Navajo Administrative History

If anything, the Mexican territory of New Mexico was even weaker than the Spanish colony. From its founding in 1821, Mexico lacked the economic resources to sustain its northern frontier. Texas in particular and to a lesser degree New Mexico were invaded by U.S. economic interests almost from the moment of Mexican independence. The Mexican government could do little to stop the Navajos, who preyed on the weakened and nearly defenseless territory. The Navajos relentlessly attacked New Mexico, appropriating crops, stealing livestock, and taking captives. The situation became so dire that in 1845, Governor Manuel Armijo wrote: "the war with the Navajo is slowly consuming us." When Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny arrived in Santa Fe in 1846 to proclaim the beginning of the American era, the best thing he had to offer the people of New Mexico was protection from Navajo raids. "The Navajos come down from the mountains and carry off your sheep and your women whenever they please," he told Santa Feans on August 22, 1846. "My government will correct all this." [20]

It was a promise the U.S. military intended to keep, particularly after a band of Navajo stole a flock of American army horses. The Navajos had almost free run of New Mexico; the great chief Narbona exercised his curiosity about the Americans by viewing the American troops at Fort Marcy near Santa Fe from a secret vantage point in the nearby mountains. But Kearny made a promise. By treaty or war, the Americans sought to bring a measure of order to New Mexican-Navajo relations that had never before existed.

Although the Navajo and the Americans signed a treaty at the end of 1846, it proved insufficient to maintain peace. The Taos Rebellion of 1847 complicated cross-cultural relations in New Mexico, and by the summer of 1847, the treaty had become a bad memory. The Navajos had lost respect for American soldiers, while Spanish-speaking New Mexicans incessantly reminded the Americans of General Kearny's promise in 1846. The result was more than a decade of war designed to compel Navajo submission. [21]

This effort culminated in the efforts of Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, who attacked the Navajos in their own land and removed them to a "reservation" in eastern New Mexico. Smitten with gold fever and using the Civil War as an excuse, Carleton proceeded against the Navajo. In the summer of 1863, he railed against the Navajo to his superiors, brought Christopher (Kit) Carson from Taos to lead 1,000 men to the Dinehtah, the Navajo homeland, and gave the Navajo until July 20, 1863, to surrender. A war with no quarter began, in which Carson and his men destroyed Navajo livestock and crops. The scorched earth policy succeeded. By the middle of February of 1864, more then 1,200 Navajo had surrendered. The Americans had kept their promise to the people of New Mexico, albeit at the expense of the Navajo. [22]

Some of the Navajo escaped capture and fled west, to the Navajo Mountain and Shonto Plateau areas. Many settled in the area, forming an independent and uncowed group of Navajo, committed to their pre-reservation style of life. Not exposed to Anglo culture and the degrading removal to the Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner in the Pecos Valley and subsequent attempts to anglicize the Navajo and make them dependent, these Navajos retained an autonomy that helped sustain traditional culture. After the Navajos returned from the Bosque Redondo in 1868, the people of the western reservation were distinguished by their independence and fidelity to traditional Navajo ways. Settled as an evasive maneuver from a conqueror, the western reservation became a bastion of cultural conservatism, the home of the most traditional Navajos. These "longhairs" had a different set of experiences than those who were sent away, and it shaped their outlook. They survived the conflict with the Americans, suffering only geographic relocation as a price. Their freedom, cultural autonomy, and economy were not taken from them.

Nor did they face much encroachment from Arizona Territory. The little development in the middle and late nineteenth century centered on the south-central part of the territory. The area around Navajo Mountain offered grazing and mining opportunities, but because of the Navajo influx, it had the reputation of being hostile territory. In the late nineteenth century, a number of Anglo-Americans explored the area, but they did so carefully. They recognized that they were in the homeland of people who took a dim view of their presence.

After the "Long Walk" to Fort Sumner and the subsequent four-year stay at the Bosque Redondo, the threat of the Navajo as a physical adversary ended. But the military defeat of the Navajo did not mean that efforts to integrate them into the society of the New Mexico Territory began. The Treaty of Bosque Redondo, which allowed the Navajos to return home, cemented a new order. While the Navajos were compelled to give up raiding and other predatory practices as part of the agreement to return to the Dinehtah, the only concession to their need to develop a self-sufficient economy was the assignment of 160-acre parcels of the newly created reservation to heads of families and 80-acre tracts for single people, as well as $100 worth of seed and implements the first year, $25 the following two years, and $10 per year for the subsequent ten years for Navajos engaged in farming. The Navajo young were required to attend school, and informal provisions for the return of Navajos held by New Mexicans were established. The Navajo were home, but needed to find a viable way to reconstitute their culture and livelihood. [23]

On their return to their homeland, the Navajo had to adapt to the new order imposed by the Americans. Much of their historic economy and way of living had been eliminated. Raiding the settlements protected by the Americans was out of the question. It was this practice that inspired the wrath of the American military, and the memory of exile in the Bosque Redondo loomed large in Navajo consciousness. Navajos instead built an economy based less on agriculture and much more on livestock and crafts such as jewelry- and rug-making. Even the people of the Shonto Plateau and the Navajo Mountain area experienced these changes, although their distance from Indian agencies and other institutions of American government and society limited the impact. [24]

Always important in the Navajo economy, sheep became the basis of sustenance for many in the post-Bosque Redondo era. Adaptable and innovative, the Navajo responded to their new situation by developing a livestock-based economy. In the 1880s, the livestock economy flourished, making the Navajo prosperous by their own standards. But this attempt at self-sufficiency also put many of the Navajo in conflict with some of the most powerful interests in the New Mexico Territory. [25]

After 1846, the Territory of New Mexico was transformed. A loosely knit cabal often referred to as the "Santa Fe Ring" dominated both the political and economic affairs of the territory. Many of its members, such as Thomas Benton Catron, later U.S. senator from New Mexico and the person for whom Catron County is named, made great fortunes and wielded vast influence. Even those who were sometimes supportive of Hispano and Indian interests, such as territorial governor and judge L. Bradford Prince, were far more sympathetic toward the Pueblos than the Navajo. Almost all of the leaders of the ring were involved in the livestock industry and most had some ties to the various railroads that sought to traverse New Mexico in the 1870s and 1880s. The result was that the most powerful forces in the territory had needs that came in direct conflict with the growing and increasingly prosperous Navajo livestock economy.

In the resolution of the so-called "Checkerboard lands" dispute between 1885 and 1910, powerful territorial interests and the Navajos developed a pattern of economic competition to replace the military adversity of the pre-Bosque Redondo era. The attitude of the Americans toward the Navajo had not changed; despite the fact that Navajos resided in the jurisdiction of the U.S., they were still regarded as opponents. The checkerboard resulted from the overlap of the alternating sections of land given to the railroads with executive order additions to the Navajo reservation and public domain lands. Compounding the problem were historical patterns of use. Navajos settled in the contested areas after their return from the Bosque Redondo and grazed animals in the area. The Indians sought to make the area an executive order addition to the reservation, but the discovery of Artesian water made the status of the lands worth contesting. Efforts by leading members of the territory helped assure delays, and the situation was never clearly adjudicated. [26]

In Arizona, the Navajos faced a similar situation. Encroaching grazing interests pushed farther north in the state, threatening Navajo sheep range along the southern rim of the reservation. Pressure increased as the network of trading posts spread across the reservation, embroiling Navajos in the cash economy and subtly encouraging more emphasis on craft-making. Little of this reached the Navajo Mountain area, located in the heart of the western reservation. No trading posts were located in the area before 1900, and the contested public domain areas that skirted the reservation protected the people of its heartland from outside grazing pressures. In the vicinity of Navajo Mountain, Navajos retained a historic pattern of living. [27]

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Navajos were people in transition, saved by their adaptability. They had survived the Bosque Redondo and developed new strategies to replace what they had lost. The livestock industry initially flourished, but the period of relative prosperity came to a halt in early 1890s as a result of an extended drought. The Navajo population continued to grow. This led to increasing pressure on the resources of the region and economy of the Navajo people.

Yet there were splits within the Navajo community. Those who experienced the Bosque Redondo had a different outlook than those who fled to the area around Navajo Mountain. The people of the area that would become Navajo National Monument remained largely unaffected by the Anglo world. Apart from it geographically, their cultural independence was protected by difficult terrain and the lack of Anglo institutions in northeastern Arizona. This area was one of the last places to be surveyed and mapped, much of which did not occur until after 1910. In the early twentieth century, few Anglos dared traverse the area.

The Navajos were also a culture recently exposed to the curiosity of the American mainstream. Beginning in the 1890s, Americans recognized that their continent had limits, geographic and otherwise. Without a frontier into which to expand, Americans perceived their future as different from their past. An effort to save remnants of the cultural and historical past was closely tied to emergence of the idea of utilitarian conservation, best described as the greatest good for the greatest number of people from each resource. Railroads began to promote the historic and prehistoric Southwest, miners and others began to explore the remote regions of the reservation, and anthropologists and archeologists visited the Southwest. In this milieu, the first explorations of what would become Navajo National Monument took place.