Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (79 page)

The Navajos had their own name for the great exodus, one that was eloquent in its understatement: The Long Walk.

For most of the Navajos, the last desolate stretches of the march were the hardest. In those final miles the land grew sparer and flatter and less like home. The sunbaked ground seemed to crackle underfoot, and the uninviting country, whose elevation was several thousand feet below that of the Navajo lands, was studded only with cholla cactus, mesquite, and creosote. The featureless plain was uninhabited, although in the distance one might see the occasional javelina or pronghorn antelope moving in the heat shimmer. Finally, the marchers dropped down into the valley of the Pecos, and like an apparition, there it was—the bosque, a great clump of shimmering green, guarded over by a new adobe stronghold called Fort Sumner.

It did not look so terrible at first. A shady place along a not inconsiderable river, with loads of firewood and plenty of room to move around. It did not resemble a prison at all—there were no fences or walls, no guard towers, no captives shuffling around in irons. The Diné’s movements were to be policed only by “pickets”—small encampments of soldiers placed strategically, but loosely, along the perimeter. And what a perimeter it was: The reservation, the Navajos were told, was a giant parcel of land stretching out on both sides of the river as far as the eye could see. It was, in fact, forty miles square, an area nearly as large as the state of Delaware. The proportions of this alien place were at least familiarly huge—almost Navajoan—in scale.

Within days of their arrival, the Diné were put to work digging a seven-mile-long
acequia madre
on the east side of the river—with numerous lateral ditches—to irrigate the many thousands of acres of fields that Carleton planned to sow. Other Navajos helped army engineers build a dam six miles upriver to control the annual floods, while still others helped the soldiers construct the adobe brick buildings of Fort Sumner—the barracks, the sutler’s shop, the officers’ quarters, the jail. The Navajos were not unmindful of the fact that by doing so, they were only giving the
bilagaana
a more powerful and luxurious headquarters from which to rule over them.

Carleton wanted a bumper crop that first summer, to get the Navajos on the road to self-sufficiency. And to the soldiers’ surprise, the Navajos seemed to throw themselves into the work with relish. They understood what they were doing and why they were doing it. Agriculture was something they knew and loved. They put in crops of wheat, sorghum, rice, and turnips—but mostly corn, the Navajo staple. By July the cornfields by the river stood lush and tall, the healthy stalks waving brightly in the prairie wind. Carleton was enormously proud to hear about the corn, and he wrote to his superiors that after the harvest “there is no reason why the Navajos will not be the most prosperous and well-provided for Indians in the United States.”

Kit Carson had savored his short leave of absence in Taos. Over the winter, Josefa gave birth to their sixth child, a daughter, whom they named Rebecca. After two months at home, Carson returned to Fort Canby in the spring of 1864 to oversee further mass surrenders of the Navajo. Then, in May, he applied for a new assignment as “superintendent” of the bosque.

Although it was a lackluster administrative post that seemed ill suited to his talents, Carson had in fact campaigned for the job. In a report he wrote at the conclusion of the Navajo campaign, he proposed that the reservation should have a person in charge who was “well versed in Indian character—who knows these people, and by whom he is known, and in whom they have confidence.” The superintendent would “supply their wants, settle their disputes, stand between them and the citizens in their limited intercourse, and instruct and direct their labors. One in fact to whom they could look for council and assistance in every and all emergencies.” Carson thought this post should be filled by a paternal figure, kind but firm, someone capable of retraining the Navajos “without their being made to feel it.” The Navajos, Carson argued, “should not be prematurely forced into the habits or customs of civilized life,” but on the other hand, neither should they be “allowed to retrograde.” In the end, the superintendent should, by steady example, “teach them to forget the old life [while] reconciling them to the new.”

Carson got the job and served as superintendent of Bosque Redondo during its promising early months, when the Navajos were planting their first crops and entering into their new life with at least some measure of hope. He proved a benevolent and fair-minded
comandante
. The Navajos were in awe of him. Like their own great war god, Monster Slayer, Kit Carson had accomplished something of legendary proportions, something no Navajo thought possible among mortals. It seemed to them that he had thrown a magical lasso around their people and hauled them in. And so out of fear and respect, they gave Carson a new name: Rope Thrower.

During the summer of 1864, as the corn grew tall and radiant, Carson worked tirelessly on behalf of the Diné, pleading for more supplies and medicines, goading the soldiers, hearing the Navajo grievances. He understood how fragile the bosque idea was and recognized that the first few months would set the tone for the whole tenuous experiment. The Navajos, he knew, were watching him for any sign of bad faith. “It is of utmost importance,” he wrote Carleton, “that every promise however trifling should be religiously kept in every particular, else the naturally suspicious mind of the Indian will be alarmed, and distrust will speedily follow.”

Despite his good intentions, Rope Thrower proved ineffective in his new post. Carson was many things, but he was not a bureaucrat. He quickly grew to hate his position, chafed at the rules, seethed at the inefficiency and corruption he saw all around him. He missed Josefa terribly, just as much as he had during his campaign in Navajo country. They were still a world away from each other—the bosque lay some two hundred miles from their home in Taos. Sitting at his desk, shuffling papers he could not read, making requests for food and equipment that the financially strapped, war-torn government would seldom honor, he toiled for three months in misery. Not since he was a saddlemaker’s apprentice had he felt so trapped in a job for which he had no liking—or competence. It was, he wrote, “not the position I contemplated occupying.”

Carson complained to Carleton that he had “no real power or control over the affairs of the Indians, except a moral one.” The job required delicacies of domestic politics that were clearly beyond him. He found that he was regularly colliding with other army and civil authorities, especially the post commander of Fort Sumner. “I expected to order where I now have to request,” Carson groused, “nor do I think it is a position befitting an officer of my rank in the service.” Over the summer Carson tried to resign on several occasions, but Carleton would not accept, assuring him that “there is no disposition to place you in a position beneath your rank.”

Part of Carson’s hatred of his job, no doubt, stemmed from increasing doubts about the long-term feasibility of the bosque. Already, he was beginning to see cracks in Carleton’s shining experiment.

For one thing, the Navajos were not getting along with the Mescalero Apaches, the small tribe with whom they shared the reservation lands. Carleton had put the two tribes together on a mistaken premise: He believed that because they were Athapaskan cousins speaking more or less the same language, they would easily mix. In fact, their hatred for one another had run hot for centuries. Predictably, the Navajos and the Mescaleros soon fell to fighting and had to be constantly policed by armed guards. For Carson, the nearly constant feuding between the two tribes caused endless headaches.

Among other problems, the Mescaleros claimed that at night the Navajos were digging up their graves and clipping fingernails, toenails, and hair, which the Diné medicine men were then using as a powerful shamanic charm. “These nocturnal forays,” notes bosque historian Gerald Thompson, “were the cause of serious and repeated complaint.”

Then there was the problem of housing. General Carleton insisted that the Navajos build apartment-style dwellings much like those in which Pueblo Indians lived. For Carleton, physical concentration was a paramount goal: The sooner they could be brought close together, the easier it would be to watch them, control them, teach them,
Christianize
them. As with everything else at Bosque Redondo, Carleton personally immersed himself in the nitty-gritty details of the design of these apartments; with all the flower beds and luxuriant courtyards he planned, “no Indian village in the world would compare with it in point of beauty.”

But when Carson put them to work building the first of his planned apartments, the Navajos balked. They could not,
would
not, live this way. It went against their very nature. If a person died in one of the rooms, the whole building would have to be abandoned: It was
chindi
. They would prefer to build hogans, but if there wasn’t enough wood for true hogans, they would just as soon live in primitive dirt hovels dug into the ground and spread out over many hundreds of acres.

Their refusal to live in a pueblo was so adamant that eventually even the colossally stubborn Carleton abandoned the idea. They could dwell in hovels, he said, but he insisted that they build them close together in long, organized rows. Superintendent Carson proposed to the Navajos that when someone died in one of lodges, the relatives of the deceased could simply vacate the now ghost-haunted structure and build another one at the end of the row. This scheme worked for a time, but really, the Navajos had no interest in living in a grid—a more haphazard pattern was more to their liking. And so, over time, they drifted back to their old nomadic lifestyle, constantly moving around the barren landscape of the reservation in small family groups, living along matrilineal lines. Yet now the wandering was aimless, without its original point of grazing vast herds of sheep. They moved, it seemed, for the sake of moving, for that is what they had always done.

The Navajos were equally adamant in their refusal to embrace Carleton’s other “civilizing” schemes. With the help of the Catholic bishop in Santa Fe, Jean Baptiste Lamy, Carleton established a church with a full-time priest as well as a school to teach the Navajos reading, writing, and math. But the Navajos could not understand the Judeo-Christian universe—its male monotheism was forbidding to a tribe with so many female gods, its stories of a chosen people half a world away had no relevance, and rituals like communion and confession seemed beyond strange.

The elementary school, on the other hand, seemed to work—at least at first. The Navajo parents sent their children in droves, but this was only because Carleton gave each pupil a meal ticket for daily attendance. Once this incentive was abolished, however, the children stopped coming. The Navajo saw no use for queer marks on a page or a blackboard—and anyway, most of the parents were skeptical of the purpose of the schooling and instinctively resisted any attempt to indoctrinate their children in the white man’s ways.

The failure of the school was a major setback for Carleton, for all along his emphasis had been on the children. The adults he had all but given up on. The traditional life the old folks brought from the Navajo country—“their savage desire to roam about and lead a life of idleness,” as he put it—was too deeply ingrained to change. But in “this spacious tribal reformatory,” the children could be shaped, he felt, and thus the government owed a special responsibility to them. He often waxed sentimental on the subject of “civilizing” Indian youth. His optimism for their future was nearly as strong as his contempt for the defunct mores of their parents.

Carleton took pity on the children, especially the ones who had been orphaned by Carson’s scorched earth campaign. When an order of New Mexico nuns, the Sisters of Loretto, created a new orphanage, he personally brought in the first Navajo child, a little girl. The nuns named her Mary Carleton in his honor.