old
war, Eden asked, "Logan?"

"Hmm?"

"If the people were all removed to eastern
New Mexico, how do they come to be here now?"

He smiled, another of those sardonic smiles
that turned on himself. "Perhaps we have the Southern rebels to
thank for that," he said. "It became too expensive to continue to
support the Dineh in a prison camp. The early designers of the camp
had planned on turning all the People into sharecroppers, but they
hadn't counted on the sour water of the Rio Pecos. Every attempt at
farming failed miserably, and the People depended heavily on stores
sent from the East.

Children and old people were dying of
malnutrition and disease, infant mortality was close to one hundred
percent, and the camps at Bosque Redondo were becoming an
embarrassment to the War Department."

"The War Department? I should have thought a
civilian agency—"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But early on,
the BIA refused to have anything to do with the camps. Running the
camp at Fort Sumner became the responsibility of the Army. As you
might guess, they had their hands full elsewhere. In 1868, the head
men of the Dineh negotiated a treaty and went home."

"After all that, they just went home
again?"

"Um-hm." He nodded.

"It seems like such a terrible loss." Eden
shook her head, not wanting to picture it all.

"Of course it was, more even than I've told
you. But in the end, we became one of the few native groups to end
up settled on our own homeland. Dinehtah, as it now shows up on
reservation maps, is much smaller than our original homeland, but
it's ours, and we still have the canyon. Our heart is here, and we
were able to come back to it."

Eden looked up at the distant canyon walls
with new eyes, understanding better what this magical, mystical
place had meant to the people who had once tended their orchards
here—and to their descendants. She felt she understood Logan
Redhorse better now as well.

* * * * *

"It's beautiful!" Eden looked at the
intricate panoply of light and shadow, color and shade that spread
before her, glorious in its intensity. "You just keep showing me
such natural wonders..." They had come to a small hill near the
wall of the canyon and Logan had driven up it, giving Eden more of
a bird's-eye vantage point on the canyon's beauty.

He flashed her one of those breathtaking
smiles. "Have I told you today how beautiful you look?''