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Today is a Good Day to Fight
The Indian Wars and the Conquest of the West
By Mark Felton The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Mark Felton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9662-7
CHAPTER 1
THE LONG WALK
'You have deceived us too often, and robbed and murdered our people too long, to trust you again at large in your own country. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, now that we have begun, until you cease to exist or move. There can be no other talk on the subject.'
Brigadier General James H. Carleton to the Navajo, 1863
March 1864. A long line of Indians stretched away across the broken terrain for miles. Many were women and children. Bundled in blankets and carrying their few possessions the line shuffled along slowly, led by a group of warriors wearing distinctive headbands that marked them out as Navajo. Along the flanks of the great column, so long that it would take several hours for it to pass a single place, soldiers, their blue uniforms covered in a thick layer of dust, rode slowly on equally dirty horses, many carrying Navajo women or children behind them on their saddles. Grinding along the dusty trail the occasional army covered wagon drawn by a team of horses bounced on its crude springs, the box stacked high with provisions and overflowing with Navajo who were too exhausted, pregnant, sick or lame to walk.
There were insufficient soldiers to guard the long column from the predators that congregated to the rear, waiting for an opportunity to swoop down on hapless victims. Many of the Navajo, hungry and exhausted, fell behind the footsore column, and each day a few more people disappeared. The predators were Ute Indians, closely trailing the column armed with rifles and hatchets, and Mexicans. Both groups would accost those who left the column and sell these unfortunates into slavery or kill them where they stood and rob them of their few possessions, like wolves trailing a wounded buffalo. This great column of defeated and disillusioned Indians was the culmination of a concerted American campaign to rid the south-west of the bigger and more troublesome Indian tribes. A few months earlier the destruction of the Navajo way of life had reached a terrible and terminal crescendo.
July 1863. Colonel Kit Carson sat on his horse and stared blankly at the scene of destruction unfolding around him. Hither and thither ran his soldiers with torches blazing, igniting the fields of crops that stretched away along the canyon floor. Beneath the brim of his campaign hat Carson's face was deeply tanned after forty years on the Frontier, his eyes narrowed, around which deep crow's feet stood out after years of squinting in the harsh south-western sunlight, hair parted on top and worn below the collar of his blue officer uniform. Carson was in his fifties and a living legend. In the pre-movie era he had become the equivalent of today's Hollywood celebrity – a genuine all-action hero whose exploits had been retold countless times in the most lurid prose by eastern journalists and hack writers. There would be other 'heroes' of the West, men like Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp, but Carson's exploits had been largely genuine and his reputation well earned. Hence he was now overseeing a scorched-earth policy in New Mexico Territory in the midst of the terrible Civil War in the east, aimed at solving the Navajo Indian problem once and for all. Denying the Navajo their food supplies by destroying their crops inside the sheltered and fertile canyons was one method for ridding the south-west of Indians. Carson determined to starve them out and force their surrender.
The traditional homeland of the Navajo stretched from north-western Arizona through western New Mexico, and north into Utah and Colorado. They had lived in bands for generations, cultivating crops and raising livestock in the numerous canyons. Inter-tribal warfare and trading was common in the south-west, and the Navajo rubbed along uneasily with the Apache, Pueblo and Comanche peoples, as well as Spanish and later Mexican settlers who came up from the south. After 1846 contact with Americans suddenly and dramatically increased after the United States and Mexico went to war. America was victorious, gaining the former Mexican territories of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Colorado as the spoils of that victory in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, including an extension of the border down to the Rio Grande. All Mexicans living in these territories automatically became American citizens, but the Indians did not. For the region's Indians victory in the Mexican–American War signalled a new and aggressive master quickly attempting to control them through treaties and military force. The Americans wanted nothing less than the corralling of the Navajo and the other tribes onto reservations as quickly as possible, where they could no longer interfere with the orderly settlement of the new territories. They ordered that the Navajo immediately cease all raiding on Americans and Mexicans. The Navajo method of raising livestock, primarily sheep, would be pushed aside by white cattle and horse ranchers moving in from the east and from Texas. The American government had quickly identified the Navajo and the Apache as the strongest and best-organised Indian groups that had to be conquered before real progress could be made in turning the wild territories into new states.
The Navajo had signed their first treaty with the Americans in 1846, and this had swiftly been followed by an agreement in 1851 permitting the United States to construct military posts on Navajo land in return for promised peace and presents from the Indian Department. In 1855 Colonel Edwin Sumner boldly led military forces into the centre of Navajo lands at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona Territory, and constructed the first post there, which he appropriately named Fort Defiance. The Navajo elders signed another treaty that same year which decreased their lands to 7,000 square miles, of which only 125 square miles was actually cultivatable. The upshot of such American short-sightedness was a food supply problem for the Navajo which could only be satisfied by warriors making periodic raids on other Indian or American settlements. Armed conflict followed, as American greed for Navajo land drove the Indians into armed resistance merely to secure the basics of life.
Fort Defiance was located amid some of the best Navajo grazing areas. Indian horses and sheep lived contentedly upon these ancient lands, most of which were under the control of a band led by Chief Manuelito. In 1858 Major William Brooks, the post commander, decided to graze his command's horses on the local Navajo lands, and Brooks arrogantly issued instructions to Manuelito to remove his animals or see them shot. When Manuelito refused Brooks sent out a party of troops who proceeded to kill sixty Navajo horses and over one hundred sheep. Manuelito's band was furious at their leader's treatment by the Americans. In retaliation the Navajo killed Brooks' black slave, who had recently raped a local Indian woman. Brooks' response was to order the Navajo to turn in the murderer for punishment or the soldiers would attack them. Manuelito's band and others suffered several months of intermittent fighting with American troops from Fort Defiance after failing to heed Brooks' instruction. Eventually, having grown tired of the disruption to their economic life the Navajo chieftains went to Fort Defiance and signed another treaty promising to remain on their assigned lands in the future. The army could claim a victory, of sorts.
The Navajo simmered with anger and resentment at the high-handed and unfair treatment dished out to them from the fort, and they bided their time. Then, quite suddenly in 1861, the soldiers began to leave the fort and New Mexico and Arizona. The outbreak of the Civil War in the east witnessed a sudden drawing down of American military strength west of the Mississippi as regular troops were desperately needed by the newly constituted Union Army. The Navajo immediately spotted the great opportunity that the Civil War offered their people. It appeared simple. Strike at Fort Defiance now and wipe the army from their lands while the Americans were occupied with killing each other thousands of miles away in the east.
The Navajo and the Mescalero Apache rose in a huge revolt aimed at driving the whites out of the southwest. They stole livestock, killed settlers, attacked settlements, raided mining camps, and even attacked a Union Army column sent by Washington to defeat General Henry Sibley's Confederate forces. The region's settlers were joined by Mexican-Americans, Ute and Zuni Indians in demanding that action be taken at once against the Navajo and Apache and the attacks ended. At the beginning of the Civil War Kit Carson had immediately resigned from his post as federal Indian agent for northern New Mexico and joined the locally-raised New Mexico Volunteer Infantry. New Mexico had thrown its support behind the Union, even though slave ownership was legal throughout the territory. The commander of army forces in the Territory after the withdrawal of regular forces east was Lieutenant Colonel Edward Canby of the 19th Infantry, based at Fort Marcy, Santa Fe. Carson was commissioned a Colonel of Volunteers, a temporary emergency rank for the duration of the war, and he took command of two battalions of the 1st New Mexico Volunteers numbering about 500 men.
In 1862 General Henry Sibley, commanding Confederate forces in Texas, invaded New Mexico, adding further to the complicated situation already existing there as under-strength and ill-trained Union volunteer forces tried to control the Navajo and Mescalero. Sibley's aim was to push on through New Mexico into Colorado and capture the rich goldfields there to aid the Confederate economy. Advancing confidently up the Rio Grande, Sibley's force clashed with Canby's troops at the Battle of Valverde on 21 February 1863. The Confederates won, forcing Canby across the river with sixty-eight killed and 160 wounded. Following this Canby was promoted and recalled east. Although the Confederates had been victorious, and would go on to occupy Albuquerque and Santa Fe, a lack of supplies eventually drove Sibley's army out of New Mexico and back into Texas. The situation with the Indians remained tense and the populace of the Territory was on edge after the invasion and constant Indian raiding. A new commander was dispatched from back east.
Fortunately for the settlers and friendly Indians the new commander of the Department of New Mexico who replaced Colonel Canby was just the man to crush the rebellious natives, a hard man who would use the harshest of methods to achieve his goal. Brigadier General James H. Carleton was a decorated hero of the Mexican-American War. He disliked the Navajo and the Apache, based on twenty years of fighting them in New Mexico and Arizona, and he believed that trying to negotiate with them was a waste of time. Carleton delivered a simple message to the Navajo: surrender and agree to go to a new reservation that he had picked for them at Bosque Redondo beside the Pecos River, or be exterminated. Carleton passionately believed that the Navajo were the reason for New Mexico's 'depressing backwardness,' and he decided to tap into the fear and anxiety caused by Sibley's invasion, and turn that collective civilian ill feeling onto a problem they could actually solve – the destruction of the Navajo and Mescalero. Carleton believed that gold existed somewhere on Navajo land and he also wanted rid of the Indians so New Mexicans could exploit any potential riches for themselves.
For the Apache, relations with the United States had long been strained and difficult. When America had claimed the former Mexican territories making up the southwest the Apache had maintained an uneasy peace with the new masters. A great Apache leader named Mangas Coloradas had signed a peace treaty with the Americans in 1846 recognising the United States as conquerors of Mexican lands. The peace held until the discovery of gold in the Santa Rita Mountains led to an influx of white miners. In 1851, near Pinos Altos, a group of miners accosted Mangas Coloradas, tied him to a tree, and beat him severely. Similar incidents led to Apache reprisals. In December 1860 thirty miners launched a surprise assault on a Bedonkohe Apache encampment on the west bank of the Mimbres River. They killed four Indians, wounded several others and captured thirteen women and children. Retaliatory raids by the Apache became more widespread. In February 1861 Lieutenant George N. Bascom lured the principal chief of the Chokonen Apache, Cochise, his family and several warriors into a trap at Apache Pass in south-eastern Arizona. Cochise managed to escape but everyone else was captured and imprisoned. The 'Bascom Affair' ended with Cochise's brother and five other warriors being hanged from a tree by the soldiers. Later in 1861 Cochise allied his people with his father-in-law Mangas Coloradas, and a unified Apache group agreed to try to drive all of the Americans out of their territory. The alliance was shortly after joined by chiefs Juh and Geronimo and only came about because of American attacks. Worse was to come.
Throughout 1862 Mangas Coloradas tried to broker a peace deal with the Americans, and in January 1863 he decided to meet personally with American military leaders at Fort McLane, near present-day Hurley, New Mexico. Mangas Coloradas arrived under a white flag of truce to meet Brigadier General Joseph Rodman West of the California Militia and future senator for Louisiana. Rodman ordered Mangas Coloradas arrested and executed. That night Mangas Coloradas was cruelly tortured by the troops and then shot dead. On the following day the chief's head was cut off, boiled clean of flesh and muscle, and then sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. as an exhibit.
In dealing with the Navajo issue General Carleton ordered Kit Carson to kill all of the men of the Mescalero Apache tribe as a prelude to forcing all Apache and Navajo onto a new reservation. Carson was appalled at such an order and refused to obey. Instead, Carson accepted the surrender of over one hundred Apache warriors and dispatched them to the new reservation at Bosque Redondo. After breaking the Mescalero, Carson was ordered to turn his forces onto the much more numerous Navajo. Carson tried to resign, but Carleton managed to talk him around to continuing with his task, which Carleton clearly saw as almost a messianic mission to rid the southwest of Indians. Carson was instructed to deliver to Navajo of the following message:
You have deceived us too often, and robbed and murdered our people too long, to trust you again at large in your own country. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, now that we have begun, until you cease to exist or move. There can be no other talk on the subject.
The Navajo traditionally conducted raids so Carson knew it was unlikely that they would fight any pitched battles with the soldiers that would lead to their defeat and subjugation. Instead, Carleton and Carson hit on the idea of turning Navajo lifestyle against them. Why not destroy the Navajo crops that they depended upon for food, and run off or kill their livestock? Why not find their villages and burn them also? Such a 'scorched-earth' policy would deny the Navajo the means to continue their resistance and quickly bring about their surrender. Carson also exploited regional tribal enmities by recruiting many Ute Indians to his cause as scouts, and they did a sterling service killing their traditional Navajo enemies and burning Navajo fields and houses with alacrity.
Bringing the Navajo under American control was a gruelling task for Colonel Carson and his men. Twelve thousand Navajo were scattered over a vast and rugged country that included the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Carson spent months riding across this territory burning crops and Navajo villages, destroying stocks of grain, rounding up sheep and hacking down Navajo peach orchards. Starvation soon became widespread among the Indians. Winter followed. The cold weather carried off old people and young children who were weakened by hunger. Carson's men entered the Navajo heartland at Canyon de Chelly where they wrought more destruction and looting while the Indians watched helplessly from the canyon walls. The scorched-earth policy eventually drove many Navajo to surrender. A hardcore of about 4,000 scattered into the remote western parts of their territory, moving into the Grand Canyon with the Chiricahua Apache and into parts of Utah. They held out for two years before starvation also ended their resistance. Carson had achieved his objective. The majority of the Navajo had surrendered, and the army prepared to march them 300 miles across New Mexico to the barren new reservation at Bosque Redondo. It was a forced march that came to be called the 'The Long Walk'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Today is a Good Day to Fight by Mark Felton. Copyright © 2013 Mark Felton. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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