What happened to Navajo after the white settlers came?

Answer 1

The Navajo were very lucky in that they faced almost no colonist settlers in their main population areas for hundreds of years after first contact with the Spanish. That first contact was in 1540 with the men of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. The Spanish set up a mission on the Hopi lands in the 1600s but in 1680 they were forced out in the Pueblo Revolt. They attempted to return in 1692 but were completely eliminated in 1700. The Navajo main experience in the 1700s was the increasing slave raids against them by the Ute, Comanche and Jicarilla. The was a large demand for Navajo slaves in Spanish New Mexico and Northern Mexico, especially women weavers and household servants. In the 1840s when the US took over it was estimated there were 3000-5000 Navajo slaves. They were sold to buyers in Santa Fe for the most part. The Navajo in turn raided Spanish settlements for sheep, cattle and horses and to retrieve captives. They also went to the many trade fairs at the Pueblos and Spanish towns. The fighting went back and forth for hundreds of years sometimes with times of peace and sometimes intense.

The Americans took over after the Mexican American war in 1848. American trappers and traders had been moving in for a few decades. There had not been significant new Spanish settlers for about 50 or more years. The Americans however, did not have much interest in the Navajo lands. Some Mormon settlers had been moving south on Brigham Young's plan to colonize much of the west and make his own country. But no rail line was planned through to area and it did not have much land that was seen as suitable for American style farming. General Carleton mainly wanted to force the Navajo out on general principal and because some leaders in Santa Fe had his ear and because he had little to do in the Civil War as the rebels in New Mexico collapsed. A powerful Navajo leader had died and skirmishes had increased and a powerful Indian Agent defender of the Navajo was reassigned to West Point because of the war as well.

The Long Walk and 4 year internment was forced by Carleton in 1864 to 1868. It ended in scandal and corruption and deaths and so the Navajo were allowed to return to a much reduced Reservation. They rejoined people who had hidden during time in the western part of what is now the Navajo Nation and in southern Utah.

Their lands were increased over and over from 1868 to 1934. The only loss to white settlers and government after that was a amount of land in the New Mexico portion of the reservation. 160 acres square tracts were carved out in a Checkerboard pattern and areas around Farmington and on the eastern edge were taken away after an Executive Presidential order had given it to them. This was because of a very powerful New Mexico politicians opposed them. They were a loosely knit cabal called the "Santa Fe Ring" that dominated both the political and economic affairs of the territory. Many of its members, such as Thomas Benton Catron and territorial governor and judge L. Bradford Prince, were far more sympathetic toward the Pueblos than the Navajo. Almost all of the leaders of the ring were involved in the livestock industry and most had some ties to the various railroads that sought to traverse New Mexico in the 1870s and 1880s. The result was that the most powerful forces in the territory had needs that came in direct conflict with the growing and increasingly prosperous Navajo livestock economy. The so-called "Checkerboard lands" dispute between 1885 and 1910 resulted from the overlap of the alternating sections of land given to the railroads with executive order additions to the Navajo reservation and public domain lands.