Fort Sumner

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Fort Sumner was a military fort in De Baca County in southeastern New Mexico charged with the internment of Navajo and Mescalero Apache populations from 1863-1868 at nearby Bosque Redondo.

[edit] History

On October 31, 1862, Congress authorized the creation of Fort Sumner. General James Henry Carleton initially justified the fort as offering protection to settlers in the Pecos River valley from the Mescalero, Kiowa and Comanche. He also created the Bosque Redondo reservation, a 40 square mile area where over 8,500 Navajo came to live.

The purpose of the reservation was to be self-sufficient, while teaching Mescalero Apaches and Navajos how to be modern farmers. General Edward Canby, who Carleton replaced, first suggested that the Navajo be moved to a series of reservations and be taught new skills. Some in Washington D.C. thought that the Navajos did not need to be moved and a reservation should be created on their land. Some New Mexico citizens encouraged death or at least complete removal of the Navajo off their lands. Army Officers and Indian Agents soon realized that the Bosque Redondo had poor water and lacked of firewood for the numbers of people who were going to be put there. The reservation plan for the Mescaleros and Navajos continued.

Gen. Carleton ordered Col. Kit Carson to do whatever necessary to bring first the Mescaleros and then the Navajos to the Bosque Redondo. All of the Mescalero Apache were there by the end of 1862, but the Navajo did not get there in large numbers until early 1864. The Navajos refer to the journey from Navajo land to the Bosque as the Long Walk. While a bitter memory to many Navajo, one who was there reports as follows: “By slow stages we traveled eastward by present Gallup and Chusbbito, Bear spring, which is now called Fort Wingate. You ask how they treated us? If there was room the solders put the women and children on the wagons. Some even let them ride behind them on their horses. I have never been able to understand a people who killed you one day and on the next played with your children...? (Source: Very Slim Man, Navajo elder, quoted by Richard Van Valkenburgh, Desert Magaine, April, 1946, p. 23.)

There were about 8,500 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache interned at the Fort in April 1865. The Army had only anticipated 5,000 would be there, so food was an issue from the start. The Navajo and Mescalero Apache had long been enemies and now that they were in forced proximity to each other, fighting often broke out. The environmental situation got worse. The interned Natives had no clean water, it was full of alkaline and there was no firewood to cook with. The water from the nearby Pecos River caused severe intestinal problems and disease quickly spread throughout the camp. Food was also in short supply because of crop failures and the typical U. S. Army and Indian Agent bungling and criminal activities. In 1865, the Mescalero Apache, or those strong enough to travel, managed to escape to their own country. The Navajo were not allowed to leave until three years later when it was agreed by the U. S. Army that Fort Sumner was a failure.

A treaty was negotiated with the Navajos and they were allowed to return to their homeland, to a "new reservation". There they were joined by the thousands of Navajo who had been hiding out in the Arizona hinterlands. This experience resulted in a more determined Navajo, and never again were they surprise raiders of the Rio Grande valley.(Source: Indian Depredations in New Mexico, John S. Watts, Wash. D.C., 1858, 66 pages) In subsequent years they have expanded the "new reservation" into well over 16 million acres, far larger than Yellowstone National Park (2,216,000 million acres) (Source: Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Avon, 1983, p. 586).

[edit] References

• Bosque Redondo — destination of the long walk
• The Long Walk Trail Of The Navajos
• Thompson, Gerald (1976). The Army and the Navajo: The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment 1863-1868. Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816504954