The Other Slavery (43 page)

Early in 1850, a force of about one hundred Mormons killed several Indian males and took about forty prisoners, mostly women and children. According to Captain Howard Stansbury in his book
Exploration and Survey of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Utah
(1852), “They were carried to the city and distributed among the inhabitants, for the purpose of weaning them from their savage pursuits, and bringing them up in the habits of civilized and Christian life.”

The original goal had been to turn the Indians into “a white and delightsome people.” But the reality was frequently one of persistent separation. Brigham Young specifically urged his followers “never to condescend to their level, but always seek to elevate them to a higher, purer, and, consequently, a more useful and intelligent existence.” Mormons who adopted Indians had to strive to erase their Native cultures and curb their wild instincts. Some testimonies are quite explicit about this: “I have a little Indian boy and girl,” said Elder E. T. Benson to a group that congregated in Provo in 1855, “and it is certainly repugnant to my feelings to have to put up with their dirty practices.” Benson rejoiced that the little boy was becoming quite bright and perceptive but acknowledged that “he yet has some of his Indian traits, and I presume it will be some time before they are all erased from his memory.” These
comments and others reflect a pervasive attitude that prevented Indians from fully integrating into Mormon society.
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Historians Juanita Brooks and Michael K. Bennion have established that Native Americans who grew up in Mormon households married at significantly lower rates than the population at large. One would think that in a polygamous society, Indian women would have been readily incorporated as secondary wives, but this occurred rarely. Contemporaries such as John Lee Jones could not hide his astonishment at finding a Mormon man with an Indian wife, calling it “quite a novel circumstance to me.” Church leaders had divergent views about the wisdom of taking Lamanite wives: some supported this practice as the most expedient means to “amalgamate with the natives,” while others emphasized their cursed condition, so that it was “better to let them alone.” Anecdotal evidence illustrates the difficulties Indian women brought up in Mormon households faced in finding marriage partners. Susie Leavitt, for example, had two children out of wedlock. When she was called before the local church authorities to answer for her sins, she famously replied, “I have a right to children. No white man will marry me. I cannot live with the Indians. But I can have children, and I will support the children that I have . . . God meant that a woman should have children.” For Indian males, the situation was dire. Few Native American men are known to have married white women. One of them was David Lemmon, who was exceptional in many ways: strikingly tall and athletic, and an extraordinary violin player who traveled frequently to play at dances and thus had many opportunities to socialize. He married a Swedish woman named Josephine Neilson. Far more common, however, are stories like that of Tony Tillohash. He proposed to a white girl from the Heaton household, where he had worked for years. The parents quickly discouraged him and advised him to marry among his own people. Eventually he went to live on the reservation of a Paiute band called the Shivwits.
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Before the Mormons moved to Utah, they never anticipated acquiring Indians and keeping them in their homes as “indentures.” Their curious ideas about the origins of Indians and their impulse to help in their redemption eased their transformation into owners and masters. But
even without these notions, they would have become immersed in an extraordinarily adaptable and durable system that had long flourished in the region. In colonial times, Spanish missionaries had acquired Indians to save their souls. In the nineteenth century, the Mormons’ quest to redeem Natives by purchasing them was not too different. Yet both ended up creating an underclass, in spite of their best wishes. Such was the staying power of the other slavery.

In New Mexico, the Civil War led to the greatest Indian slavery boom in the territory’s recorded history. Although the conflict began in the East, it quickly spilled into the West. Texas was a conduit for the westward expansion of the conflict. As a cotton state, it had opposed the election of Abraham Lincoln and favored secession from the United States. The Lone Star State formally joined the Confederacy in March 1862. As the sectional conflict intensified, Confederate leaders in Texas and elsewhere looked to New Mexico as the gateway to the mineral wealth of Colorado and the coast of California. Thus, barely three months into the conflict, Texas troops entered New Mexico. By early March 1862, the Texans had taken control of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. It was a rapid and impressive advance that nonetheless soon came to a grinding halt. Moving south from Colorado, Union troops engaged the Texans just east of Santa Fe in the famous Battle of Glorieta Pass, sometimes grandly referred to as “the Gettysburg of the West.” The Union forces could not defeat the Texans, but they did destroy the wagon train containing most of the Confederates’ supplies, thus making their continued presence in New Mexico difficult. The final blow came from California, where Colonel James H. Carleton had raised a volunteer force of about two thousand men known as the California Column. Under Carleton’s vigorous leadership, these volunteers braved the Mojave Desert and marched eight hundred miles via Tucson to arrive in southern New Mexico in the summer of 1862, just in time to drive out the last Confederate remnants.
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This is how Carleton found himself in New Mexico, at the head of a sizeable force and with no visible enemy. He had to remain vigilant in case the Texans returned. Otherwise he merely awaited the unfolding of
the Civil War in other parts of the country. Still, there were some things he could do with his men and resources. Like many other officers of the day, Carleton had fought in the U.S.-Mexican War and subsequently taken part in various Indian campaigns in the western territories. In the early 1850s, he had spent nearly five years in New Mexico fighting the Apaches. During this formative period, Carleton had witnessed the never-ending cycle of war and peace with the Indians of the West. U.S. officials signed treaty after treaty with the Apaches, Utes, and Navajos, compacts that were sometimes not ratified by Congress and were routinely violated by one or both parties. It was an ineffectual and confusing situation, all the more so because policy concerning the Indians was mired in a petty rivalry between the Department of War and the Department of the Interior. Carleton learned one important lesson from these experiences: the only lasting solution to the “Indian problem,” as he called it, was to move the tribes onto reservations by means of forceful military action. When he took military command of New Mexico in the fall of 1862, he had a unique opportunity to do just that. With New Mexico under martial law, now General Carleton enjoyed practically unlimited authority.
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Of the various Indian groups surrounding New Mexico, the Navajos, or Diné, had been the most menacing in recent years. In the spring of 1860, they had assembled the largest war party ever recorded in Navajo history, and their intention had been nothing less than to overrun the only American military outpost established within Navajo territory, appropriately called Fort Defiance. In the predawn darkness of April 30, 1860, more than one thousand Navajo warriors (perhaps as many as two thousand according to some sources) arranged themselves in three groups and took up their positions. It was an unprecedented maneuver in terms of daring, planning, and scope. The Navajos possessed few firearms and were at a tremendous disadvantage against a fully manned fort designed to resist such attacks. But their frustration had reached the boiling point. They began their attack in the early daylight, mostly with bows and arrows, seizing some of the outlying buildings, killing one soldier, and wounding several others. The assailants kept pounding Fort Defiance for several hours, finally reaching a stalemate. The
Navajos carried on their fight through the spring and summer of 1860, as Navajo riders struck communities throughout western New Mexico as far south as Acoma. A Santa Fe newspaper estimated that the Navajo offensive claimed the lives of some three hundred individuals and resulted in a loss of property amounting to $1.5 million. These figures are almost certainly too high, but they reflect the very real concern among New Mexicans.
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Multiple reasons impelled the Navajos to fight. One of the most important was the dynamics of the captive exchange. Thanks to the painstaking work of anthropologist David M. Brugge, it is possible to plot the ebb and flow of the traffic of Navajo children and women into New Mexico as revealed by baptismal records. These documents run continuously for nearly two centuries, from the 1690s to the 1870s (see
appendix 7
). The peaks correspond with known military campaigns, Indian wars, and sometimes adverse environmental conditions. For example, the initial baptisms in the 1700s can be explained by Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdés’s “vigorous war” against the Navajos in 1705; the upswing in the number of baptisms in the 1740s was almost certainly a result of a major war between the Navajos and Utes, exacerbated by a drought in 1748; and the captive boom of the 1770s coincided neatly with the breakdown of a half century of peace between the Spaniards and Navajos. After the 1770s, there was a forty-year lull (with minor exceptions), which nonetheless ended with an unprecedented upsurge in Navajo captives during the 1820s. Starting in the 1820s, Navajo baptisms continued decade after decade until the 1870s. During this sixty-year period, the Navajos replaced the Apaches and Utes/Paiutes as the most heavily enslaved Indian nation in New Mexico.
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A closer look reveals that the initial captive taking led to raids and reprisals that yielded yet more captives and gave rise to a vicious circle of mutual predation that was very difficult to break. In the late 1700s, the New Mexicans and Navajos had developed protocols and practices that made open warfare infrequent and brief. These protocols, however, broke down as slave taking proliferated. In particular, as Hispanics and Anglos became more numerous and dominant in New Mexico, they insisted on unequal captive exchanges that caused resentment among the
Natives. A Navajo headman named Armijo explained this phenomenon better than anyone during a visit to Santa Fe in January 1852. “More than 200 of our children have been carried off and we know not where they are,” Armijo told Indian agent John Greiner. “The Mexicans have lost but few children in comparison with what they have stolen from us.” The Navajo man went on to explain how for five years, his people had tried to get their children back, to no avail. “Eleven times have we given up our captives—only once have they given us ours,” Armijo said. “My people are yet crying for the children they have lost. Is it American justice that we must give up everything and receive nothing?” Indian parents had seen their children grow up in bondage in New Mexican homes. In many instances, they knew where their sons and daughters were being held but were not permitted to get close to them after three decades of unrelenting slave taking. The Diné had had enough. This was the tinder for the 1860 Navajo attack on Fort Defiance and the campaign against the New Mexicans.
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But a counterattack was beginning to gather strength, and it would rage against the Navajos with extraordinary force. Years later the Navajo chief Manuelito spoke of the fateful time “when this world was dark with dirt and sand flying, and the stones were raised by the wind . . . [and] when all the Nations came against us, then we lost our children.”
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Manuelito’s assertion that “all the Nations” turned against the Navajos was not an exaggeration or rhetorical flourish, but a verifiable reality. The first to mobilize were the Hispanics in New Mexico. In the wake of the Navajo attacks of 1860, the residents of frontier communities such as Cubero, Cebolleta, and Abiquiu banded together to form local militias. Historically these exposed towns had served as military outposts and staging areas for raids into Navajo and Ute lands. They had skilled commanders, impoverished soldiers motivated by the prospect of acquiring loot, and vast campaign experience stretching back to Spanish presidial times. According to New Mexico’s Militia Law of 1851, “Any man of experience & good character” could raise a volunteer force as long as his campaigns were conducted in good faith and according to the rules and customs of war of the United States. Indeed, the New Mexican territorial government was required by law to provide arms to such volunteer
units, and Governor Abraham Rencher was ready to comply. Whereas in the 1850s militia units had been required to give up their Indian captives “to be disposed of as the governor shall direct,” an amendment introduced in January 1860 by the territorial legislature omitted any reference to the disposal of Indian captives. Though seemingly minor, this omission allowed frontiersmen to raise forces for the explicit purpose of capturing Indians. In effect, the amendment legalized the enslavement of hostile Indians.
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Hispanic militia units fanned out through the Navajos’ lands during 1860. They varied in size and success. Ramón A. Baca of Cebolleta commanded as many as three hundred men and was extraordinarily effective. During an expedition in June, his forces took six women, eight children, fifty horses, and two thousand sheep. Adhering to frontier tradition, they drove the prisoners to Cebolleta, where they promptly sold them off. Other Hispanic militias were smaller and less successful. In July Jesús Gallegos of Abiquiu led one hundred twenty-five men into Navajo territory, but they were able to kill only four Navajos, wound a few others, and take four ponies. Yet other militias experienced disaster. Joaquín Candelario, also of Cebolleta, had a fierce encounter with Navajos at Laguna Grande, leaving thirty of his men dead. Candelario and thirteen survivors, seven of them badly wounded, straggled back into Fort Defiance on June 27, 1860.
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