Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (57 page)

Manuelito was an expert horseman, a man attentive to good breeding and rich enough to own the best. If he was indeed there at the fort that day, watching his horse compete, enjoying a moment of peace, it was a rare appearance—and most likely he would have kept himself incognito. For Manuelito was the sworn enemy of the Americans. Consistently, emphatically, categorically, he alone among his tribesmen had advocated war. Known by his countrymen as Hastiin Ch’ilhaajinii, or Black Weeds, Manuelito hated everything about the Americans. They had slaughtered his cattle herds. They had murdered his father-in-law. They had stuck forts in the craw of the Navajo nation. To their every demand, his response was the same uncut rage. The people, he roared, must drive the
bilagaana
from the country.

Certainly he had tried. The last few years—1858, 1859, 1860—had been particularly violent ones, and always Manuelito had been at the center of the maelstrom, his steady, implacable voice urging his countrymen not to budge an inch. The Doniphan treaty, signed with so much optimism and goodwill, had proven scarcely worth the paper it was written on, as had the Washington treaty three years later. The old war was still very much alive. If the sheep-rustling Diné had not changed their ways, neither had the New Mexicans, who continued leading freelance raids into Navajo country to steal children and win spoils.

But over the last few years, it seemed, the war had escalated into something else altogether, a conflict of a different order of magnitude. The Diné now had enemies on all sides. They suffered nearly constant attacks not just from New Mexicans, but also from Utes, Comanches, Apaches, and other ancient foes—as well as from their new foe, the American soldiers, who inflicted their punishments with increasing vigor. It seemed to the Navajo that they were surrounded by wolves. Even nature had turned against them—for several seasons the Navajo country had broiled under a terrible drought. People were starving to death, selling their children for food, fighting amongst themselves. Their society was stressed to the breaking point. The medicine men had lost their touch, the old ceremonies didn’t seem to work. The Diné had reached the nadir of their tribe’s existence, a decade of doubt and struggle that they still call, to this day, the
nahondzod
, “the fearing time.”

The American military commanders in Santa Fe, even the more obtuse ones, recognized that the old war between the Navajos and the New Mexicans was a two-sided quarrel, with legitimate grievances flowing in both directions. But they almost always accepted the New Mexican version of the conflict—“chastising” the Navajos for their treaty infractions while looking the other way when Hispanic militias and ragtag vigilante groups marched west. As far as Manuelito was concerned, the Americans had become the bigger problem; if it weren’t for them, he thought, the Diné could hold their own in any war against the New Mexicans. Yet there stood the United States government, stubbornly insisting on playing the role of a one-eyed umpire.

Part of the problem was a lack of consistency. From year to year the Navajos had little idea whom they were dealing with; from their point of view, the Great White Father in Washington was restless and fickle, for he kept sending new emissaries to the territory. Since the American occupation of New Mexico, a dizzying succession of commanders had come and gone: Kearny, Doniphan, Price, Washington, Beall, Munroe, Sumner, Garland, Bonneville, Fauntleroy, and now, the current military governor, Col. Edward Canby. Each of these men had attacked the “Navajo problem” in his own way, with lesser or greater degrees of insight and militancy. But the Navajo conflict was a rat’s nest, a Gordian knot of troubles, and largely because of it, the 9th Military Department, as New Mexico was known, was considered a hardship post, a shit-hole, a quagmire. The territory’s myriad adversities wore a soldier down. Within the army, no one much cared for the place, and few were inclined to stay long enough to really understand the Navajos and the true nature of the conflict—let alone solve it.

If the cast of American leaders had been kaleidoscopic, the main themes were hammered out with an almost monotonous consistency: The Navajos must stop roaming and become sedentary, full-time farmers, working private plots of individually owned land. They must become town-dwellers, and preferably Christians, hewing to clear national boundaries. They must select a single chief to speak for all the Navajo people and answer for all their crimes. In short, the Diné must cease being what they were—an amorphous concatenation of seminomadic bands—and become a single political entity. Over time, the tone with which the American commanders issued their demands became ever more shrill: The Navajos must do all these things, or face extinction.

During the mid-1850s there was perhaps only one bright spot in the American-Navajo relationship. For a few brief years a truly competent man held the office of Indian agent to the Navajo people. His name was Henry Linn Dodge, a perceptive young man from Wisconsin who had lived for years in the territory. Dodge got his first exposure to the Diné in 1849, when he accompanied the Washington Expedition into the Navajo lands. Most Indian agents regarded their posts as mere sinecures, and many were extravagantly corrupt. But Dodge pursued his job with great zeal and a curiosity to match. Soon after his appointment in 1853, he moved his office deep into Diné country. He learned to speak Navajo. He traveled constantly without military escort and befriended all the headmen, attending nightchants and other ceremonials. He brought blacksmiths to teach Navajos metallurgy, bought them wagonloads of hoes and axes often with his own money, led numerous peace delegations to Santa Fe, and lobbied for the creation of schools and the building of mills on Navajo land. He fell in love with the Navajo people—he even married within the tribe (so it was widely said). The Navajos called him “Red Sleeves” and considered him a friend, perhaps the first
bilagaana
who ever bothered to understand them.

His four-year tenure was a testament to the potential power of one-man diplomacy: While Dodge was agent, the Navajos remained substantially at peace, and reports of their raiding were scarce. For a brief time even the tenor of the talk about them changed. William Davis, a Harvard-trained lawyer and circuit court judge who was also a writer of some note and had made a trip with Dodge and other peace emissaries deep into Navajo country in 1855, theorized that the Diné may well be a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel (a fashionable anthropological topic of his day). “In many respects the Navajos are the most interesting tribe of Indians in our country,” Davis wrote in his perceptive study of New Mexico,
El Gringo
, published in 1856. “The modern doctrine of ‘Women’s Rights’ may be said to prevail among them to a very liberal extent. Women are admitted into their councils and sometimes control their deliberations. The Navajos are mild in disposition, and very seldom commit murder.” They were, Davis concluded, “a superior race of Indians.”

With Henry Dodge tirelessly soliciting on their behalf, the Navajos’ reputation as the incorrigible thugs of the Southwest was softening. But in 1857 this brief period of amity came to an abrupt end. While hunting in the Zuni Mountains, Red Sleeves was murdered, reportedly by Apache Indians.

Everything Dodge had worked for soon evaporated; the relationship between the Diné and the Americans never recovered.

The conflict between the
bilagaana
and the Navajos came to a flash point in the spring of 1858, when Manuelito insisted on grazing his cattle herds on the grounds of an American fort called Fort Defiance, deep in the Navajo red rock country, on the present-day border between Arizona and New Mexico. From the moment of its construction in 1851, the Americans had intended Fort Defiance, as its name suggests, to be an irritant and a provocation to the Navajos—and it was. When the American soldiers instructed Manuelito to remove his animals from U.S. property, the headman refused. “The water there is mine, not yours,” he reportedly said, “and the same with the grass. Even the ground it grows from belongs to me, not to you.” And so on May 29, soldiers marched out in the field and shot every last head of Manuelito’s cattle herd—some sixty in all—and left the carcasses to rot in the field.

A month after the herd was slaughtered, an anonymous Navajo came to Fort Defiance to trade with the soldiers. When no one was looking, the Navajo turned and fired an arrow into the back of a teenage black slave owned by the American commander, Maj. William Brooks. While the Navajo made a clean getaway, the stricken boy, whose name was Jim, attempted to pull the arrow out himself, but the shaft broke off with the arrowhead lodged deep in his body. Jim died of his wound several days later. Interpreting the incident (probably correctly) as a personal attack, Major Brooks threatened to obliterate the Navajos if they did not produce the murderer at once. A few weeks later the Navajos obliged, hauling in the corpse of the man they said was the culprit. But the fort surgeon conducted an autopsy on the cadaver and determined that the Diné were trying to pull a fast one: The body was that of a Mexican who met almost none of the physical descriptions of the murderer.

After that, the situation escalated into a fairly hot war, with the American army leading multiple forays into Navajo country to hunt down Manuelito. But like a Navajo Rob Roy, the shadowy headman stayed just a few steps ahead of the soldiers. Then in April 1860, Manuelito organized a thousand Navajo warriors and staged a full-frontal assault on Fort Defiance. Striking before dawn and armed primarily with arrows, he and his warriors occupied a number of the fort buildings, killed a United States soldier, and produced numerous casualties. However, Manuelito’s near triumph at Fort Defiance did nothing to change American policy in the end, but it cemented his reputation as the preeminent warrior of the Navajo.

By all accounts and photographs, he looked the part: Black Weeds was tall and dark with a distinct air of menace, the sort of man who made people, even other Navajos, edgy. His shoulders were broad, his chest muscular, his torso long and lean. He had a scar on the left side of his chest from a gunshot wound sustained in a fight with Comanches. He carried himself with great confidence, for he was one of the true
ricos
of the tribe, blessed with many thousands of sheep, numerous children, and at least two wives—Narbona’s daughter and a Mexican woman named Juanita he had stolen in a raid. His chin was scruffed with a wispy beard, and his facial features, chiseled and vaguely Asian, made him look like a Mongol chieftain. Nearly every photograph of Manuelito shows the scowl of an all-consuming wrath. A biography now taught in Navajo schools describes Black Weeds this way: “An angry fire burned within him, and he refused to put it out.”

He was born in 1818, a son of the Bit’ahni, or Folded Arms clan, and grew up in a place called the Bear’s Ears, in present-day Utah. Because his homeland was close to the mountain country of the roving Ute Indians, he grew up trilingual, fluent in both Navajo and Ute as well as Spanish. Even as a child he carried himself with a jaunty arrogance that made people notice. His friends teased him that even though he had not been on a single raid, he walked around as though he were a headman.

Young Manuelito replied, “I walk like a headman now so that when I become one, I will already know how to behave.”

In 1835, at the age of seventeen, he participated in his first great battle, the ambush on the invading Mexican army at Copper Pass organized by Narbona. He donned a war helmet, carried a buckskin shield, and painted serpents on the soles of his moccasins. He dipped his arrows in a poison made from rattlesnake blood and yucca-leaf juice. During the battle he made a name for himself by attacking and killing a Pueblo Indian in a hand-to-hand fight. He scalped his victim, and later chewed on the bloody skin so that he might draw power from it and become “a true warrior.” From his actions that day he won the nom de guerre Hashkeh Naabaah, or Angry Warrior.