In 1863 General Carleton ordered a campaign against the Navajo; Kit Carson's troops burned cornfields, orchards and hogans and killed livestock, most notoriously in Canyon de Chelly, forcing surrender by starvation. From 1863 to 1866 more than fifty groups were marched up to 300-350 miles east to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner, journeys of eighteen to forty days on eight days' rations; people who could not keep up were shot, and hundreds died on the road. At Fort Sumner more than 8,500 Dine and nearly 500 Mescalero Apache were held together on alkaline land with failed crops, insufficient rations and epidemic disease; the Mescalero left without permission in November 1865. The experiment was abandoned and the Treaty of 1868 permitted the Dine to return to a reservation within their homeland, the only such return in the history of United States removal policy.
The United States Army, under Brigadier General James Carleton and Colonel Kit Carson, destroyed Navajo (Dine) subsistence, marched the survivors to eastern New Mexico and interned them with the Mescalero Apache at Bosque Redondo
There was no count of the Navajo before the campaign; estimates from Army correspondence and later reservation rolls put the people at roughly 12,000-15,000. About 10,000 were marched to Bosque Redondo, where the peak camp population was 9,022 in spring 1865; several thousand evaded capture in the canyon country and to the west.
There is no death register for either the marches or the reservation. New Mexico Historic Sites states that hundreds of Dine died as a result of the march conditions; deaths at Fort Sumner from dysentery, exposure, malnutrition and epidemic disease over four years are usually reckoned in the low thousands from ration returns and post correspondence. Navajo oral history records killings on the march, including of those unable to walk, that the army did not document, and the range given here is a reconstruction rather than a count.
New Mexico Historic Sites and the EBSCO summary document the destruction of Navajo crops, orchards and livestock to compel surrender, the killing of stragglers on the marches, the confinement of the population at Fort Sumner and the labour imposed on internees to build irrigation works.
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