Analysis: Status Report on the Condition of the Navajos

Date: May 30, 1868

Author: Theodore H. Dodd

Genre: report

Summary Overview

After four years in exile from their homelands at the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the Navajos signed a treaty with the United States that allowed them to return home and regain sovereignty over their reservation that spans northeast Arizona, northwest New Mexico, and southeast Utah. Four years earlier, the US Army had force-marched the Navajos over 300 miles across the desert, resulting in hundreds of deaths over the eighteen-day-long march. Life once they arrived was not much easier. Farming was next to impossible in the alkali soil. Food and water were in short supply, as many more people were held there than the government had planned. About 9,000 Navajos reached Bosque Redondo in 1864, and this report, prepared for General William T. Sherman and Colonel Samuel F. Tappan, who were negotiating the peace treaty, profiles what remained of the Navajos on the eve of the signing of the treaty.

Defining Moment

The nineteenth century was a time of considerable change for the Navajos. During the early part of the century, spanning much of the time between the Mexican Revolution in 1821 to the conquest of the region by the United States in 1846, the Navajos maintained a sporadic raiding war against the Mexican and Pueblo settlements in New Mexico. Much of this unrest was aided by the sale of arms from Anglo-American traders to the Indians, thus making what was only a tenuous hold over the region by Mexican officials much more problematic. The situation was much the same during the 1850s–1860s. The Navajos maintained their raiding and hit-and-run tactics, effectively staying out of outnumbered conflicts with American military forces.

However, the 1863 campaign led by Kit Carson, with considerable assistance from the Hopis, Zunis, and Utes, resulted in two changes to Navajo life that would have immense ramifications. First, the sustained military pressure finally forced the Navajos to the negotiating table, after Carson and his troops destroyed all means the Navajos had to feed and house themselves. However, perhaps the most demoralizing aspect of their defeat was the fact that it resulted in their expulsion from their homelands, and relocation to the reservation—in reality, an internment camp—at Bosque Redondo, New Mexico.

Federal Indian policy at the time held that Indian peoples were to be forced to remain on the reservations set out for them by the government, and were subject to military action and extermination if they resisted. On the reservations, such as Bosque Redondo, the Indians would be forced to assimilate to the American way of life, including farming, living in villages, non-Indian education for children, and forced instruction in Christianity. For the Navajos and the Mescalero Apache with whom they shared the camp, life at Bosque Redondo was dismal. They tried to grow crops, only to have them destroyed by insects. The Army provided rations, but not enough to support all of the people. The alkaline water of the Pecos River caused intestinal problems and many people died of a smallpox epidemic that swept through the camp. If the Navajos left, not only would the US Army pursue them, any women and children could be taken by Comanches and New Mexicans for the slave trade.

After four years, it was apparent that the Navajos were not assimilating and the United States no longer wanted to pay all of the costs to support the Navajos when they were self-sufficient on their homelands. Though some federal officials wanted to send the Navajos to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, Navajo leader Barboncito and others were able to convince the treaty negotiators to send them home.

Author Biography

Theodore H. Dodd was, as most soldiers in the West during the late 1860s, a veteran of the Civil War, having fought for the Union as a lieutenant colonel in the Second Colorado Infantry. After the Civil War, Dodd was assigned to Fort Sumner, and had the unenviable task of overseeing the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches there. Throughout 1867 and 1868, Dodd wrote about the problems faced by the Navajos with simple survival and the raids by the Comanches, who stole both horses and other Indians to be sold as slaves. Dodd noted in a June 1867 report to Congress that the Navajos were anxious to return to their homeland, and Dodd was a fervent supporter of the Navajos, seeing them as better behaved than other local tribes, such as the Comanches and the Apaches. With the negotiation of the 1868 treaty, Dodd's role as an advocate for the Navajo became even more vital.

Document Analysis

Written on the eve of the 1868 treaty that would end the exile of the Navajos at Bosque Redondo, Theodore H. Dodd's report to Peace Commissioners General William T. Sherman and Colonel Samuel F. Tappan demonstrates both the fact that the Navajos had worked hard to survive in an inhospitable environment and their desire to return to their homelands. Dodd's text mixes facts and figures relating to the activities of the Navajos at the camp, along with his evaluations of the Navajos' state of mind.

Dodd begins by demonstrating that, although the soil is very poor and the water alkaline, the Navajos grew significant crops of corn, wheat, pumpkins, and beans during 1865 and 1866, though the 1867 crop failed due to an insect infestation. He then switches to talking about Navajo families, stating that “[s]ince I have been Agent (nearly three years) I have found that a majority of them living on the reservation are peaceable and well disposed.” He notes that the Navajos do work hard, both as day laborers, and as cultivators of their own plots, though Dodd is clear that much of the land at Bosque Redondo is not very productive.

The second half of the report consists of Dodd's reflections on the Navajos' dissatisfaction with life at Bosque Redondo, and his thoughts on more suitable locations for the people. He notes that the Navajos, displeased with the scarcity of wood for fuel, the poor soil and water, and the bad weather, want more than anything to go back to their homelands, where they know where to obtain everything they need, and food and water are in abundance. He is so convinced of their desire to return home that he notes that “if they are not permitted to return to their old country that many will stealthily return and in doing so commit depredations upon the people of N.M. and thus keep up a state of insecurity.”

Dodd recommends that the Navajos be placed on a reservation close to a fort, so that those Navajos who are idle (Dodd estimates this at one-third of the population) can be watched. He notes that they will need federal support to feed themselves until they can produce a crop, and importantly recommends that they be given at least 40,000 head of sheep and goats. Though he does not state this explicitly, sheep and goats were the basis of the Navajo economy and much of their identity, and any effort to resettle them—on their homelands or elsewhere—was likely to be easier with the provision of the animals that the Navajos traditionally kept.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Bailey, Lynn R. Bosque Redondo: The Navajo Internment at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1863–68. Tucson, AZ: Westernlore, 2000. Print.

Denetdale, Jennifer. The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile. New York: Chelsea House, 2008. Print.

Iverson, Peter. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2002. Print.

Kessell, John L. “General Sherman and the Navajo Treaty of 1868: A Basic and Expedient Misunderstanding,” Western Historical Quarterly 12 (1981). Print.

Lanehart, David. “Regaining Dinetah: The Navajo and the Indian Peace Commission at Fort Sumner.” Working the Range: Essays on the History of Western Land Management and the Environment. Ed. John R. Wunder. Westport, CT, Praeger, 1985. Print.

Roessel, Ruth. Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press, 1973. Print.

Sundberg, Lawrence D. Dinétah: An Early History of the Navajo People. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone, 1995. Print.

White, Richard. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska P, 1988. Print.