The Long Walk happened because the U.S. military wanted to permanently remove the Navajo people, known as the Diné, from their homeland in the American Southwest. In 1864, after a deliberate campaign to starve them into submission, thousands of Diné were forced to march between 250 and 450 miles to a desolate reservation called Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. The causes stretch back centuries, but the immediate trigger was a military order driven by wartime politics, settler pressure, and a general’s ambition to “solve” conflict on the frontier through forced relocation.
Centuries of Conflict Before the March
The tensions that led to the Long Walk did not appear overnight. For more than 200 years before the forced march, cycles of raiding and retaliation defined the relationship between the Diné and European settlers in the region. Spanish colonists arrived in what is now New Mexico in the late 1500s, and almost immediately, raids on livestock became a source of conflict. The Diné took horses, sheep, and cattle. The Spanish, in turn, raided Navajo communities and sold captured Diné into slavery in the mining regions of Chihuahua. Slave raiding was one of the principal reasons for continued Navajo hostility throughout the 1600s.
This pattern repeated itself across generations. After nearly fifty years of relative peace, Spanish settlers pushed onto lands beyond the traditional frontier in the 1760s, and the Diné resumed raiding in response. Spanish military expeditions would then devastate Navajo cornfields and seize sheep and horses as retribution. At one point, the Diné were ordered to return 4,000 sheep, 150 cattle, and 60 horses that had been recently stolen. Neither side was innocent in these exchanges, but the cycle entrenched deep mutual hostility that carried over when the United States took control of the territory after the Mexican-American War in 1848.
Under American rule, new waves of settlers arrived and the same pattern of livestock raiding and violent reprisal continued. American officials inherited what they saw as a “Navajo problem,” and they increasingly pushed for a permanent military solution.
The Civil War Opens a Window
The American Civil War, which began in 1861, reshaped military priorities across the country. In the Southwest, Union forces under Major General James H. Carleton drove out a Confederate invasion of New Mexico in 1862. With the Confederate threat neutralized, Carleton turned his attention to the region’s Indigenous peoples. He had troops, supplies, and authority, and he saw an opportunity to force both the Mescalero Apache and the Diné onto a single remote reservation far from settler territory.
Carleton envisioned Bosque Redondo, a patch of flat land along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico, as a place where Indigenous people could be confined, controlled, and supposedly “civilized” through farming. His plan was equal parts military strategy and social engineering. He believed that removing the Diné entirely from their homeland would end raiding permanently and open their land for American settlement and mineral exploration. The Civil War gave him the political cover and military resources to act on that belief without much oversight from Washington, where attention was focused on the war in the East.
Kit Carson’s Scorched-Earth Campaign
To force the Diné to surrender, Carleton ordered Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson to wage a scorched-earth campaign across the Navajo homeland beginning in the summer of 1863. Carson’s troops did not primarily seek direct battles. Instead, they systematically destroyed everything the Diné needed to survive. Soldiers burned villages, slaughtered livestock, poisoned water sources, and torched crops and orchards, including the ancient peach orchards in Canyon de Chelly that had sustained Diné families for generations.
The strategy was deliberate starvation. By the winter of 1863 to 1864, with their food stores destroyed and their herds killed, thousands of Diné faced a grim choice: starve in the mountains or surrender to the military. Most chose to surrender. Small groups continued to resist or hide in remote canyon country, but the vast majority had no realistic option left.
The March to Bosque Redondo
Beginning in early 1864, the military organized a series of forced marches from the Navajo homeland in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to Bosque Redondo, a journey of 250 to 450 miles depending on the starting point and route. These were not a single event but multiple groups marched over a period of months. Thousands of Diné, including elderly people, children, and pregnant women, walked through winter cold and harsh terrain with minimal food or supplies. Those who fell behind were left to die or, in some accounts, shot. The Diné remember this journey as Hwéeldi, a word that carries the weight of the suffering endured.
Estimates of the total number forced to march range from roughly 8,000 to over 9,000 people. Hundreds died along the way from exposure, exhaustion, starvation, and violence. For the Diné, the Long Walk was not simply a relocation. It was a deliberate attempt to break them as a people.
Why Bosque Redondo Failed
The reservation that awaited the Diné was a disaster from the start. Carleton had chosen Bosque Redondo based more on its remoteness than its ability to support thousands of people. The land could not sustain them, and the problems were fundamental.
The Pecos River water was heavily alkaline. Crops planted in the soil absorbed toxic minerals from the irrigation water. Corn would grow to full height and then develop a fungal disease that destroyed it before harvest, a problem military officials attributed to harmful compounds in the river water being taken up by the plants. Beans were wiped out by insect infestations. Cabbage rotted from fungus before it could mature. Season after season, the farm failed. A congressional report on the reservation’s unsuitability noted three compounding problems: persistent drought, erosion that washed away the riverbanks and cut off irrigation channels, and the alkaline soil and water that poisoned crops.
Beyond the agricultural failures, the Diné were confined alongside the Mescalero Apache, a group with a very different culture and language, creating additional tension. Disease spread through the overcrowded camp. The promised government rations were insufficient and sometimes spoiled. The entire experiment was, by any measure, a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Treaty of 1868 and the Return Home
After four years of suffering and mounting evidence that Bosque Redondo was unsustainable, the U.S. government finally negotiated a treaty with the Diné in June 1868. The treaty established a reservation within a portion of the Diné’s original homeland, bounded roughly by the 37th parallel to the north and the site of old Fort Defiance to the south, including the important Canyon de Chelly. The government agreed that no unauthorized persons could settle on or pass through this territory.
In return, the Diné agreed to make the reservation their permanent home and not establish settlements elsewhere, though they retained the right to hunt on adjoining lands. The government agreed to pay for their subsistence during the journey back and to provide transportation for the sick and elderly. The Diné began their return home in the summer of 1868.
The treaty was a rare instance in American history of an Indigenous nation successfully negotiating a return to their homeland rather than being permanently displaced. But it came at an enormous cost. The Diné lost thousands of lives, their livestock herds were decimated, and the trauma of Hwéeldi shaped the community for generations. The reservation established in 1868 was a fraction of the territory the Diné had traditionally used, and it took decades of subsequent expansions to approach something closer to the original homeland’s boundaries. For the Diné, the Long Walk remains the defining event in their collective memory, a reminder of what was endured and what was nearly lost.