I have spoken to many who helped to humble the Navajos. As soon as harvest time approached, the soldiers would enter their country year after year: they say that the corn-fields were splendid; but they cut them all down, and fired the district wherever they went, driving off sheep, sometimes to the number of seventy thousand in a single raid, and oxen also by thousands. When there were no crops to destroy, and no apparent enemy to be found, or flocks to drive off, the military would encamp at the different springs, and try by this means to destroy the remnant of their stock: but in this, for a long time, they were unsuccessful ; for the Navajo sheep, probably from force of habit, could thrive if only watered once every third or fourth day; and thus it happened that when the troops had guarded a spring long enough, as they supposed, to prove that no Indians or flocks were in that district, and had left to go to another, the Navajos, who were quietly grazing their cattle in the secluded nooks amongst the hills hard by, came down to the spring and refreshed themselves with perfect impunity.
Year after year they boldly held out; and plunder became to them a necessity of existence, for they had no other means of support. At last, however, this never-ceasing hostility reduced the whole tribe to utter destitution; nor did they give up until they were literally starving. In 1863 the first large section of them (I believe about five thousand in number) delivered themselves up to the government. They were removed from their own country, and placed upon a large reservation on the Rio Pecos; and old Fort Sumner, which had been abandoned, was re-established in the centre of the reservation, for the purpose of carrying out the design of the government towards them. Since then nearly all the remains of the tribe have delivered themselves up, and, to the number of about seven thousand five hundred, have been placed on the reservation. Mr. Ward is of opinion that a very small fraction indeed of this once powerful tribe is now at large in the country north of the Rio Colorado, arid in Utah Territory; but since, for years before they gave in, the advantage had been on the side of the settlers against the Navajos, he assures me that there are at the present time not less than two thousand captives in the hands of the Mexicans, who profess to bring them up, and to take care of them as members of their families and households.
As regards the present condition of the Indians on the Bosque reservation, I cannot do better than give a short quotation from the report of Colonel A. B. Norton (Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico) for- the year 1866 :- -- "At Fort Sumner this tribe has about two thousand five hundred acres of land under cultivation, mostly in Indian corn, with an admirable system of irrigation. The water, however, is very poor in quality, and wood so scarce that it has to be hauled from twenty-five to thirty miles to the post, while the mezquit root, the only wood used by them for fuel, must soon give out. Add to this that the Comanehes make constant raids upon them, to within a few miles of the fort, and, as they are very little able to protect themselves, this adds still more to their discontent. Of the state of health and morals of these Navajos, the hospital reports give a woful account. The tale is not half told, because they have such an aversion to the hospital that but few of those taken sick will ever go there, and so they are fast diminishing in numbers; while the births are many, the deaths are more. Discontent fills every breast of this brave and light-hearted tribe; and a piteous cry comes from all as they think of their own far-off lands, 'Carry me back, carry me back !'" They have had a severe lesson and a terrible punishment ; but when a railway traverses the country, they may with perfect safety be allowed to return to their own land, now parched and desolate, but still so yearned for by these unhappy prisoners.
Without further investigation, I cannot hazard an opinion as to whether the Navajos are a branch of the town-builders or the true North-American redskins. They say themselves that they are related to the former; and their arts as well as their faces would, I think, rather tend to lead us to the same conclusion. Those figured at page 241 look far more like Southern than Northern Indians; and the woodcut is a good copy of a photograph.
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adapted from A. W. Bell
"On the Native Races of New Mexico"
1869 (Journal of the Ethnological Society of London)
