Audio Tours

In 1991, New Mexico State Monuments, the Museum of New Mexico, Navajo and Apache leaders began the creation of this memorial to truthfully acknowledge the history here. Fort Sumner is listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places and was designated a New Mexico State Monument in 1968.

The Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner opened on June 4, 2005. Friendly and knowledgeable rangers are here to assist you and answer questions. A gift shop and book store are located in the main building.

The Memorial was designed by Navajo architect David Sloan. The architecture, including the oculus window above, refers to the natural world under the eye of the Great Spirit. Enjoy your tour.

In 1991, New Mexico State Monuments, the Museum of New Mexico, Navajo and Apache leaders began the creation of this memorial to truthfully acknowledge the history here. Fort Sumner is listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places and was designated a New Mexico State Monument in 1968.

The Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner opened on June 4, 2005. Friendly and knowledgeable rangers are here to assist you and answer questions. A gift shop and book store are located in the main building.

The Memorial was designed by Navajo architect David Sloan. The architecture, including the oculus window above, refers to the natural world under the eye of the Great Spirit. Enjoy your tour.

Sounds: Navajo singing, drums, bells, dancing, horses, soldiers, wind and fire crackling.

Blackhorse Mitchell, Navajo, sings this song, one of many written by Navajo during their imprisonment at the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. The songs are much like the spirituals sung by slaves during this time and earlier in the Southeast. Blackhorse Mitchell is the author of Miracle Hill: The Story of a Navajo Boy, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2004, received his Masters degree in secondary education at the University of New Mexico. Blackhorse has been an educator in Native American Studies and the Navajo language for the past thirty years. Blackhorse lives and teaches in Shiprock, New Mexico.

My name is Wes Studie and I welcome you to this historic place. Telling the story of Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation is to respect the significant cultural, spiritual, and physical pain suffered here by the Navajo and Mescalero Apache, and to acknowledge United States policies which contributed to one of the most tragic eras in American history.

Step outside to the surroundings. To the west, the Pecos River flows. During the 1860s, 450 Mescalero Apache prisoners lived here, on either side of the river. The Navajo prisoners?about 8,500 of them? lived to the north.

The early 1860s in the United States were years of war. The young, expanding nation was striving to define itself, but disagreement split the states. President Abraham Lincoln offered new moral and economic platforms, ones that ultimately pitched the country into the Civil War, a war waged to protect or dismantle the economic institution of slavery and to resolve the issue of states' rights.

But there was folly in the federal policy. While the Civil War secured the emancipation of four million slaves in the Southeast, the Lincoln White House gave a long leash to an ambitious General James H. Carleton in the Territory of New Mexico. General Carleton acted on an agenda of militarist policies against Native Americans in the Southwest. He, and many military officers of this time, practiced Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that a dominant culture has the God-given right to spread across the continent, regardless of any preceding culture.

New Mexico was named a territory of the United States in 1848. The territory was divided into two large districts along the current state lines of New Mexico and Arizona, with Santa Fe as the territorial capitol.

By 1862, the Territory of New Mexico saw change and growth in its population. Anglo settlers from the East passed through or came to homestead in this land of the Navajo, Pueblos, Kiowa, Comanche and the Mescalero, Gila and Jicarilla Apache. The settlers were subject to attack as they traversed the homelands and hunting grounds ofNative Americans, especially in central New Mexico, home to the Mescalero Apache.

At the onset of the Civil War in 1861, many troops in the Territory of New Mexico were sent east to war. New Mexico became vulnerable to both the Native peoples resisting settlement in their homelands and to the Confederates in Texas who saw a western frontier at their fingertips. Union leaders in Washington, D.C. sent Colonel James H. Carleton from California. He arrived leading the California Column, a force of 2,350 rank-and-file soldiers.

Colonel Carleton was a man of his time, bent on the 19th century appetite for expansion. He set forth under the prevailing military policy of Manifest Destiny. In 1862, Colonel Carleton was breveted Brigadier General and took charge of 4,000 soldiers.

With the imprisonment of so many Mescalero Apache, military attention turned north to the Navajo. In 1863 and 1864, the military waged a scorched earth policy against the Navajo in the Four Corners Region. The Navajo were chased, starved, shot, their homes burned, their water wells polluted. By the end of 1864, some 10,000 Navajo surrendered at Fort Wingate and Fort Defiance. The first to surrender were 51 Ceboyetan Navajo at Fort Wingate -this marked the beginning of the Long Walk Period. General Carlton met with Navajo leaders Barboncito and Delgadito on February 1, 1863, at Fort Wingate. General Carleton said of the Navajo:

" ... that they have until the twentieth day of July of this year to come in - they and all those who belong to what they call the peace party. That after every Navajo that is seen will be considered hostile and treated accordingly."

The Abajo Press in Albuquerque ran an editorial describing the fate of the Navajo who refused to surrender ... " ... (they) would be hunted from mountain to mountain, like wolves."

From the forts, the Navajo families in groups of 50 to 200, were forcibly marched more than 450 merciless, winter miles southeast across New Mexico to the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. Those who slowed the progress, usually the very young or very old, were shot or left behind. One fifth of the Navajo population perished as prisoners on the Long Walk or while living in horrible conditions on this reservation until 1868. They named this place H'weeldi. the place of suffering.

On June 1, 1994, President Peterson Zah of the Navajo Nation marked this site with a 20- ton boulder from Fort Defiance, where many of the Navajo prisoners had surrendered in 1863. This rock is symbol of the spiritual weight cast upon the Navajo culture here at Hwee/di, the place of suffering. The Treaty Rock marks the end of this period. On June 1, 1868, the Navajo Treaty was signed in this field and prisoners walked home as free people of a sovereign Navajo Nation.

We are the Dine.

Our endurance lies in our beliefs, prayers, chants, language and wisdom.

Holding these truths, we return to our homeland within our sacred mountains.

Our Strength endures everlasting

In Beauty We Walk

In Beauty We Walk

In Beauty We Walk

In Beauty We Walk

In 1862, General Carleton turned his focus to the Native American resistance and determined to stifle it. He decided to wage war on the Mescalero Apache and Navajo, tribes he deemed unwilling to coexist peacefully.

To lead the campaign, General Carleton chose the legendary frontiersman and scout, Colonel Kit Carson of Taos. But Carson was reluctant to accept this assignment - he thought the Native Americans could be brought to terms shy of war.

As a matter of interest: Kit Carson never went to school and he never learned to read or write. He did speak English, Spanish, and Cheyenne. Eventually brevetted a Brigadier General, he remains the only illiterate General in American history.

General Carleton decided the way to control the Navajo and Mescalero Apache was to place them on an isolated reservation under military guard. This inspired the building of Fort Sumner at the center of the million-acre Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. General Carlton ordered Colonel Carson to tell surrendering Mescalero Apache at Fort Stanton that war was waged and only if they begged for peace would the military consider talks.

"All Indian men of the Mescalero tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them. The women and children will not be harmed, but you will take them prisoners, and feed them at Fort Stanton until you receive other instruction about them."

Colonel Carson invaded southeastern New Mexico in late 1862, gathering Mescalero Apache and taking them to Fort Stanton as prisoners of war. In January 1863, 450 prisoners arrived here to an incomplete Fort Sumner. They were put to work immediately.

Navajo oral histories recount the scorched earth campaign launched by General Carlton in the Four Corners Region. The histories tell of ancestors in hiding and their struggle to survive, of soldiers tracking the Navajo, as bands of families fled, of merciless killing. This was war.

For the Navajo, the Long Walk and the years at the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation present a watershed in history. Navajo oral histories are interrupted by these years, resuming afterwards with short narratives of the tragic times. The histories describe such pain, that many are brief.

Histories tell of mounted soldiers galloping after Navajo who walked in single file to hide at such outcroppings as Black Mesa. Navajo oral histories confirm the military orders to kill Navajo men and take their women and children as prisoners. Navajo who tried to flee were killed.

On the Long Walk from the Four Corners Region to the Bosque Redondo, Navajo clans of men, women, the elderly and children, were forced to march despite winter cold, pregnancies, fatigue, injury, illness or hunger. Those who delayed the journey were shot or left behind to die. This policy was a direct application of 19th century American expansionist ambition under Manifest Destiny. American expansion into the west would happen despite any preceding culture.

As the military aggressed, Navajo fled, less for fear of imprisonment than for fear of removal from their home. Then and now, the Navajo are inextricably connected to their homeland where each towering mesa or shimmering rock represents an element of their origin.

General Carleton created the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation with the notion his tribal prisoners would become farmers, like the Pueblo Indians he had seen near Santa Fe.

But, the General's notion that the reservation would spawn a farming community of thriving, transplanted Native American prisoners in the "garden spot of new Mexico" proved disastrous. His own troops sarcastically dubbed the reservation "Carletonia." Mescalero Apache and Navajo who cooperated did so for the survival of their families.

General Carleton made a deliberate choice to place the Navajo and the Mescalero Apache on the same reservation-despite hostilities and language barrier. He intended to hold the tribes in a place from which they could not escape, to dismantle their cultures and assimilate the tribes into mainstream society.

In 1865, as winter loomed bringing cold weather, weakened prisoners fell to smallpox. Firewood was scarce. The population at the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation dropped a third. Some 500 Navajo fled in October and again in November, despite the death warrant promised for such action.

That same month, November of 1865, almost all remaining Mescalero Apache also defied the military and fled, no longer willing to abide Carleton's imprisonment. They returned to their homes in the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico, rejoining relatives who had never surrendered.

On December 31, 1865, a Navajo man said:

"Cage the badger and he will try to break from his prison and regain his native hole. Chain the eagle to the ground - he will strive to gain his freedom, and though he fails, he will lift his head and look up to the sky which is home - and we want to return to our mountains and plains, where we used to plant corn, wheat and beans."

The early 1860s witnessed increased expansion into New Mexico by settlers from the south and the east. The Navajo and Mescalero Apache resisted this influx into their homelands and hunting grounds by raiding settlements and caravans throughout the Territory. In 1863, the U.S. Army rounded up thousands of Navajo and forced them to march to the Bosque Redondo Reservation which was established here for their exile. Approximately 11,000 Navajo suffered the "Long Walk" and about 450 Mescalero Apache were also held here.

The reservation experiment was a nightmarish catastrophe. There was never enough food, agricultural efforts met failure, wood for cooking and warmth was scarce, and the water was unhealthy. The prisoners were allowed to return to their homelands in 1868 and the fort was abandoned in the same year.

Exact figures are not known, but historians estimate that as many as 100 of the Mescalero Apache and perhaps 1,500 of the Navajo died during the winter of 1863-64. Added to the 1,400 prisoners who perished during the Long Walk, these deaths meant the Navajo lost, as a direct result of General Carleton's policy, 20 percent of their population.

The buildings in this photo were the first of Fort Sumner, situated immediately southwest of the later, permanent fort. The site of these initial structures was directly in front of you and has been completely washed away by the Pecos River. The photograph probably dates from 1863 and shows Fort Sumner in its infant stage of development.

These temporary huts were built entirely by the soldiers during the winter of 1862-63. They used adobes and cottonwood logs to erect quarters for the officers and men, stables and a hospital dispensary. The hospital itself was then in two tents. Please continue toward the River.

Welcome to our newest addition to Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner Historic Site.

You are standing at the start of the Pecos Riverwalk Audio Tour. Here you can learn about how nature influenced the history of this important place, and you will get to see and imagine the trees and plants that were considered gifts of beauty and survival from the Creator for the Diné (Navajo) and the Ndé (Mescalero Apache). Enjoy each bench painted by young Fort Sumner artists and learn about the incredible history and use of each plant, many of which are still found in this area.

We are most grateful to our partners that contributed to this new outdoor exhibit including: The Friends of the Bosque Redondo Memorial; The 2023 Fort Sumner High School Art Department Students; Fort Sumner High School Art Teacher Kathy M. Craig; Golden Artist Colors, Inc, who donated the finest paints for these local artists to work with; and to Raw Materials Art Supplies, for supplying all the brushes and tools.

These men are foot soldiers. They are standing in front of their barracks which stood at the end of the parade ground. Although you are now standing at the point from which the photograph was taken, the drainage ditch and the highway have destroyed the site of the structure.

Just a reminder: Please stay on the pathway for your own safety!

The farmlands were to the north of the fort where crops are grown today. Corn was the Indians' principal crop but they are also grew wheat, beans, melons, pumpkins, and sorghum.

Despite the Indians' best efforts, the agricultural experiment was a disaster. Cutworms ravaged the cornfields from 1864 to 1866. The crops of 67 were a total failure due to early drought and late hailstorms. The Indians refused to plant the following year. These losses obliged the U.S. Government to supply the 7000 prisoners with foodstuffs. Rations were always minimal, but food expenses still ranged up to $1,500,000 annually.

Communication from General J. H. Carleton to Major Henry D. Wallen, commanding Fort Sumner, New Mexico, dated Headquarters Department of New Mexico, Santa Fe, March 9, 1864:

'It will require the greatest effort and most careful husbandry to keep the Indians alive until the new crop matures. . .. The Indians must live on the smallest quantity of food. The amount set in the order is in case we are fortunate in getting enough, which I fear greatly we shall have trouble in obtaining.'

This is the site of the Indian Commissary. The commissary was the storehouse for corn and other rations issued to the Indians.

The journey home for the Navajo included groups of mixed clans, with women, children and the elderly this time riding on carts. Some rode horses, some walked. There were some supplies and animals distributed among the groups. No soldiers shot anyone for slowing an entourage.

Manuelito, the last Navajo chief to surrender in 1864, described the Return Walk in 1868:

"The days and nights were long before it came time for us to go to our homes. The day we were to start, we went a little way toward home, because we were so anxious. We told the drivers to whip up the mules, we were in such a hurry. When we saw the top of the mountain from Albuquerque we wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so, and some of the old men and the old women cried with joy when they reached their home".

The oral history of an orphan Navajo girl returning home from Fort Sumner:

"There was talk about the Navajo going home, so much so that people were packing their things. The word came to everyone that they would be able to leave in the next few days. No one could sleep, not any baby, or old man or lady, not even the young people. As if magic, the whole camp moved by itself during the night to West of the river. This was because the people were excited.

The next day they were told they could return home, and it was if the whole of them was lifted by the wind and they walked every way they could. It was during this time she saw a light come to the eyes of the people and they began to sing old songs and walk with sore feet and hunger found them with spirit in their bodies and did not stop them. She found herself helping old folks with the few things they carried. Some of them had managed to store anyway, little bits of com pollen from long ago. When they crossed the highland they could see the tip of a peak to the West It was small on the horizon The old people spoke quietly, ''what mountain is that?'' Someone said, ''is that our mountain, one of our Sacred Mountains?" The word came from up ahead it is so. Today, it is Mount Taylor.

The old ladies fell to the ground and cried, they were so glad to see it there in the distance. And in the way of our people, they took a little com pollen and blessed the land, and themselves and gave thanks that they could see their own country."

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With thanks to our narrators: actor Wes Studie; New Mexico District Judge Stephen Pfeffer; author and educator Blackhorse Mitchell; Yolanda Nava, Dana Leigh Gordon, Jennifer Marie Gordon, Lillian Bowe, and Aaron Roth.

Special thanks to Governor Lujan Grisham for the revitalization of our outdoor tour.