American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“What is history but a fable agreed upon.” So wrote Napoleon Bonaparte, a man considered by many to be a tactical genius and by others to be a bloody butcher. Reality lies somewhere between, part of the fable. Defined as “a narrative making a cautionary point . . . a story about legendary persons or exploits . . . [or] a falsehood,” the term fable characterizes, in a positive and a negative sense, the treatment of many historic episodes, including the Navajo Long Walk period. Much has been written of this time when the Navajo people, following what appears to be a fairly short resistance, surrendered in droves to the US military, collected at Fort Defiance and other designated sites, then moved in a series of “long walks” to Fort Sumner (Hwéeldi) on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. There was much that preceded these events. Stretching back to the beginning of Euro-American occupation of the Southwest, the Spanish initiated a slave trade against the “wild” or unsettled (non-Puebloan) Indians that pitted various groups against their neighbors. Two major players in the arena were the Utes and Navajos. They shared relatively few years of peace, remaining gener- ally in a state of warfare that simmered somewhere between hostility and open conflict. As with so many colonial wars, the beginning of these tit-for-tat reprisals is lost to history, but its constancy is not. Spanning the Spanish, Mexican, and early territorial period of the American Southwest, the slave trade was a prime source of fuel for intertribal conflict and provided the owner of captive Indians with labor to enhance comfort and spur economic development. Much of what characterized this period of history and Navajo/Ute relations is comparable to what happened to other peoples in different settings.