The Long Walk
In 1864 while the
Civil War was going on in the
east; on the Navajo land Kit Carson was destroying the crops that were
life
sustaining for the Navajo. The plan
behind the destroying of the Navajo food was that when winter came the
Navajo
would have no food and have to surrender which is exactly what
happened.
The Navajos were then made to walk 300+
miles to Fort Sumner and here is a story passed down to Howard Gorman.
On
the journey the Navajo went
through all kinds of
hardships, like tiredness and having injuries. And
when those things happened, the people would hear
gunshots in the
rear. But they couldn’t do anything
about it. They just felt sorry for the
ones being shot. Sometimes they would
plead with the soldiers to let them go back and do something, but they
were
refused. This is how the story was told
by my ancestors. It was said that those
ancestors were on the Long Walk with their daughter, who was pregnant
and about
to give birth. Somewhere between
K’aaglogil Dzil (Butterfly Mountain) and on this side of Bilin (Belen),
as it
is called, south of Albuquerque, the daughter got tired and weak and
couldn’t
keep up with the others or go any further because of her condition.
So my ancestors asked the Army to hold up
for awhile and to let the woman give birth. But
the soldiers wouldn’t do it. They forced
my people to move on saying that they were
getting behind
the others. The soldiers told the
parents that they had to leave their daughter behind. “Your
daughter is not going to survive, anyway; sooner or
later
she is going to die,” they said in their language. “Go ahead,”
the daughter said to her parents, “things may
come
out alright with me.” But the poor
thing was mistaken, my grandparents used to say. Not
long after they had moved on they heard a gunshot from where
they had been a short time ago. “Maybe
we should go back and do something, or at least cover the body with
dirt,” one
of them said. By that time one of the
soldiers came up riding from the direction of the sound. He must
have shot her to death. That’s
the way the story goes.
After
the walk ended they were forced to stay on a place that no man or woman
would
want to live on called Bosque Redondo, NM near Fort Sumner. They
had almost no firewood and had to suffer at Bosque
Redondo for 4
years. Finally, in April of 1868 they
were allowed to return to their homeland after signing a treaty that
gave away
a lot of their land. And so after 4
years of confinement the Navajo were allowed to go home.
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