The Lost World of the Old Ones by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

During the last two decades, I’ve made about sixteen backpack trips into various corners of the Navajo Reservation, lasting as long as twelve days. Several of my trips were solo outings, during which I ran into not a single other Anglo hiker or Navajo sheepherder. Besides those backpacking forays, I’ve headed out on more than thirty day hikes to out-of-the-way corners of the Rez.

Most of those journeys, like my ramblings on Cedar Mesa, were in quest of ruins and rock art left behind by the Ancestral Puebloans. But in September 2013, with Greg Child, I set off on a quest whose goal was to probe a Diné mystery, not a prehistoric one.

The doleful story of the Long Walk—the darkest chapter in Navajo history—has been often told. Of the 9,000 captives who were forced to march to the Bosque Redondo, more than 2,000 died within the next four and a half years. Some perished on the march, some even before starting out, of dysentery and exposure. At the Bosque, others died of starvation when the corn harvest failed two seasons in a row. Some women were fatally infected with syphilis by the soldiers guarding them. Some were killed trying to escape. Others committed suicide.

The alkaline water of the Pecos River running through the Bosque afflicted the prisoners with severe intestinal and stomach ailments. By the second year, the Navajo had to walk from twelve to twenty miles each day to gather firewood. One survivor of the famine later recalled, “The U. S. Army fed corn to its horses. Then, when the horses discharged undigested corn in their manure, the Diné would dig and poke in the manure to pick out the corn.”

In 1868, forced to admit that the Bosque Redondo was a failure—even his own officers had begun to deride the general’s squalid concentration camp, calling it “Fair Carletonia”—the government freed the surviving Navajos. Without horses, they had to retrace the three-hundred-mile walk to regain their homeland. Each adult was given a pitiful allowance on which to build a new life: two sheep and some seeds for planting. The leaders of the returning tribe, Manuelito and Barboncito, were broken men.

Ever since my first visit to Tsélaa’ in 1999, I had been fascinated by the deeds of the Navajos who had hidden from Carson’s pursuit and escaped the Roundup. No one, not even Diné elders today, knows how many they were, and their stories are far more evanescent than those of their brethren who survived the Bosque.

The greatest and most legendary of all the Navajos who eluded capture was a headman named Hoskinini, who lived near Monument Valley. About thirty-five years old in 1863, when the Roundup began, he fled with sixteen companions—men, women, and children—as Carson’s mounted cavalry pursued them. They had a single horse, one rusty rifle, and twenty sheep.

Hoskinini’s band came to the banks of the San Juan River. And there, miraculously, they escaped. In all likelihood, the Navajo knew of a secret ford by which they crossed into

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