Bosque Redondo Memorial

Bosque Redondo is Hwéeldi — the place of suffering — the million-acre reservation at Fort Sumner where Carleton and Carson forced the Navajo and the Mescalero Apache between 1863 and 1868. The Long Walk: fifty groups over three hundred miles, stragglers shot, women in childbirth killed for falling behind, slave traders taking children off the column. At the reservation: no wood, foreign rations, the smallpox from the soldiers, fifteen hundred dead — twenty percent of the Navajo people.

The assimilation was the design — farming a land that couldn't be farmed, Christianity instead of the ceremonies they were forbidden, the Navajo and Apache penned together on the Pecos. It failed by 1866; in 1868 they signed the treaty at the fort and went home — the Long Walk back, the sovereign Navajo Nation the treaty created. The memorial at Fort Sumner opened in 2005 — the site where the suffering happened and the treaty that ended it.

The file keeps Bosque Redondo: the Long Walk, the million-acre reservation, the fifteen hundred dead, and the 1868 treaty that let them go home.

Bosque Redondo is the archive's Long Walk file — the internment camp and the treaty that ended it.