Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (84 page)

A satirist in the
Santa Fe Gazette
penned a popular poem that made fun of Carleton’s quixotic experiment on the bosque—

Fair Carletonia dressed in flowery pride,

Where the swift Pecos rolls its rushing tide,

Here captive tribes no longer sad but gay,

In honest labor pass the lengthened day.

By interest bound; but by the bonds confined,

The once wild Indian curbs his roving mind,

Bends his whole will at once to earnest toil,

And draws abundance from the virgin soil.

In April 1865, Lee and Grant signed the armistice at Appomattox and the Civil War ended. Suddenly the environment in Washington changed. Political leaders, having focused for four years on the miseries and devastations of the war, awakened to the reality that yet another war was taking place out west. Two months later Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, chairman of a committee investigating the hydraheaded muddle that was U.S. Indian policy, led a congressional junket to the Southwest. In large part he was coming to study the Chivington massacre at Sand Creek as well as the spiraling disaster at Bosque Redondo.

Senator Doolittle interviewed Kit Carson at great length and even spent the night in the Carson home. After dinner the senator pressed him for stories from his old trapping days, and though it took some prodding, Carson did not disappoint. He kept the whole entourage up “far into the small hours of the morning,” Doolittle said, with tales of being treed by grizzlies and the like. The senator was smitten. “Knowing him as a bear-hunter and an Indian fighter,” Doolittle later wrote, “you can hardly imagine the impression which this most unassuming man with a voice almost feminine in accent and expression made upon us.”

In their official interviews—recorded by congressional stenographers and later cleaned up into a lofty prose that could not have been his—Carson had much to say on the subject of Indian affairs. Doolittle clung to his every word, and Carson’s ideas were prominently featured in the massive report the Doolittle Committee later produced, entitled
The Condition of the Tribes,
now a classic of Western studies. “I came to this country in 1826,” Carson began modestly, “and since that time have become pretty well acquainted with the Indian tribes, both in peace and at war.”

His thinking on the subject of Indians had evolved over the past several years. He now seemed to believe that most of the troubles “rose from the aggressions of whites.” Carson had nothing but criticism for Chivington and his actions at Sand Creek, which apart from being a cold-blooded mass murder had done nothing to make the people of Colorado more secure; on the contrary, it had set off a chain of aggressions among the tribes of the southern plains, threatening to consume the whole region in war. (Doolittle clearly agreed and soon would describe Chivington’s attack to the secretary of the interior as a “treacherous, brutal, and cowardly butchery, an affair in which the blame is on our side.”) Unable to continue a military career due to his failing health, Carson seemed more interested in playing a role of diplomat to the tribes of the southern plains. “In view of the treatment they have received,” he told Doolittle, “I think that justice demands that every effort should be made to secure peace with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes.”

As for Bosque Redondo, Carson had little praise for it, but neither did he see an alternative. The conflict between the New Mexicans and the Navajos was “an hereditary war,” one that “had about always existed” with “continual thieving back and forth.” At least Carleton’s reservation at Bosque Redondo had broken the ancient cycle of violence. “If they were sent back to their own country tomorrow,” Carson told Doolittle, “it would not be a month before hostilities would commence again.”

Carson moved on to discuss other tribes—Comanches, Jicarillas, and his beloved Utes—and through it all sounded a clear note of alarm that Indians as a race were fast heading for extinction, “due in great measure to their intercourse with white men.” They had nowhere to go—white settlers were now everywhere, pressing in from all sides. “Civilization,” he said, “encircles them.”

Doolittle asked why so many New Mexicans were against Carleton’s plan to keep the Navajos at the bosque—what was the real source of the growing criticism? Carson answered with what to Doolittle must have seemed a refreshing honesty. It was because the New Mexican slave traders no longer had reservoirs of slaves to draw from, because the markets were drying up—“because they [the New Mexicans] cannot prey on them as formerly,” Carson said.

Doolittle could not help noticing, however, that Carson had his own Navajo servants helping out Josefa around the house. And perhaps, Doolittle also saw little Juan Carson, the Navajo boy who seemed to run around the house just like any other family member. During the weeks ahead, the senator would learn that several thousand Navajos were serving as slaves or peons throughout the New Mexico Territory—nearly one-third of the census of the entire tribe. In Santa Fe alone there were more than five hundred Navajo servants working in both Spanish and Anglo homes. It was New Mexico’s dirty little secret. Doolittle was finally absorbing the uncomfortable truth that the United States, having fought a bloody war in large part to banish the evil of chattel slavery, still had slavery flourishing in various pernicious forms in the West.

The congressional entourage moved on to Santa Fe to question Gen. James Carleton. The general was happy to unburden himself of all his theories on Indian affairs, and also to provide the congressional aides with reams of documents and copies of his personal correspondence. Carleton defended his bosque experiment tenaciously, insisting that the Navajos were being treated “with great kindness.” Over time their steady exposure to agriculture and sedentary society would show the Navajos “the evils to which their course of life tends.”

Reservations—functioning like “islands in a great sea…inviolate to the encroachments of whites”—were the only hope of saving the Indian, Carleton said. Although he had so far been unsuccessful in converting the Navajos, he still believed Christianity would play an important role in their transformation. “The natural decay incident to their race must find its remedy in a power above that of mortals,” Carleton wrote in a follow-up questionnaire to Doolittle.

However, Carleton was not optimistic about the future of American Indians. Reservations might slow their demise, but ultimately it was their destiny to die out in the divine battle for survival of the fittest. “In their appointed time,” Carleton wrote, “God wills that one race of men—as in the races of lower animals—shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race, and so on in the Great Cycle traced out by Himself, which may be seen but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The races of the Mammoths and Mastodons, and the great Sloths, came and passed away: The Red Man of America is passing away!”

Doolittle was impressed by Carleton, if not exactly enamored of him. But during his time in New Mexico, the senator had heard an earful about the serious problems at Bosque Redondo, and before he left the territory, he paid a reservation a visit. Conditions there were alarming enough that he recommended that the Department of the Interior conduct its own separate inquiry into the bosque—which it soon did.

Both at home and within the army, criticism of Carleton began to mount: allegations of financial irregularities, political favoritism, invasions of civil liberties. People had grown weary of his high-and-mighty posturing and his insufferable lectures. Mainly, though, the criticisms centered around his beloved bosque—the spiraling costs, the failed crops, the unwarranted deaths.

Then, in September 1866, the general received notice that he would be removed from his command by early spring. Carleton protested and asked that a board of inquiry review the case, but General Grant denied his request. The territory rejoiced, and the
Weekly New Mexican
fairly screamed good riddance to “this man Carleton, who has so long lorded it amongst us.” Two months later, control of the reservation was officially transferred from the military to the Indian Bureau, which fell under the Department of the Interior.

Carleton was to assume a new post in Louisiana, but continued to argue vehemently that the Navajos should stay at Bosque Redondo. Having invested so much in the experiment, he could not turn loose of it, even as he was exiting the stage. In a sad way, it represented his life’s work. Until his death, in fact, he seemed blind to the horrors he had wrought. Three thousand Navajos—one out of every three captives held there—died at Bosque Redondo.

Carleton also failed to acknowledge in his correspondence this conspicuous fact: No gold was ever found in Navajo country.

The bosque’s architect was gone, but life there crept miserably on for another year. The same week Carleton received his transfer orders, Manuelito—wounded and starving to death—staggered into Fort Wingate on the edge of Navajo country and gave himself up. He and his band of two dozen emaciated followers had been eating berries and sucking on palmilla roots. One of Manuelito’s arms had an infected bullet wound and now hung limply at his side. Manuelito was soon removed to Bosque Redondo, the last of the great Navajo headmen to capitulate.

In the spring of 1868 the Navajos refused to plant altogether. The irrigation ditches ran dry, the fields lay fallow. The Diné had given up. They spent their days gathered around the issue house—“like steel filings around a lodestone,” according to one account—waiting for the daily dole.

Yet in late May there were rumors circulating through the reservation that an important
bilagaana
was coming to the bosque. He was from the place they called Washington and knew the Great White Father himself. Barboncito, the Navajo medicine man, had been told that this leader, whoever he was, planned to make important decisions about the future of the Navajos.

Their fate would rest in his hands.