Part 2

The man’s moccasins are a surprising item, because the Anasazi of this time usually wore well-made sandals. These sandals were typically woven of plant fibers with intricate designs in several colors, and are outstanding among the textiles of any prehistoric people.

In the 5th century A.D., the Anasazi acquired from the south the technique of making fired pottery, and they adopted the craft rapidly. Ceramics was a significant addition to the equipment which these people needed to live in what was at best a difficult environment. It made the everyday business of cooking food and storing water much easier. During the next several centuries the Anasazi achieved a high degree of skill in the art of ceramics and produced handsome pots in a variety of shapes, decorated both by relief and painting. Various styles of design were developed by different groups.

Basketry, the ancient craft, survived the competition from ceramics but became less important. Sandals, coiled bowls, plaited yucca trays, and rush mattings were still made, but were not as well manufactured or designed as they once had been.

Other changes followed the introduction of pottery, and they profoundly altered the culture of the Anasazi. More substantial and permanent houses were developed, the bow and arrow replaced the dart-thrower and dart for hunting and fighting, and handles were placed on stone axes and hammers, greatly increasing the effectiveness of these tools. Turkeys were domesticated, and their feathers replaced some of the fur in the blankets which they used for clothing. New varieties of corn, squash, and beans became known, and, more importantly, the cultivation of cotton was introduced.

Sometime during these years of change the Anasazi adopted the practice of deforming the skulls of their children by the use of rigid cradleboards. The cradleboards of their direct ancestors were webbed and lined with soft rabbit fur, but a new conception of beauty led them to strap newborn infants onto flat, hard boards which flattened the back of the skull and broadened the forehead.

These characteristics of the Anasazi developed slowly and were well established only around A.D. 750. Sometime after that date they began to live above ground, building their homes of upright poles and mud plaster. Each family’s room adjoined one or more other rooms, making more and more compact village units. In the 900’s, these pole and mud structures gave way to masonry buildings, some of which eventually became two-and three-story terraced apartment houses.

The ancient pithouse was not forgotten. Its counterpart survived in almost all of the new villages in the form of a circular underground room that soon lost all resemblance to a house. Each of the larger villages had two or more of these underground rooms, which undoubtedly were ceremonial structures, serving as meeting places for men of the various clan societies and secret religious brotherhoods and for the performance of rituals. The rooms may have functioned very much like men’s clubhouses. Similar ceremonial rooms of present-day Pueblo Indians are called kivas.

Much of the ceremonial activity in the ancient kivas can be inferred from the religious practices of modern Pueblo Indians. A large part of their ceremonials takes place within the privacy of the kiva and includes praying, chanting, and dancing. Details of costumes, in which feathers are extensively used, and of dance steps are important, for the whole ceremony is a prayer. The rituals are performed as petitions for rain, to insure a good harvest, or for success in hunting.

In testimony to the traditions which endure in some human societies, a cache of bird feathers, undoubtedly saved to make a costume for such a ritual, was found in Big Cave in Canyon del Muerto. A carefully worked cylinder of wood was filled with packets of brightly colored feathers and bird skins. There were dozens of blue-green skins from mallard ducks, and even parrot feathers that must have come from Mexico. Skins of a red bird, still not identified, and bundles of hawk and eagle down were also found in the cylinder.

Between A.D. 1000 and 1050 the culture of the Anasazi reached its height and became stable for a few centuries, until about A.D. 1275-1300. Their homes were now substantial buildings of stone masonry, containing numerous adjoining rooms. Their kivas followed standard lines and were often incorporated in the house structures, though they were sometimes built as separate, semisubterranean chambers. No other abrupt changes or new forms distinguish this late period, which was essentially a continuation and fulfillment of earlier times. The large pueblos, most of which were begun about A.D. 1000, are the most outstanding development of this period.

In Canyon de Chelly, construction was started on White House and Antelope House during these years. Other important population centers were developing simultaneously at Mesa Verde (Mesa Verde National Park, Colo.), where the largest concentration of surviving cliff dwellings is located, and at Chaco Canyon (Chaco Canyon National Monument, N. Mex.), where spacious apartment houses, one with more than 800 rooms, were constructed on the floor of the canyon. Other villages were built in the Kayenta-Marsh Pass area (near Navajo National Monument, Ariz.).

As permanent homes gave them social stability and well-developed agriculture ensured adequate food, the Anasazi had leisure and sufficient security for greater activity in their arts, crafts, and ceremonials. As a consequence, trade with other peoples seems to have grown and flourished because it brought in the specialized and exotic materials needed for rituals and pleasure. Parrots were traded from Mexico for their plumage, and ornamental shells from the Gulf of California and the West Coast found their way to Anasazi settlements. Turquoise, jet, and salt also became important trade items.

The mode of dress changed little. Feather-string blankets were still commonly worn in winter. Cotton became almost the only fiber used for making cloth. Sandals, which were woven from whole yucca leaves, were crude, compared to those of earlier periods. But painted pottery reached its highest development in both variety and quality.

These great pueblo centers flourished for about two centuries. But this was a time of increasing dryness in the Southwest, and the end for these settlements came during a severe drought late in the 13th century. Tree-ring data indicate that there was not enough moisture to produce crops during most of the years between 1276 and 1299. The drought brought crop failures, and the ensuing erosion destroyed the fields. Hunger, decline, and migration followed. Family after family and group after group left their homes in the cliffs and canyons. Taking what few possessions they could carry on their backs, they drifted away in search of land with a dependable water supply suitable for farming.

The villages in Canyon de Chelly apparently lasted longer than most and may even have provided a temporary haven for refugees from other regions to the north. The four-story tower house at Mummy Cave might have been built for such refugees by skilled masons from the Mesa Verde area.

By 1300, however, all the great cliff dwellings were abandoned, and the people of the Canyon de Chelly area had moved on to new lands. Most of them probably joined the tribes that were gathering around Black Mesa to the west, near the location of the modern Hopi pueblos. Others may have turned south, settling finally near the middle of the present boundary between Arizona and New Mexico. Other Anasazi made their way to the upper Rio Grande Valley in north-central New Mexico. In these localities the Pueblo farmers renewed their way of life, and it was there that Spanish explorers found them on their first trip through the region in 1540-42.

At White House and a few other ruins there is evidence of structural additions made long after the villages were abandoned. These and other indications of occupation well after 1300 probably represent the work of Hopi Indians who used the canyons seasonally for agriculture, taking the harvest back to their villages about 70 miles to the west. Peach trees, which the Spanish introduced to the Hopi in the 17th century, were evidently brought to Canyon de Chelly in either that century or the next, and the small orchards still scattered through the canyons were started. The use of the canyons by the Hopi probably dropped off rapidly after the Navajos appeared in the area in the 18th century.

THE NAVAJOS

The present Indian occupants of Canyon de Chelly are Navajos. They are not related to the Anasazi who built the masonry villages now in ruins.

No one is certain just when the Navajos came to this region nor do we know exactly where they came from. The best available evidence now suggests that these people and their close relatives, the Apaches, both of whom speak an Athapascan language, came south along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains as a single group. They may have reached the Southwest between the 13th and the 16th centuries. The earliest mention of people who were probably Navajos is in the Oñate documents of 1598. This account places them in north-central New Mexico, an area they still call their homeland but no longer occupy.

The name “Navajo” has never been adequately translated. The first interpretation of the word came from Father Alonso de Benavides, a Spanish priest who started missionary work among the Navajos. In his “Memorial of New Mexico,” which was presented to the court of Spain in 1630, he stated:

_But these Apache de Nabahu [Navajo] are very great farmers for this is what Navajo signifies ... great planted fields...._

By 1750, the Navajos had abandoned their homes west of the Chama River Valley because of pressure from the Utes to the north. Generally they moved westward, but a few split off to the south. We do not know when they first entered Canyon de Chelly, but there is evidence at the site of Tse-ta’a to suggest that it was after 1700.

Hunters, gatherers, and farmers, the Navajos changed their way of life sharply when they acquired horses and sheep from the Spanish after the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. Horses made the Navajos highly mobile and increased their ability to raid the alluring towns along the Rio Grande and then vanish into mountain and canyon hideouts. Sheep gradually changed the basis of their economy, converting them from hunters and raiders to the pastoral herders they are today.

After the Spanish reconquered New Mexico in 1692, many Pueblo families from the Rio Grande sought sanctuary with the Navajos. Some of these refugees were absorbed into the tribe, and they brought with them not only weaving, but sheep raising, pottery and basketry techniques, architectural and agricultural ideas, the clan system, and much religious lore.

Navajo-Spanish relations were generally quiet after the Spanish returned because the tribe was preoccupied with fighting the Utes to the north and was interested in enlisting Spanish support or, at least, forbearance. This comparatively peaceful interlude came to an end in the 1770’s because of land disputes, and friction continued from that time until the 1860’s.

In 1805, during this period of strife, a Spanish punitive expedition entered Canyon de Chelly, bent on taking slaves, or servants as the whites called them.

According to the Navajo account of the episode, all the Navajo men had gone out on an expedition, leaving the old men, and women, and children hidden in a deep ledge high up the canyon wall. Their position was strengthened by a wall of loose stones placed along the rim of the ledge. As the Spanish troops, commanded by Lt. Antonio Narbona, passed below, an old woman who had been a Spanish slave could not resist scoffing at them and thus exposed the hiding place.

In a letter on January 25, 1805, to the Governor of New Mexico, Narbona described the action which followed:

_On the 17th of the current month I managed to attack in Cañon de Chelli a great number of enemy Indians and though they entrenched themselves in an almost inaccessible spot, and fortified beforehand, we succeeded after having battled all day long with the greatest ardor and effort, in taking [it] the morning after and that our arms had the result of ninety dead warriors, twenty-five women and children, and as prisoners three warriors, eight women and twenty-two boys and girls...._

Narbona reported his losses as 1 dead and 64 wounded. Massacre Cave in Canyon del Muerto was named for this event.

The Navajos had been held in partial check by Spanish bribes and punitive expeditions, but after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, the Navajos returned to raiding in behalf of all those enslaved by the Spanish. In 1823, 1833, 1836, and 1838 the Mexicans mounted large expeditions against the Navajos, sometimes sending as many as 1,500 men after them. It was during this period that Canyon de Chelly was most often referred to as the stronghold of the Navajos. Although Mexican reprisals often forced the Indians to take temporary refuge north of the San Juan River, they were too sporadic to effectively quell the raiders, who always came back with new attacks. Conditions were so bad that the Navajos boasted they let the Mexicans live on only because they made good shepherds for the tribe. The taunt hardly exaggerated their power at the time.

Navajo depredations had very nearly decimated the frontier settlements in the central Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico when the United States went to war with Mexico in 1846. Col. Stephen Watts Kearny had the task of seizing the northern Mexican provinces, an area that is now part of the American Southwest. In late June 1846 he left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Marching over the Santa Fe Trail without opposition, Kearny and his American Dragoons arrived in Santa Fe on August 18, 1846, and proclaimed New Mexico a part of the United States.

When Kearny and the Army of the West marched off to Mexico, Col. Alexander W. Doniphan was left behind with orders to invade the Navajo country, release captives, reclaim stolen property, and either to awe or beat the Indians into submission. In August 1846 he led the first United States expedition against the Navajos. Maj. William Gilpin, with 200 men, entered the Navajo country on the north and swung south to meet Doniphan and several Navajo chiefs at Bear Springs near the town of Grants, New Mexico, later the site of Fort Wingate. The treaty signed there turned out to be little more than a scrap of paper. Five more unsuccessful military expeditions were sent against the Navajos between 1846 and 1849 in vain attempts to end the Indian raids.

In trying to contain the Navajos, the U.S. Government made the same mistake that the Mexican and Spanish Governments did before them. They all assumed that a single chief led the several Navajo bands. Actually, each local Navajo group had its own leader, and time and again treaties of “lasting peace with the Navajos” were signed by these local chiefs, who spoke only for their own small bands and had no influence with others.

The U.S. Army expedition of 1849 clearly illustrated this problem. Lt. Col. John W. Washington, military commander of New Mexico, led an expedition to Canyon de Chelly, then considered to be the Navajo heartland. Washington met local Navajo chiefs on the crest of a small hill between the present Thunderbird Guest Ranch and the mouth of the canyon. Here on Treaty Hill a treaty of “lasting peace” was signed with the Indians. Washington had no sooner returned to Albuquerque, however, than he learned that another Navajo band had raided a small village near Santa Fe.

Regardless of treaties and punitive expeditions, Navajo depredations continued. Late in 1851, Col. E. V. Sumner marched into the Navajo country in still another effort to settle the problem. After a single encounter with the Navajo in Canyon de Chelly, Sumner returned to a spot southwest of the Chuska Mountains where he established Fort Defiance in the autumn of 1851. Fighting broke out again in 1858, when a Negro slave of the post commander at Fort Defiance was killed by a Navajo arrow. The Army retaliated with an attack on a party of peaceful Navajos, and the Indians retreated northward.

Up to this time, U.S. Army commanders had controlled Indian policies; the authority of the civil agents appointed by the Indian Department was negligible. But now the civilian agents brought political pressure to bear upon the unsuccessful Army. To soothe the politicians, the Army drew up still another treaty with the Navajos on December 25, 1858. This treaty was the second attempt to outline the boundaries of a proposed Navajo reservation. Like an earlier proposal, the Meriweather Treaty of 1855, it was never ratified.

The year 1859 was relatively peaceful, with few raids on either side. But the next year opened with a series of Navajo raids that culminated in a concentrated attack on Fort Defiance. Some of the old Navajos who participated later recalled that it was a carefully planned assault at dawn, with as many as 2,000 warriors taking part. After attacking for two hours, the Indians were forced to withdraw.

In the winter of 1860-61, Col. E. R. S. Canby led the last military expedition against the Navajos before the Civil War, but his efforts failed to bring peace. Zarcillos Largos, a great Navajo leader who had worked for more peaceful relations with whites, was killed in an ambush during the campaign. The Indians soon resorted to their old tactic of dispersing, and the campaign ended with another treaty. When troops were withdrawn from Fort Defiance in March 1861 for Civil War duty, the last restraint was removed from both sides, and raiding began once more. For the Spanish-Americans, it was the high point of their warfare against the Navajos.

The job of subjugating the recalcitrant Navajos now fell to Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, commander of the Department of New Mexico and a seasoned Indian fighter with 25 years of active service. His earlier experience in Indian affairs had convinced Carleton that establishing reservations where the Indians could be educated would be the only way to get them to settle down. Carleton said:

_Soon they will acquire new habits, new ideas, new modes of life; the old Indians will die off, and carry with them the latent longings for murdering and robbing; the young ones will take their place without these longings; and thus, little by little, they will become a contented people...._

In 1863, Carleton drew up plans for a 40-square-mile reservation at Fort Sumner on the Pecos River in central New Mexico. He called the new reservation Bosque Redondo, which is Spanish for circular thicket.

When the reservation was ready, Carleton ordered Col. Christopher (Kit) Carson to take the field against the Navajos in June 1863. Carson’s force consisted of four companies of New Mexican Volunteers, two mounted and two unmounted, and 200 Ute Indians, who were guides and scouts, altogether a force of about 1,000 men. Their first operation was to reoccupy and repair the abandoned Fort Defiance, which they renamed Fort Canby in honor of General Canby.

The Navajos were led by Barboncito of Canyon de Chelly, a spokesman for the bands living west of the Chuska Mountains, and Manuelito, a leader of those who dwelt east of the mountains. Many subchiefs, as usual, led individual bands.

Carson had orders from General Carleton to destroy all cornfields and livestock. He sent word to the Navajos that they should surrender at Fort Canby, and then moved into the field to persuade them. The first skirmish took place in August near the fort. Under constant pressure from the military through the winter of 1863, their herds being killed and crops burned, the Navajos were soon destitute and began to surrender in small numbers.

The crowning blow to Navajo pride, however, was the Army’s ostentatious penetration of Canyon de Chelly, their most secure refuge. A detachment of men under Capt. Albert Pfeiffer carried the “Navaho Fortress” in January 1864. Entering through Canyon del Muerto, Pfeiffer guarded the junction while Capt. A. B. Carey led a detail through the main gorge of de Chelly, marching west to east. Captain Pfeiffer described his progress through del Muerto: