Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (83 page)

He ordered four thousand sheep and gave specific instructions on how to economize on the meat. “The whole animal, including what the butchers call head and pluck, must be used,” he wrote the commanding officer of the camp. The mutton was to be incorporated into stews, soups, blood puddings, and even haggis. When informed that Navajos did not traditionally eat soup, he insisted that they learn: Soup would be their salvation, and it must become their daily ritual. Said Carleton: “It must be inculcated as a religion.”

In the meantime, Carleton urged his officers at Bosque Redondo to try to buoy the spirits of the Navajos. “Tell them,” he wrote, “to be too proud to murmur at what cannot be helped. Tell them not to be discouraged but to work hard, every man and woman, to put in large crops next year, when if God smiles upon our efforts, they will, at one bound, be forever placed beyond want and be independent.”

From his Santa Fe headquarters, Carleton went into a kind of overdrive. He commissioned the planting of more than 12,000 trees. He ordered that every last glop of bacon grease be saved and reused. He requisitioned 13,000 yards of cloth, 7,000 blankets, 20 spinning wheels, 50 corn mills, and thousands of needles and spools of thread. Upon hearing that feral hounds had become a nuisance, he proclaimed that “all dogs found at large will be shot.” To make the farms work more efficiently, he arranged for the delivery of an enormous bronze bell; cast in St. Louis and weighing one thousand pounds, the bell was rung throughout the day to call the Navajos to work and mark the hours, much like steam whistles used in Northern factories, or slave horns on Southern plantations.

Carleton’s ideas for improvements kept flowing—he couldn’t help himself. “You must pardon me, for suggesting all these details,” he wrote one beleaguered officer, “but my anxiety is so great. Every idea which comes into my mind I will send to you and believe that you will enter into the spirit that animates me for the good of the Indians.”

Carleton became increasingly preoccupied with locating Manuelito and coaxing—or forcing—him to surrender. If he could nab the most famous Navajo holdout alive, it would signify the end of all resistance and the triumph of the Bosque Redondo idea. In February 1865, General Carleton sent Navajo runners into Diné country to try to convince Manuelito to emigrate to the reservation. He had been hiding with his band of nearly one hundred warriors and a dwindling number of horses and sheep. But when the runners caught up with him near the Zuni trading post, Manuelito told them again that he would never go to Bosque Redondo. “My God and my mother live here in the west,” he says, “and I will not leave them. I could never go far from the Chuska Mountains where I was born.”

Hearing of Manuelito’s continued defiance, Carleton sent a terse dispatch back to the commander of Fort Wingate: “Try to get Manuelito,” he said. “Have him securely ironed. It will be a mercy to others whom he controls to capture or kill him at once. I prefer that he should be captured. If he attempts to escape, he will be shot down.”

However, a few months later Manuelito made a surreptitious journey to Bosque Redondo to see for himself what conditions were like. He hardly recognized his own people. Everyone seemed listless, melancholy, in a collective state of shock and depression. Among the Navajos, Bosque Redondo was known as Hwelte—their mispronunciation of the Spanish word
fuerte,
or fort—a word now synonymous in the Navajo language with “a place of suffering.” Diseases like smallpox and dysentery were rampant, but the Navajos did not know where to turn for treatment; the traditional healers, lacking their familiar herbs, were increasingly powerless, while the army hospital was a fearful place where, as one headman put it, “all who go in never come out.”

Crops were failing again, this time as a result of hailstorms and floods. The turnips had dry rot. Out in the fields, the farm machines sank in the mud. Some of the rations issued were found to be contaminated with ground plaster and rat droppings. Navajo urchins could be seen crawling in the corrals and stables, sifting the manure in search of undigested corn to eat.

Manuelito conferred with other headmen of the tribe. He spoke with Barboncito, the short, bewhiskered medicine man from Canyon de Chelly who was fast emerging as the most prominent leader of the Navajos at the bosque. Barboncito was in many ways the antithesis of Manuelito; he was a serene and reflective man, slight and wiry, with small agile hands, a diplomat by instinct, and an eloquent public speaker. But he was an old friend of Manuelito and had fought with him on that early April morning in 1860 when the Navajos attacked and nearly overran Fort Defiance. Barboncito made it clear to his old comrade that he saw no future for the people at Hwelte. “Here I own nothing but my own body,” he said. “I have no stock, I have nothing. In this place, I know the Great Father is a long way off.”

Manuelito was repulsed by the truly pathetic state of his people. He returned straightaway to Navajo country under cover of night, despite Carleton’s orders that soldiers “must kill all Male Indians found outside the Reservation without a passport.” Manuelito burrowed even deeper into the recesses of his homeland and tried to keep quiet. But his exile was taking its toll on both him and his followers. With so little food and so many spies hounding him from all sides, he knew he couldn’t hold out forever.

Meanwhile, the four hundred Mescalero Apaches sharing the reservation with the Navajos had come to the end of their patience. Outnumbered by Navajos twenty to one, they were especially miserable at the bosque. They had refused to send their children to Carleton’s school and had completely given up trying to plant corn. Unlike the Diné, the Mescaleros had no tradition of agriculture and had come to view the work required to grow crops—while an interesting novelty at first—as beneath their dignity. At the most basic level, they did not understand the life Carleton wanted them to live; and to the extent that they did, they abhorred it.

One day at Bosque Redondo, Cadete, the great Mescalero chief, fell into a conversation with Capt. John Cremony about the Mescalero’s view of work. With frank eloquence, Cadete explained his people’s disdain for the white man’s mode of existence. “You desire our children to learn from books, and say, that because you have done so, you are able to build all those big houses, and sail over the sea, and talk with each other at any distance, and do many wonderful things,” Cadete told Cremony, who recorded the conversation in an 1868 article published in the magazine
Overland Monthly
:

Let me tell you what we think. You begin when you are little to work hard. After you get to be men, you build big houses, big towns, and everything else in proportion. Then, after you have got them all, you die and leave them behind. Now, we call that slavery. You are slaves from the time you begin to talk until you die; but we are free as air. The Mexicans and others work for us. Our wants are few and easily supplied. The river, the wood and plain yield all that we require. We will not be slaves; nor will we send our children to your schools, where they only learn to become like yourselves.

When Cremony tried to debate some of Cadete’s points, the captain found it “utterly impossible to make him comprehend the other side of this specious argument.” The Mescaleros’ hatred of the bosque was so palpable, and their rejection of its day-to-day life so complete, that Cremony thought they were unteachable.

One morning in early November 1865, the soldiers at Fort Sumner awoke to discover that the entire tribe of Mescaleros had bolted from the reservation. The Indians had carefully planned their nighttime breakout, scattering in all directions of the compass, then reconvening in the mountains of their homeland. To effect their escape—and also to pay a parting insult to their hated fellow tenants—the Mescaleros absconded with some two hundred horses owned by the Navajos. The army picket guards scarcely bothered to pursue them, and though embarrassed by the episode, Carleton didn’t press the matter.

The Mescalero Apaches never returned to the Round Forest.

Increasingly, officials both in Santa Fe and Washington were beginning to view the experiment at Bosque Redondo as a tragic, and extremely costly, mistake. Carleton was spending nearly $1 million a year and yet the miserable Navajos had not made the slightest progress toward self-sufficiency. The place was cursed, it seemed. Endless bad news seemed to emanate from the bosque: a scurvy outbreak, measles, floods, more attacks by Comanches, more escapes, more crop failures. The alkaline water was now “saturated with animal and vegetable impurities,” according to the post surgeon. The soldiers stationed at Fort Sumner plainly hated the place and found Bosque Redondo a hellhole.

The growing consensus was that the Navajos should all be moved to another location, perhaps back to their own lands, but ideally to somewhere in Oklahoma, the preferred dumping ground for all Indians since the time of Andrew Jackson. Clearly the site on the Pecos, with its barren land and putrid water, was not working—it was literally killing the Navajos. Perhaps the most vocal of the critics was Dr. Michael Steck, New Mexico’s superintendent of Indian Affairs. An earlier proponent of the bosque, Steck gradually came to see Carleton’s policy as “terribly misguided.” He stepped up his attacks on Carleton in the press and even traveled to Washington to make his case, saying that the general would be responsible for the deaths of thousands of Navajos. Steck’s more sensible suggestion was to create a Navajo reservation on the Little Colorado River, within the old Navajo country itself. This was more or less what General Canby had had in mind in 1860. Steck thought that if Canby’s original plans “had not been broken up by the war, I have little doubt the Navajos would this day be at peace, and supporting themselves, instead of being an enormous tax upon the treasury.”

A new superintendent of the camp, A. Baldwin Norton, was appointed in early 1865, and upon surveying the premises, rendered his verdict in no uncertain terms. “If they remain on this reservation, they must always be held there by force, and not from choice,” Norton wrote. “The sooner it is abandoned and the Indians removed, the better.”

But Carleton would not entertain any criticism of his pet project. He was nearly obsessed with the bosque—Gen. William Sherman said he was “half-crazy on the subject.” He argued that the future of New Mexico rested on the long-term success of his experiment, and on whether the United States government “has the determination and ability to hold this formidable tribe.” Virtually a dictator now, Carleton was able to squelch dissent by maintaining a state of martial law throughout the territory, even though the threat upon which he’d originally justified it—a possible reinvasion by the Texans—had never materialized. Carleton’s many arrogances made him more and more enemies, and the newspapers began to attack and ridicule him. The
Santa Fe Weekly New Mexican
called him “this curse, this clog upon the territory.”