Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (78 page)

But Carson would not stay long enough at Fort Canby to see the worst of it. Now that he had gathered far more than the general’s quota of one hundred prisoners, Carson was entitled to take his leave of absence and return home. The first week of February he departed with an initial convoy of 253 prisoners. Carson, their conqueror and now advocate, escorted them without incident as far as the Rio Grande. From there he turned north for Santa Fe, while armed guards marched the prisoners the remaining three hundred miles to Carleton’s new reservation on the Pecos.

In Santa Fe, Carson was greeted as a god. People saluted him, embraced him in the muddy streets. The plaza was thronged with celebrants. In six short months he had done something that no field commander over nearly three hundred years of history had been able to do.

General Carleton was fulsome in his praise, calling Carson’s triumph the “crowning act in a long life spent fighting the savages among the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains.” In a glowing report the general sent to superiors in Washington, Carleton pointed out that Canyon de Chelly had been “the great fortress of the Navajo tribe since time out of mind. Colonel [John] Washington and many other commanders have made attempts to go through it, and had to retrace their steps. It was reserved for Colonel Carson to be the first to succeed.”

What’s more, Carleton was so encouraged by the huge numbers of Navajos streaming into Fort Canby—now four thousand and growing—that he declared a “suspension of arms.” On February 27 the general confidently wrote to Washington: “You have doubtless seen the last of the Navajo war.” As usual, Carson felt uncomfortable with the public’s adulation and was quick to point out that it was Carey and Pfeiffer who had actually made the historic penetration of Canyon de Chelly.

The truth was, Carson was in no shape to celebrate his victory—even if he was inclined to accept it as such. He was near exhaustion and in increasing pain. He did not know it yet, but something was growing inside his chest that was slowly killing him. His horse accident years ago in the San Juans had apparently caused the formation of an aneurysm on his aorta—a tiny balloon that was steadily expanding and would prove immediately lethal should it burst. He knew something was not right. As Tom Dunlay described it, “An enemy he could neither outwit nor outfight was on his trail.”

He wanted no more of the Navajo wars. “The state of my health warns me,” Carson wrote, “that I can no longer render my country efficient service.” As quickly as he could slip from the clutches of the adoring capital, Carson sped home to Josefa.

They marched with nothing but the wretched clothes they were wearing. In a column that stretched for many miles, they tramped through the blustery snows of the high desert spring. Before they’d even passed out of Navajo country, tears of homesickness welled in their eyes. Faces that had always known suffering were now filled with new depths of anguish and sorrow—yet many faces were also touched with a faint hope. They trusted that any existence would be better than the life of paranoid squalor they’d been living for the past year. They had little conception of where they were going, or what sort of home to expect once they arrived. All they could do was keep on walking, toward the east.

East was the direction of hope, after all—the direction that every Navajo hogan faced to greet the morning sun. But east was also the direction from which the
bilagaana
had come. There was a paradox to this, and also an admonition: Ever since they could remember, the Diné had been told never to leave the confines of their four sacred mountains. If they did, the ceremonials would cease to work. Ancient chants would become meaningless, and even the best medicine men would lose their touch. And so, as the refugees filed out of Navajo country, past Acoma and Laguna pueblos, and down into the Rio Grande rift, they began to fear the consequences of drawing so close to the land of the sunrise.

For a short time, they could swivel their heads and take comfort in the sight of their familiar Blue Bead Mountain—Mount Taylor—rising over the brown plains, its broad shoulders still shawled in snow. But after another day or two of marching, the mountain began to grow wispier, its bold blues hazing into nothing, until it disappeared altogether. From then on, as they climbed mesas, plunged down
bajadas,
and inched across the prairie, they could see no more vestiges of Navajo country. And still they marched east.

Most of them were guilty of nothing more than being Navajo. The errant young men responsible for most of the raids represented but a small percentage of the tribe. Yet now the many would pay for the malefactions of the few; now all the Diné would finally suffer for the trouble caused by its most incorrigible members. It was the poorest Navajos, the
ladrones,
who had surrendered first. They were the sickest and weakest, the ones who had lacked the wherewithal to hold out. Now they had less than nothing—not their health, not their animals, not even a country.

Men like Manuelito were not among them. Manuelito was one of the
ricos
—he had sheep enough to eat and barter his way across Navajo lands, to keep on the move, to resist. “I shall remain here,” he told one army scout who sought his surrender through an intermediary. “I have nothing to lose but my life, and that they can come and take whenever they please.” Manuelito was a strong and defiant man, a man of uncommon pride. But he also had something that the
ladrones
did not have when they finally did the unthinkable and gave themselves up: He still had food in his belly.

Now they had food, too, if that’s what you called the rations the
bilagaana
provided along the march. The bacon was rancid and caused the Navajos to retch. They had coffee beans but no means to grind them. The daily ration of wheat flour was virtually useless. Although there was nothing particularly wrong with it, most Navajos had never seen flour before and didn’t know what to do with it. So they just stuffed it into their mouths, uncooked—and naturally grew sick.

General Carleton ordered his soldiers to treat their charges with “Christian kindness”—and reminded them that the goal was to transport them to Bosque Redondo as swiftly and safely as possible so that soldiers would never have to fight them again. If the guards mistreated them, the Navajos would desert and return to their country, and the wars would begin anew. The Navajos, Carleton said, were now “protégés of the United States—a people who, having given up their country, should be provided for by a powerful and Christian nation.”

Kindness may have been the policy, but as almost always happens in the escalating confusion of a refugee evacuation, the best intentions slipped. Army command devolved into chaos. Soldiers raped women, denied rations, and pushed elderly marchers to the brink of death. Cruel guards occasionally shot those who couldn’t keep up and left them to rot where they lay. And soldiers looked the other way as old enemies of the Navajos—the Zuni, the Jemez, and the New Mexicans—had their fun with the helpless trains of emigrants, stealing women and children away in the night. The slave raids became so prevalent that an American officer circulated a warning that all guards “must exercise extreme vigilance or the Indians’ children will be stolen from them and sold.”

Hundreds of Navajos succumbed to sickness, exposure, and exhaustion. The erratic spring weather for which New Mexico is famous only worsened the ordeal. On March 21 a blizzard fell on a party of nearly a thousand marchers. Army quartermasters were not prepared for the storm—they had not procured enough firewood or blankets to go around. Many of the Indians were nearly naked and soon developed frostbite. By the time this unfortunate column reached the bosque, 110 Navajos had died.

There is no indication that the author of all this misery, Gen. James Carleton, ever saw the forced relocation as it was actually happening. For the most part he stayed in his Santa Fe headquarters and kept his tireless pen scribbling. But he received constant updates and descriptions of the hegira that was sweeping across the vast territory he governed. The march was a beautiful metaphor, he thought, an image that epitomized the inevitable last stages of Manifest Destiny—an eastward-moving counterpoint to the greater westward migration of Anglo-Saxons.

“The exodus of this whole people from the land of their fathers is a touching sight,” Carleton wrote. “They have fought us gallantly for years on years; they have defended their mountains and their stupendous canyons with heroism; but at length, they found it was their destiny, too, to give way to the insatiable progress of our race.”

Carleton was so pleased with the progress of his Navajo campaign that late that summer he allowed himself an uncharacteristic vacation. He had long wanted to climb Baldy Peak, an enormous treeless slab that hovered over Santa Fe. More than twelve thousand feet high, roamed only by mountain sheep and the occasional bear, Baldy was then mistakenly thought by many to be the loftiest point in New Mexico. And yet despite its obvious allure, no white man had ever climbed it—or so Carleton had been informed.

So one day in August, the general and several of his friends set off for the majestic mountain and reached its summit in a few days. There was a beautiful little lake near the top, a cold blue tarn now known as Lake Katherine. From Baldy’s lichen-splashed boulders and high meadows of wildflowers, Carleton could gaze west and see the Navajo country. With the sweep of his eye he could take it all in, his newly won domain. He could see the spurred foothills and notched mesas where he was sure gold would be found (and in a few months, in fact, he would give a certain businessman-prospector named Albert Case Benedict the power of attorney to hunt “any ledge, lode, or vein of gold-bearing quartz” in the general’s name).

Perhaps, if he looked in the right place with his field glasses, Carleton could also see the “touching sight” of the dust clouds being kicked up by the Navajo refugees as they marched toward their new home at the bosque. Carleton lingered at the breezy summit of Baldy Peak only long enough to do what a conquering U.S. general might be expected to do when perched atop his conquest: He planted an American flag.

For a brief time Carleton seemed indeed to be standing on top of the world. The citizens of New Mexico loved him—they called him the “deliverer of the Southwest.” President Lincoln praised his efforts. The territorial governor created a special day of “prayer and thanksgiving” in his honor. The newspapers hailed him as a Roman god.

“Behold him!” one editor wrote, somewhat facetiously. “His martial cloak thrown gracefully around him like a toga, his teeth set firm, his Jove-like front. Carleton rules the land.”

The general was pleased to learn that thousands more Navajos were now assembling at Fort Canby and Fort Wingate and preparing to head east. Nearly the entire Navajo nation had surrendered—or was on the verge of doing so. For most of the Navajos the march took about three weeks, depending on the weather, trail conditions, and the exact route followed. It was not a single migration, but a series of them carried out in many stages, the ungainly process stretching out over many months. But taken all together, it was a forced relocation of biblical proportions, one of the largest in American history—second only to the Trail of Tears of the Cherokees. Throughout 1864 and on into 1865, nearly 9,000 Navajos would emigrate to Bosque Redondo; approximately 500 would die along the way.