Hampton Sides interview
Hampton Sides
(upcut)…for all of the various Indian groups, and they were to just be swept aside and the other thing that went along with manifest destiny was a kind of an idealism--a sense that, you know, what our governments, our systems of democracy are really better, and it should be obvious to everyone that they're better and we're really doing you a favor to conquer you. So the United States and the populace of the United States had gotten itself whipped up into a kind of idealistic frenzy believing that this was the right thing to do and we were doing all these different people we were going to conquer a huge favor.
Interviewer
Tell us about Stephen Watts Kearney and the Army of the West. What was their purpose?
Hampton Sides
Actually let me go back and mention one more thing about a Polk, specifically. President Polk was an amazing figure in our history. He's not very well known as a President, but essentially everything he sought to get in his one-term in office, he got... very stubborn, very determined, a grim man--the sort of person who is not very charismatic, but he got what he wanted. President Polk had said at the outset of his administration that he would only seek one term of office, and so everything about his presidency had this accelerated sense of deadline--that he was going to get all of the land of the American West in those four years, and so everything was pressured and accelerated. But he did get everything he wanted.
Interviewer
Talk a little bit about Stephen Watts Kearney and the army. What was their purpose?
Hampton Sides
Stephen Watts Kearney was and old hand in the prairie lands of the West and was the logical candidate to lead the Army of the West from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas westward along the Santa Fe Trail to take New Mexico and the Northern provinces of what was then Mexico, and also march all of the way to California and take California as well. Their purpose was essentially to take all of this land in kind of a bold land grab and to hopefully do it without firing a shot and really to execute what would be one of the longest military marches in our history.
Interviewer
Talk a little bit about the Pueblo involved. What actually happened in Taos?
Hampton Sides
Not the Pueblo revolt... the Taos revolt? I hesitate because there is this thing called the Pueblo revolt, which goes way back into Spanish history. Gotcha... After Stephen Watts Kearney left New Mexico to head west towards California, he left the territory of New Mexico in the hands of a governor named Charles Bent. Charles Bent quickly found out that although conquest was easy, occupation was very difficult and an altogether different challenge. The people of New Mexico hated the Americans and didn't want to be governed by them, and that was true with some of the Pueblo Indians as well. So shortly after Kearney left in 1847, there was a revolt up at the Taos pueblo and Governor Bent was taken out of his home and scalped alive in front of his family, and there began a very bloody chapter in the occupation of New Mexico. Americans everywhere were singled out and killed and so the American Army entered the pictures and put down this insurrection.
Interviewer
Let’s talk a little bit about Navajo history. Where did they come from? Where were they living?
Hampton Sides
The Navajo are somewhat late arrivals to the American Southwest. They came down from Athabaska in Canada and filtered down along the spine of the Rockies. It's tempting to believe they moved here because they were sick of the cold weather in Canada and heard about some place warmer to the South. But in fact their migration was much more, sort of haphazard, and it took a long time for them to work their way down. They arrived anywhere between 1100 and 1300 A.D. and began to thrive in the Southwestern country. As the Navajos migrated southward, they branched off from their linguistic cousins, the Apache, and between the two of them (the Apaches and Navajos), really thrived in the Southwest and really became some of the dominant tribes in the area.
Interviewer
Let’s talk about their relationship with Chaco canyon. Did they live there for a while? What are the lessons to be learned about Chaco from the Navajo perspective?
Hampton Sides
The Navajo people have always lived around Chaco Canyon, which is of course one of the most magnificent ruins in the Southwest, and have been fascinated by it and have viewed it as they are the custodians of this place in many senses. But at the same time, they viewed Chaco Canyon as a cautionary tale--to live in such density, to live in these Pueblo apartment complexes where disease could be communicated, to take that kind of toll on the environment that a dense living arrangement can take. I think they came to see that as not a good idea in a desert environment where there is not much water to go around, there's just not that much grazing country to go around. And so they decided they would not live in that way, that they would spread out over the Southwest country and live a very different sort of semi-nomadic life.
Interviewer
Talk about their life and other's fear of them as raiders by the settlers...
Hampton Sides
I think a lot of Americans have an idea that the Navajo are, and having always and historically been a very peaceful weaving culture--and of course they have been. But they were also, during that day, widely feared as raiders. They were very successful at it. They were really good at stealth and essentially coming in along the Rio Grande settlements of the Hispanics and every year taking many thousands of heads of sheep, sometimes stealing women and children, sometimes killing shepherds along the way, although sheep was really what they were after. They were a sheep people; they loved mutton, they were great weavers, they were in many senses like a pastoral people you might find in the holy land circulating widely and over a large and sparsely populated area with their sheep. They found sheep were much more successful in that terrain than horses.
Interviewer
Talk a little bit about their fear of death and how that relates to their culture.
Hampton Sides
The Navajo people have tended to have a deep-seated fear of death, anything to do with death--funerals, corpses--and they have a lot of lore and beliefs about what they called "skin-walkers," who are ghosts that do all kinds of evil things and basically invade graves and steal from... The Navajos have traditionally believed in a class of witches essentially called "skin-walkers," who they believe rob graves and steal valuables that are buried with their loved-ones in the various pockets of Navajo country. This fear of death that is so prevalent in Navajo country affected the way they dealt with all kinds of things. It's one of the reasons, although they were very successful raiders, they were not known as being tremendously successful warriors on a large-scale. They very rarely fought in concentrated numbers. Their idea was go do a raid as fast as you can and get out of there and get back to Navajo country and then undergo a series of ceremonies to wash off the taint of having anything to do with death or killing.
When the American Army was approaching New Mexico, what they didn't realize is that New Mexico was already embroiled in kind of low-grade war that had been going on for centuries between the Navajos and some of the other raiding tribes and the Hispanic people. And in fact, shortly before the Americans arrived in the very first village they came to in New Mexico, a little village called Las Vegas, there had been, the previous night, a raid. Navajos had swept in from the mountains and had taken thousands of head of sheep and a shepherd had been reported to have been killed, so this cycle of violence of the Navajos raiding the sheep herds and then the Spanish retaliating, was a cycle that had been going on for centuries. And the Americans were just about to get a taste of this ancient war, and were about to inherit it, essentially.
Interviewer
Let’s talk about the reciprocal slave and raiding between the different settlements. Talk about the Taos slave markets.
Hampton Sides
The Spanish often went into Navajo country to get slaves. There was a thing they called "the Santa Fe Bachelor Party," which was essentially before someone was about to get married, the groom and his buddies would go into Navajo country and steal a bunch of slaves for the prospective bride to have someone to help with housekeeping. It's one of the dirty little secrets of New Mexico that slavery was fairly rampant and you could buy slaves just like you could in the American South in slave markets. There was one up in Taos. It cost like a hundred dollars. Navajos were considered particularly valuable slaves because of their talent for weaving, so this was just kind of a cycle that had been perpetuated for centuries in which the Navajos... yes they came in and stole sheep, and the Spaniards reciprocated by stealing people. It was a really vicious cycle and a hard one to break.
Interviewer
Narbona... what kind of man was he? And maybe you can talk about the democratic nature of the Navajo society, and follow that up with what actually happened and why that was a pivotal moment in U.S./Navajo relations.
Hampton Sides
Narbona was a hugely wealthy and eminent leader of one of the larger sub-groups of the Navajos, but you have to understand, the Navajos didn't really have chiefs in the sense that the American government was always saying 'take me to your leader, who’s your chief?" The Navajos were very democratic and very pluralistic and very decentralized politically. But if you had to pick one person who sort of represented the Navajos in the early days when the Americans first arrived, it was Narbona. He was well into his 80's, he was widely respected, and he was quite wealthy, and had in his early days, as a warrior, been very successful as a raider. But as he aged and came to see the larger consequences of raiding, he became known as a peacemaker. Narbona was very worried about the Americans. He had heard all sorts of stories about how powerful they were, that they had conquered his age-old enemy, the Mexicans, without firing a shot. And so he wanted to come to Santa Fe for himself and get a glimpse of what the Americans were up to. So he made a secret trip, kind of took the back roads, crawled up behind the fort that the Americans were building, Fort Marcy, and saw the might of these people--"these new men," as he called them--and realized then and there that it was futile to try to fight these people who had come so far beyond the buffalo plains to conquer the West, that he was going to go back to the Navajo country and recommend to all the other head men that it was important to reconcile with the Americans and to deal with them because otherwise there was going to be a long and fruitless war.
Interviewer
What actually happened when he met his demise at the hands of the U.S. military?
Hampton Sides
Throughout this saga there are these moments where you feel like the different sides are going to reconcile, they're going to settle their differences--that there are these windows of opportunity and one of those windows of opportunity came during the Washington expedition. A Colonel named Washington led a group into Navajo country in 1849, and they met with Narbona, and it was clear that Narbona was an advocate of peace and was in a rare position to be able to convince the Navajo people to deal with the Americans. But shortly after this meeting took place, and within hours of the conversation that took place with Colonel Washington, an argument, a rather stupid argument, broke out in which someone identified a horse that the Navajos had apparently stolen and one of the Hispanic militia soldiers with Washington said "that's my horse, I need it back." Washington didn't really know what to do. He sided with his soldier's point of view and demanded that the horse be returned. The next thing you know there is gunfire and a... a piece of artillery is brought out and Washington orders that it be fired on the Navajo people that are gathered. And Narbona is one of the Navajos who is killed. Within hours of encountering the American Army and Narbona is killed, not only killed but he's scalped by a souvenir hunter, and this opportunity is lost. This moment... this window of opportunity is gone and understandably the relationship between the Navajos and the United States deteriorates after that. One of the people who was watching as Narbona was killed was Narbona's son-in-law--a defiant and truculent young leader named Manuelito who would emerge as one of the great leaders of the Navajo people and a believer. After having seen his father-in-law murdered and mutilated, that there was nothing to be gained by negotiating with Americans. This was an all-out war of survival. So Narbona's son-in-law Manuelito becomes kind of the voice of defiance in subsequent years.
Interviewer
Tell me a little bit about General James Henry Carleton. What kind of man was he and tell me a little bit about his history.
Hampton Sides
James Henri Carleton was a real piece of work. He had an insufferable kind of a schoolmarm personality--someone who believed with outright righteous zeal that he had the solution to the problem and the problem being what to do with the Navajos. He took one side-long glance at all of the chaos of New Mexico and that old cycle of violence that had gone on between the Hispanics, and the Navajos and said "you know what? I've got the solution." What we need to do is take the Navajo people, round them up, move them to the plains to a location that he had personally scouted and force them at gunpoint overnight to become Christian farmers living in apartment complexes like the Pueblo Indians and to do this for their own good. It's kind of funny to say, but he was a humanitarian idealist who believed that he could reform the Navajos, and that in reforming the Navajos he would have a kind of a case study as to how to deal with all western tribes. Carleton was a New England Calvinist. He had grown up in Maine. He traveled all over the American West... had fought in some important battles in the Mexican war and had served in California with the California volunteers. He had marched all the war to New Mexico during the Civil War to help fight against the Texans who had invaded New Mexico only to find out that the New Mexicans had already been sent packing, like Kit Carson and Colonel Canby and others, and so he inherited New Mexico as the commander with nothing really to do, but very aware that his colleagues back East were winning daily appointments of glory on the battlefields of the Civil War, knew that he had to do something spectacular to gain a name for himself, and I think, invested an unusual and disproportionate amount of his personal attention and zeal to figuring out this Navajo problem, believing it was his ticket to fame.
Interviewer
Let’s talk about gold as a motivator and the speculation that there was gold on the Navajo lands.
Hampton Sides
Another motivation that Carleton had for rounding up the Navajo and moving then was his belief, based on no particular evidence, that Navajo country was rich in gold. He believed that... he kind of saw himself as an amateur geologist and had spent perhaps too much time in California watching a lot of men grow incredibly rich digging for gold. So he had this idea that Navajo country would yield the next big mother load of gold. Carleton was somewhat embarrassed by New Mexico and by its poverty and how much money it was costing the American Government during the desperate times of the Civil War to keep this territory. There were a lot of people who wanted to give New Mexico back to Mexico. They were sick of the place. And he thought that if he could prove there was gold in Navajo country that it would not only help fund the Civil War back East, but it would sort of redeem New Mexico in the eyes of those back in Washington who wanted to just give it away. So he started sending speculators and gold experts into Navajo country to try and find this gold and believed that Navajos would all have to be swept aside so that the settlers could stream in and start panning for gold. Of course, there was no gold to speak of and this proved to be quixotic, and it never came to pass.
Kit Carson was a larger-than-life figure; someone who was famous in his own day because of a series of cheap pulp novels that were published called "Blood and Thunders," in which he was depicted as this great hero of manifest destiny.
Kit Carson was a larger-than-life figure--someone who was famous in his own day for these terrible pulp novels that had been published in which he was invariably the star--these novels called, "Blood and Thunders." He became a household name in America because of these books, and yet he hated these stories. They never got his consent to use his name. They never game him any money. They certainly never bothered to find out anything about the real Kit Carson. And the finally irony of these books was he couldn't read them because he was illiterate, so he had to have other people around the campfire read them to him, and he just hated them and he hated the celebrity that hounded him throughout his whole life because of them. The thing that I think is remarkable about Kit Carson is the extent to which he really came to embody all the different phases and facets of settling the American West. He came out here to New Mexico as a runaway when he was sixteen on the Santa Fe Trail. He became a trapper. Then he became a hunter, and then he became a guide for the Topographical Corp., and then he became a soldier and a Transcontinental Courier, and then he became an Indian Agent, and finally he became a General. So his career is very multi-faceted and sort of mirrors the different aspects and different stages of the expansion into the American West.
Interviewer
Tell us about his philosophy about being a soldier and how he viewed that when he was asked to do something.
Hampton Sides
One of Carson's greatest faults, you might say, certainly one of his strongest attributes, was a sense of duty to order. When he got an order he carried it out. You do have to understand that the army of that day was not one in which you could sort of pick and choose the orders that you wanted--oh this one I agree with, this one I don't think I'm going to do that. Of course you had to carry out the order you were given, but he carried these orders out with zeal and with a haste that was unusual and a big part of his character. You constantly see in his career, superiors giving him orders that would seem to violate his personality. Kit Carson didn't hate Indians. His first two wives were Indians. Many of his early friends, as a trapper, were Indians.
Interviewer
Talk about how Kit didn't hate Indians...
Hampton Sides
It really can't be said that Kit Carson hated Indians. In his early days as a trapper he probably lived more like an Indian than a white man, and he understood the tribes of the West well, if not better than any white man alive. His first wife was Arapaho, Singing Grass; one of the great loves of his life.
It can't be said that Kit Carson hated Indians. He understood American Indians probably better than any white man alive and had lived more like an Indian than a white guy for most of his young adulthood as a trapper. He had friends who were Indians. He had married into Indian tribes. His first wife was Arapaho, a woman named Singing Grass. They had two children together, then she died in childbirth with the second daughter. His second wife was Cheyenne. He spoke five, six, maybe even seven Indian tongues, so it can't be said that Kit Carson lacked an understanding of American Indian culture or ways of doing things. Carson's second wife, a Cheyenne woman, is... that marriage didn't work out and she essentially kicked him out of her tepee with all of his belongings. Shortly after that he married Josefa Jaramillo from Taos, the love of his life. He was married to her for 25 years. They died one month apart. She was 18 years his junior--a beautiful Hispanic woman. At the time I think she was only 14 when they began to court. So I guess he was robbing the cradle in some ways. I think Josefa only vaguely understood what Kit Carson was doing when he was away all those many years in the service to a government she didn't have any particular allegiance to; a government that had never done anything particularly favorable to her people, the Hispanics. So I think there was a tension in the household. What are you doing? Why are you away so much? I think her extended family didn't get Kit Carson, or they were a little frustrated with his absences.
The "Blood and Thunder" novels frequently employed advice where there would be a white woman who would be kidnapped by some tribe or other in the Southwest and Kit Carson would be called upon to save the day to go rescue her from the tribe. It just so happened that there was, in fact, a real kidnapping of a real woman who just happened to be named, Ann White. Her family was attacked on the Santa Fe Trail by the Jicarilla Apaches, and Kit Carson... the real-life Kit Carson got the call to go find her. She had been kidnapped with her baby daughter, and Kit Carson pursued the trail for 12 days into the plains of Texas, finally located the tribe, and there was a mix-up about how to approach and what kind of overtures to make with the tribe, and in the ensuing confusion, Ann White was killed by the Jicarilla Apaches, and the tribes scattered. Carson was devastated by this and was haunted by her death the rest of his life. But one of the strange little things that happened was, when they went through the belongings of the Jicarilla Apache, they found a book that Ann White had been reading, and it was "Blood and Thunder" staring in, none other than Kit Carson, saving the day and rescuing a white woman from a kidnapping. Of course Kit Carson couldn't read this book, so he had some of the soldiers read it around the campfire. This was the very first time that Kit Carson became aware of his mythic status as essentially a comic book hero, and he hated it. He told his soldiers to burn the damn thing and hated those books for the rest of his life.
Unlike the Pueblo Indians, for example, the Navajo people never had a capitol city or a central location, a dense location where they carried out their rituals and so forth. But they did have this amazing place called Canyon de Chelly; one of the great national wonders of the American Southwest--a 70-mile network, a labyrinth of different canyons actually. It was sort of a sentimental and literal heart of Navajo country. They met there every fall for large sort of festivals and they carried out all kinds of rituals there and painted and etched all sorts of artwork on those beautiful walls, and it was a sacred place to them and still is. It still is very much the center, kind of a metaphorical heart of Navajo country. In Canyon de Chelly the Navajos were extremely proud of their peach trees. There were these orchards spread out all along the canyon floor and when the Navajos would stream in the fall for these ceremonies, they would eat the canyon peaches, and it was really part of their culture and the pride of the Navajo people.
Interviewer
Tell me a little bit about what happened at Canyon de Chelly.
Hampton Sides
When Kit Carson got the order to go into Navajo country from James Henry Carleton, he realized pretty fast that he couldn't fight the Navajo people in a traditional sense, and engage the enemy in a concentrated battle--that what he really had to do was to fight the Navajo country--to fight the land itself. And so he embarked on a scorched earth policy a full year before General Sherman led his famous scorched earth campaign against the American South. Scorched earth is really as old as warfare, but it was one of the very first times that it ever became a stated part of American military policy--to go into this country and starve a people out, to destroy their cornfields, to destroy every bean patch and melon patch, to ruin the water sources, to guard the salt sources and to do this over a prolonged period of time until you over months and months and months, force and entire people to their knees. That's what Carson did and it began to slowly but surely work. Kit Carson seems to me, did everything he could to avoid Canyon de Chelly. He seemed like he was spooked by the place. He had numerous opportunities to go in there and refused. It was only until James Henry Carleton said, "no you have to go into Canyon de Chelly, this is the heartland of the Navajo people, this is the place to make a stand and broadcast to the Navajo holdouts your purpose and to traverse the length of the canyon, it was believed to kind of break the spirit of the Navajo people." So that's what he finally did. He went, with some reluctance, into Navajo country and pierced Canyon de Chelly. What's remarkable about Carson's campaign into Canyon de Chelly is that he sent subordinates to actually do the work down in the canyon. Even then he was... it seemed like he was spooked by the place. He went up on the rim. He went in the mouth of the canyon right there at Chinle Wash, but he didn't go all the way in, and he didn't want any of the glory that might come with saying you were one of the first commanders to penetrate the full length of this mighty canyon. He wanted nothing to do with the place and let his subordinates win that glory.
Interviewer
Could it have been worse if it was somebody else...?
Hampton Sides
All people hate their conqueror and that's certainly true of the Navajos with respect to Kit Carson. They hate him. They think he's a genocidal maniac. They've compared him to Hitler. But I've always said that really the Navajos could have had a much different and a far worse conqueror than Kit Carson in terms of how he actually led the campaign and his understanding of American Indian culture. He was no Sheridan. He was no Custer. He was no Andrew Jackson, if you want to go farther back into American history. He didn't hate American Indians, and he resisted orders that he got from Carleton to shoot every Navajo on site, for example. And the fact was he was a reluctant warrior, he didn't want to be there. He had on several occasions, put in for a leave of absence. He actually resigned at one point and Carleton said "no you're indispensable to me. You have to do this." Now you can ask the question, is it worse to conquer a people and do it because you believe it's right, or to do it anyway even though you have reluctance about it? That's a good question and it certainly doesn't let Kit Carson off of the hook morally. But it is true that he did what he said he was going to do in most instances. He tried to keep the casualties as low as possible, and when he accepted the surrender of the Navajos he treated them fairly and with decency, and he insisted, when he found out that there really wasn't enough food to go around, that the government provide for these people or else this whole thing was going to be a total failure.
Interviewer
Talk about the Long Walk for a little bit...
Hampton Sides
The Long Walk was the largest forced relocation of American Indians after the famous Trail of Tears of the Cherokees. Depending on where you started from, it was anywhere from 200 miles to almost 500 miles. It was not designed to be a failure like most relocations of... Like most forced relocations of refugees, things went wrong. There wasn't enough food. The weather interfered. Navajos froze to death because there weren't enough blankets. They weren't acquainted with the kind of food that they were issued by the American Army. The old and the sickly and the children who were already weakened by this scorched earth policy of Carson got sick, and their constitutions were already depleted so the march took longer and it was harder--took a harder toll on them. But it evolved into something of a disaster and many hundreds of Navajos died along the way.
Interviewer
Was it as brutal as it was depicted in terms of the American soldiers...?
Hampton Sides
The American soldiers were under strict orders to treat the Navajos kindly and fairly. After all, this was an experiment to prove to the Navajos that you can become Christians and farmers and, you know, if you can't even get them to the site without killing them, then this experiment is going to be a failure. What was so tragic about the Long Walk was that these long columns of refugees were exposed to other enemies, not just the American soldiers, but Pueblo tribes who had long hated them; Hispanic slavers who preyed upon the flanks of this long column of refugees. So they were constantly being picked off and shot at, and it seemed like they had enemies on every front.
The Navajos had been living for years in a period they come to call "the fearing time," in which they had enemies on every side and they had had droughts and they American government had pursued them, but so had the Ute’s, and so had so many other tribes, and Kit Carson finally led his campaign into Navajo country it was sort of a final straw that broke the back of the nation. They thought that anything would be better than this sort of paranoid existence that they had to live for the previous four or five years, and they were willing to give it a try. They didn't know what it all really meant. They had never seen this country the Bosque Redondo, but they were willing to give it a try. They certainly had some experience with agriculture. They were proud growers of corn and melons and beans and it wasn't an entirely alien experiment for them at all. It was only when they got there to the site of Bosque Redondo that they began to have profound doubts. The location was out on the plains--an area that is just light-years away from Navajo country. There wasn't enough firewood to keep them warm. There wasn't enough pastureland for their animals. The water in the Pecos River was alkaline and caused them to get sick, so this experiment very quickly began to unravel and the corn crop that they planted that very first year was infested with an insect called a cut-worm, almost like a biblical plague. Just before they were about to harvest, they realized that the entire crop was ruined. So it seems like the whole experiment was cursed, and with each succeeding year the Navajos began to give up.
Interviewer
How many died on the Long Walk?
Hampton Sides
It's really hard to get an accurate sense of how many people died on the Long Walk. The army didn't take very good records, and the Navajo stories that live to this day contradict some of the army stories. The Navajos have said that the numbers were much higher. The army records that I was able to look at said the number of those who died on The Long Walk itself were actually fairly small, maybe two or three hundred, not the many thousands that you will hear in other accounts. Where the real numbers began to add up of casualties was at the Bosque Redondo. Very quickly diseases of all sorts began to break out. Many Navajos froze to death. Dysentery broke out. Many diseases began to break out including dysentery and cholera--typical of many prison camp situations. And venereal disease became a terrible problem when the soldiers found out that they could sleep with some of the Navajo women because they were starving and needed money essentially. It was a desperate situation and it just got worse and worse and worse, and within a few years as many as 3,000 Navajos had died. That's essentially 1/3 of the 9,000 that had been brought there during the Long Walk.
Interviewer
Did General Carleton participate in anything at the Bosque Redondo?
Hampton Sides
General Carleton was a funny man in a lot of ways. He was a control freak. He followed every aspect of this campaign and yet weirdly, he never went with Kit Carson into Canyon de Chelly or into Navajo country to fight. He ran this campaign from afar. When they were moved to Bosque Redondo, Carleton went occasionally, but by and large he stayed in Santa Fe and wrote tons and tons of letters and dictated all sorts of minutiae. This was his baby--he personally believed in this with all his might. He personally scouted this location. He had gambled his entire army career on its success, and so when things started to go bad he was very reluctant to believe it. He was one of these sort of "stay the course" guys who believed that we're going to make this thing work and not accept failure even when it's staring you in the face.
There are all sorts of villains in this disastrous experiment in social policy. If you're really looking for a villain in this I tend to focus... If you're really looking for a villain in the Bosque Redondo experiment, it's James Henry Carleton. This was his baby. He believed in it with all of his might. But you don't necessarily have to stop there because this was policy that was approved in Washington and was approved by President Lincoln, so it goes all the way up the chain of command. The basic outlines of Carleton's policy of removing the Navajos to Bosque Redondo fit perfectly with policy emanating from Washington and his plan was signed and approved by President Lincoln. So it went all the way up the chain of command.
Interviewer
Let’s talk about the Mescaleros... how did they get there? How did they get along with the Navajos...?
Hampton Sides
As a sort of warm-up to the Navajo campaign, Carleton assigned Kit Carson another mission to go into Mescalero country, Mescalero Apaches, and round them up--a much smaller tribe, mostly mountain-dwelling tribe in Southern New Mexico--and to take them to Bosque Redondo. It proved to be a huge mistake to bring the Mescalero Apache Indians into the Bosque Redondo and have them share this place with the Navajos. Carleton thought they would get along just fine because they spoke more or less the same language because they were Athabaskan Indians as well. But they were bitter enemies and had been for centuries, so from the start they fought and stole each other's livestock and raided each other on the Bosque Redondo and it proved to be one of the first real problems that the commanders there had to deal with--essentially policing these two tribes that are supposed to get along, but essentially hate each other. The Mescalero Apache began to realize that the Navajos were running the show here at the Bosque Redondo. This was their reservation. The Apaches were outnumbered something like 9,000 to more like 500, so they saw the writing on the wall, and they finally realized that this was a huge mistake, it wasn't working, people were starving, and so one night they just simply vanished into the night. They escaped stealing a bunch of Navajo horses as kind of a final insult as they left. And Carleton made a feeble attempt to chase them, but he realized it was futile--they couldn't hold this tribe there and it was a mistake to try and make these two tribes get along in this close environment.
There is one other point though about why this was just a bad thing for the Navajos that I think I should say. One of the other reasons why the Bosque Redondo experiment was such a failure is that the Navajos really lost a sense of themselves by leaving their country. Their identity, their tribal identity was so closely tied to the four magic mountains of Navajo country and to the place names that are sprinkled all throughout Navajo country. Every place is sacred. Every place has a name and figures into their folklore. To be removed from all of that--it just broke their spirit. The medicine men didn't believe they had any power left. They lost their touch. There were old prescriptions that had said you're never to leave Navajo country and the four sacred mountains unless for very very particular purposes. So it really was a great source of fear that by removing them from their homeland, the Americans had essentially taken the magic out of the people and their sense of themselves. That by violating those prescriptions maybe they were on a road to complete ruin.
General Sherman was certainly no sentimentalist on any subject. He had seen pretty much everything there was to see in the department of human misery as a General in the Civil War. But when he came to New Mexico after the Civil War and surveyed the situation at Bosque Redondo, he came very quickly to see that it was a huge failure and it was a very sad place. The Navajos were despondent. They weren't planting. They had pretty much given up. And furthermore, everything that the experiment had set out to do had failed. They were not Christians. They were not Pueblo dwellers and they were not farmers on a large scale. They were not self-sufficient, and it was costing the U.S. Government millions of dollars to essentially prop this thing up. These once-proud people had become wards of the State. When Sherman came to Bosque Redondo his primary idea was that the Navajo should be moved to Oklahoma, even farther away from their homeland--Oklahoma being the preferred dumping ground for American Indians for generations ever since the Cherokee. But he was willing to listen to the Navajo leaders and hear their side of the story and hear what they wanted. Barboncito had emerged as one of the great leaders of the Navajo people and was certainly one of the more eloquent speakers. The Navajo had finally come to see that, you know what? the American people (these bilagana), they really want us to have a leader--someone who speaks for the tribe, someone who represents the will of the people and is accountable for the actions of the people.
Sherman was somewhat appalled by what he saw at Bosque Redondo, just how bleak the place was and hopeless, the numbers of Navajos who had died there, and yet how expensive it was to maintain. It was a complete failure. He said that Carleton was half crazy on the place and recognized that this had been kind of a personal experiment of Carleton's and that the Government had to do something to change this. His idea was to send the Navajos to Oklahoma, even farther away from their homeland. But he was willing to sit down and listen to the Navajo people and hear what they had to say. Over the course of the years at the Bosque Redondo the Navajos finally came to understand that the American military really wanted and needed to have a leader, a spokesman for the Navajo people and that it was in the tribe's interest to have one. This seemed to be what the biligana needed to, you know, "take me to your leader" syndrome again. The person who emerged as the Navajo leader in many respects was Barboncito--a very respected headman and medicine man from Canyon de Chelly originally, who was very eloquent. He stood up and gave a very impassioned speech to General Sherman, which was captured by the army stenographers and translated, in which he essentially said, this place at Bosque Redondo does not like us. Everything we do here turns to death. He said that my desire comes in at my feet and leaves from my mouth that you will not send us to Oklahoma and you will send us back to our homeland before I die. General Sherman was moved by Barboncito's speech--a man who is not accustomed to being moved by anybody, and decided to grant him is wish to go back to Navajo country. No gold had ever been found in Navajo country. Perhaps it's a little bit like the briar patch in the sense that the U.S. Government, by that point, did not find Navajo land very valuable.
Barboncito was a medicine man from Canyon de Chelly and a great speaker. He was very gentle and small--small hands, very calm, very steady, very quiet, a reassuring presence with whiskers. He was not typical of the Navajos that have beards. But he became to be respected by the American commanders and by Sherman for his eloquence. He seemed to have kind of a prophecy that the Navajos were going to go west, not east... go back to their homeland and not to Oklahoma, which was the last place he wanted to go. Barboncito rose and gave a great and impassioned speech to Sherman in which he said everything that we touch here turns to death. "This land does not like us" he said. He made it very clear that he did not want to go to Oklahoma. He said, "My desire comes in at my feet and comes out at my mouth that you will let us return to our homeland before I die." This speech was captured by the army stenographers and later translated. It was a very beautiful speech and Sherman was quite moved by it--Sherman being someone who was very rarely moved by anyone. He considered what Barboncito had said and decided that the Navajos had suffered enough and that he would return them back to their homeland. And so they began to negotiate a treaty to return them to their homeland.
Manuelito was defiant and was one of the very last Navajo headmen to surrender. He had been hiding out for years resisting pleas of the various American commanders to give up, and to come to the Bosque Redondo. He was kind of like the most wanted man among the Americans. If they could make him surrender, then everyone would surrender. But he held out for years and years. It was said that he hid out in the Grand Canyon and in the country around monument valley. He was constantly on the move, but he finally did surrender. He came to Bosque Redondo and looked around for a little while, then left again, escaped in the night because he thought it was such a dismal place. But then finally he surrendered again for the final time and came to Bosque Redondo and was there in the final desperate months of this experiment when nothing was working. Manuelito in many ways was kind of the antithesis of Barboncito--he was a large man, a very truculent warrior, a very... just a tough guy. Everything about him was just large, you know a large voice, and had been this defiant warrior for all of this life. But even he began to see that he had no choice but to surrender, and he gave himself up for the final time, came to Bosque Redondo and lived there during the most desperate months, the last months of this experiment.
The American government was still, even after the failures of Bosque Redondo, trying to do everything in its power to turn the Navajos into Christians, farmers and apartment dwellers. It seems to be something they could not get away from. And in sending the Navajos to boarding schools and not just teaching them in English, but requiring that they not speak Navajo and that their beliefs and their culture was inferior, did a lot to contribute to a kind of inferiority complex, and it has taken the Navajos a long time to get away from it and get over. It was terribly destructive and really counterproductive to the larger goals of Indian policy.
It's really hard to say that anything good came out of this experiment--all this needless suffering, all of the starvation and bloodshed. But the Navajo people did learn some very important lessons about the realities of dealing with the biligana. For the first time the Navajos really became a unified tribe because up until that point they had really been a very decentralized (not one tribe, but many tribes) with many different leaders, and they became unified in their voice, and in their political will, in a way, that was necessary for their continued survival. They also came to really appreciate the fact that this cycle of violence that had been going on, that they were indeed a part of with the Hispanic culture, had to end--that this metronome back and forth of slave raiding and sheep raiding was not a cycle that was going to work anymore, that the United States Government was serious about ending this culture of violence. So these were some of the lessons that were learned. The United States Government learned some things as well. It became more and more evident after the failure of the Bosque Redondo experiment, that although reservations were necessary to prolong the culture of American Indian tribes and to ensure their survival, these tribes needed to be located in their own homeland. This whole idea of forced relocations began to lose purchase because prior to that, really, the American had the idea that essentially just move people around like pawns on a board it really didn't matter--thousands of miles, hundreds of miles, it didn't matter. Finally the government was beginning to realize that homeland was sacred and was necessary to the morale and spirit and the tribal identity of these tribal groups, and to move them long distances was going to ensure the failure of any kind of reservation.
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