The Long Walk

The Long Walk of the Navajos - When the Navajos tried to take advantage of the military slack caused by the outbreak of the Civil War, the US government sent Colonel Kit Carson to settle the uprising. His mission was to gather the Navajo together and move them to Fort Sumner on the Bosque Redondo Reservation. When the Indians refused to move and hid in the Canyon de Chelly, he began a merciless economic campaign destroying crops and lifestock, burning villages and killing people. By destroying their food supplies, eventually he convinced the Navajos that going to the reservation was the only way to survive. In 1864, the Navajos, among with some other tribes, a total of 8-9,000 people, began their move to Fort Sumner.



Officials called it a reservation, but to the conquered and exiled Navajos it was a wretched prison camp.

- David Roberts, Smithsonian Magazine

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