Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  I need not remind this committee of the constant protestations and objections of the Hopi people for over 100 years to the onslaught of Navajo trespasses and other excesses in the destruction of life and property that have become a way of life with them since their arrival on this land. . . . Because of our long history of nonaggression we are penalized and forced to endure intolerable conditions under the heel of the mighty Navajo tribe which could be avoided if Congress would promptly take action. . . . No other minority people on the face of this land have been required to negotiate for the implementation of their rights as decreed to them by the federal courts.

  The Hopi, through their links with the media, had the best story line. The rule of public relations is that once a narrative has been established in the national media, it is almost impossible to turn it around. The story was of implacable hatred between the two tribes in which the peaceful Hopi were victimized by the aggressive Navajo. National newspapers carried constant stories about the trouble in the American Southwest.

  The failure to incorporate Native American history into mainstream history greatly helped this version of events to prevail. In American culture Indians have been largely relegated to the anthropologists, not the historians. So the range war and the “centuries-old Hopi-Navajo struggle” went unquestioned. Had anyone taken the time to look at Navajo history, they might have found a different and equally fascinating story.

  THE NAVAJO AND BOSQUE REDONDO

  The Navajo also had a story to tell, but they couldn’t get to the microphone. Before the 1850s the Navajo were prosperous and wealthy and living in northern New Mexico. Their struggles were mainly with the Spanish who kidnapped Navajo for slaves. Then after the United States won the war with Mexico in 1848, their new enemies were the Anglo-Europeans who believed that Navajo lands were filled with gold. Anglo miners started to come into their lands, looking for gold and silver. The Navajo retaliated by raiding the mining settlements with skill and determination. The miners complained bitterly to the governor of New Mexico Territory. Governor Connelly told the territorial legislature, “The Navajo occupy the finest grazing districts within our limits [and] infest a mining region extending two hundred miles. [We are] excluded from its occupation and the treasures of mineral wealth that are known to exist.” He went on the describe the Navajo as having “too long roamed as lords of the soil over this extensive tract of country.” But it took the Civil War to provide the occasion to forcibly clear the land of the troublesome Navajo, so that mineral prospecting could go forward.

  In 1862 a Texas general named Henry Hopkins Sibley crossed the Rio Grande with a regiment of Texas cowboys and claimed Santa Fe and the New Mexico Territory for the Confederate South. (A plaque in the old square in Albuquerque commemorates the Confederate campaign.) While the US Army troops were diverted in fighting Sibley, the Navajo seized the moment to retaliate against the invading miners. They raided the mining settlements with ferocity, killing miners and carrying off horses, equipment, and supplies. The mine owners screamed for protection.

  The government in Washington heard them. On September 16, 1862, General James Carleton arrived in Santa Fe from California as the new commanding general of New Mexico Territory. The Santa Fe newspaper called him “the deliverer of the Southwest.” The nature of his mission was to expel Sibley and quiet the hostile Navajo. Carleton also believed in the stories of mineral wealth in the lands that the Navajo inhabited. “There is evidence,” Carleton wrote to General Henry Halleck, “that a country as rich if not richer in mineral wealth than California, extends from the Rio Grande, northwestwardly all the way across to Washoe [Nevada].” Carleton at first organized companies of “irregular soldiers,” many of them slave raiders, to fight the Navajo. Then he enlisted Kit Carson, the famed frontiersman, explorer, and Indian fighter, to be the field commander of the regular Navajo Campaign. Carleton’s war policy toward the Navajo was that of total war—killing the men, taking women and children prisoners, destroying their food base, removing them from their lands, and colonizing them as farmers in eastern New Mexico at Bosque Redondo, almost at the Texas border, where many of them died.

  Using Mexican and Ute scouts, Carson discovered the Navajo settlements and sent in troops to kill or drive off the inhabitants. He captured stored grain, burned all the crops, destroyed the Navajo fruit orchards, and slaughtered the livestock. Thousands of sheep, the basis of the Navajo economy, were killed. Carson knew the Navajo could find more food sources, but not if he kept them continually on the move.

  The Navajo kept moving west, crossing into Arizona Territory, and many fled into the depths of Canyon de Chelly, a mystical and beautiful canyon until then unexplored by white men and protected by quicksand at the canyon entrance. Carson set up a blockade at the canyon entrance and waited out the winter. In the spring of 1864 Carson sent a detachment of men into the canyon and rounded up fifteen hundred Navajo, by then half starved, frozen, and at the end of endurance.

  Thus began the infamous Long Walk to Fort Sumner, three hundred miles away. During the march through spring blizzards, the soldiers shot anyone moving too slowly, raped women and girls, and physically mutilated their prisoners. Hundreds died. Many froze to death. “Three hundred miles at fifteen miles day!” wrote Ruth Roessel. “If a woman went into labor, she was shot. Navajos remember, ‘There was absolutely no mercy.’”

  No wonder the Navajos felt they were marching to the ends of the earth. The way led gradually out of the fierce, red rocks and high plateaus of their own country, past Bear Springs, their old stamping ground, where Fort Wingate now stood menacingly ready to push them on their way, and then past the long flow of lava which is the life blood of Yeitso, the monster slain by the war gods. Beyond rose the long slopes of Mount Taylor, the southern sacred mountain [of the four sacred mountains]. When they left it behind, they were out of Navajoland, entering unhallowed ground where no ceremonies would be effective. The Navajo say they held no ceremonies at Fort Sumner except the War Dance which nullifies the evil effects of contact with strangers and enemies.

  General Carleton considered it a great victory. Kit Carson became an American hero, although details of the Navajo Campaign later challenged that reputation. The march, however, was merely a preview of what was awaiting the Navajo at Fort Sumner. There, other Navajo who had either turned themselves in or been picked up in other raids were brought together in a prison camp inadequate for seven thousand Navajo. (In 1864 the camp census said the number of Navajo was 8,354; in 1865 it was 9,022.) The camp, which had no economy or continuity with preexisting settlement, became known by its Spanish place-name, Bosque Redondo, for the cottonwoods that marked the area. Carleton saw it as a permanent solution for the Navajo problem and directed that a forty-square-mile area be set aside as an internment zone. He ordered the digging of irrigation trenches and the planting of fifteen hundred acres of corn, beans, melons, and pumpkins. Unhappily, General Carleton knew little about agriculture, and given his authoritarian temperament, no one ventured to advise him.

  The hot sun and drought conditions withered most of the corn. Grasshoppers, worms, and severe storms devastated the melons and squash. The water was brackish, stagnant, and a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Carleton had few farm tools to give to the Navajo to cultivate the fields, and what he ordered were stolen by the Indian agents. Soon the Navajo were starving again, and many of them were stricken with malaria or dysentery. The soldiers at Fort Sumner infected many of the Navajo women with syphilis and gonorrhea, which in turn was transmitted among the Navajo men. Comanche Indians from Texas crossed the Rio Grande and raided the camp almost at will. The prisoners were on the verge of starvation most of the time and suffered from heat, malnutrition, and disease. Everyone who saw the camp said it was brutal and inhumane in the extreme. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts—one of the great opponents of slavery during the antebellum period—made a speech on the floor of the Senate, denouncing both the governor of New Mexico and General James Carleton for practic
ing “Indian slavery.”

  Throughout the years of the Civil War, the US government was spending more than $1 million every eighteen months on the Navajo imprisonment ($50 million in current dollars). When pressed in 1868, General Carleton said it was cheaper to imprison the Navajo than to fight them. He blamed the excessive expense on the corruption of the Indian agency that administered the camp. Indian agency superintendent Steck pressured Carleton to release the prisoners based on extreme hardship, the inability of the settlement to become self-sustaining, and its extraordinary expense. Carleton insisted that Steck should clean up the corruption in his own service.

  In a long-running bureaucratic battle, General Carleton and Indian superintendent Steck fought over supplies, rations, budgetary responsibility, and bureaucratic turf. Carlton sent his own team to monitor a delivery of supplies from the Indian agency to the Navajo prisoners. “Rusty, old-fashioned, unserviceable, unsaleable plows, soft-iron spades, rakes, hoes, knives and hatchets, thin shoddy cloths and blankets,” the army sutler recorded. George Gwyther, the fort’s doctor, weighed the blankets and reported them “a full pound less than army issue and twice as expensive.” Carleton’s team figured that $100,000 shipment to be worth $30,000, a $70,000 profit for various politicians and purchasing agents.

  Because the Navajo camp never became self-sustaining, at the end of 1868 Carlton was relieved of command and General William Tecumseh Sherman, fresh from his Civil War victories, was sent to Fort Sumner to negotiate the terms of a treaty with the Navajo. “Better send the Indians to a Fifth Avenue Hotel to board,” Sherman reported to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton about the tremendous cost of the camp.

  At first Sherman tried to convince the Navajo to move to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Their leaders refused. Then he finally agreed to negotiate a strip of reservation land overlapping the Arizona and New Mexico border, extending to Canyon de Chelly. Even at the time it was recognized as being far too small and arid to support seven thousand Navajo. In the five years of the Navajo imprisonment, white settlers had moved into their old lands. Their previous economy and agriculture had been completely destroyed. On their old lands they found charred hogans, fields overgrown with brush, and corrals that had to be rebuilt. All that was left of the beautiful peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly were blackened stumps.

  According to the Bureau of Ethnography’s Indian Land Sessions in the United States, the treaty was never formally signed, but the Navajo agreed never to wage war against the United States in exchange for being released to their old lands. In turn, the government agreed to supply the Navajo with food and livestock to get them through the first few winters. But somewhere between the Indian Bureau and Fort Wingate, the shipments of supplies disappeared without a trace.

  Few of General Sherman’s promises were kept. The Navajo moved far beyond the paper boundaries marked out in the treaty map. The Navajo pushed on. They went north beyond Shiprock, northwest to Monument Valley and Navajo Mountain, and to the valley of the San Juan River. They went beyond the Hopi villages into the interior of Black Mesa. The government never did meet their terms of the treaty to provide them with the promised sheep and cattle to rebuild their economy.

  The problem with the construct of the “centuries-old Navajo-Hopi land dispute” was that it was not centuries old. The actual history of the Navajo settlement and reservation negotiations would have provided a different historical context. Except for a one-paragraph summary,* the story of the Navajo reservation was not made part of the Hopi-Navajo court case in Healing v. Jones. As a practical matter, the 1882 Executive Order Reservation of thirty-nine hundred square miles was useless in marking usable borders between the people of the two reservations. The Parker-Keam line established in 1891 and known as the “sixteen-mile limit” established with the cooperation of both Hopi and Navajo leaders was honored by most tribal members. This intertribal agreement facilitated by Thomas Keams, an Indian trader who gave his name to Keams Canyon, stood in practice and principle until 1958, when legal claims were filed by John Boyden on behalf of the Hopi against the Navajo.

  By 1974 the Hopi Land Settlement Act had passed both houses of Congress and was awaiting President Ford’s signature. When concerned citizens wrote to the Interior Department asking for information about the Hopi-Navajo dispute, Interior sent them a pamphlet prepared by the Peabody Coal Company. The final bill that passed had been introduced by Wayne Owens, a freshman congressman from Utah, but had been written by John Boyden. When Owens failed to win reelection, he joined John Boyden’s law firm in Salt Lake City, now located in new offices in the Kennecott Building overlooking Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

  John Boyden and Stewart Udall and Peabody Coal/Kennecott Copper needed leasing rights, coal, and access to the aquifer. It might have been theft, but it was all done legally. By passing new laws, Black Mesa became a crucial resource colony for the expansion of the New West. Water and energy were key to the massive population shift of the 1970s and ’80s that, in the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, transferred increasing political power from the East to the western states.

  *When Emory Sekaquaptewa Jr. died in 2007 at the age of seventy-nine, the New York Times obituary (December 16, 2007) described him as a university professor, anthropologist, judge, artist, compiler of the first Hopi dictionary, co-owner of a silversmith shop, and political activist in leadership positions in the village of Kykotsmovi. He also became executive director of the Hopi Tribal Council, associate judge on the Hopi Tribal Court, and member of the Hopi Land Negotiating Committee, charged with negotiating the physical division of Hopi and Navajo lands. These roles in Hopi governance—the tribal court, the tribal council, the negotiating committee—were all important aspects of providing institutions in Hopi life that met Washington’s needs, a fact that did not escape the traditional members of the Hopi villages.

  *The government also did its part in trying to make them vanish. In 1890 Sitting Bull, his son, and six bodyguards were killed at the Standing Rock Sioux agency. Hearing of Sitting Bull’s death, Chief Big Foot decided to move his band to a more protected area of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He was ill with pneumonia and riding in a wagon that flew the white flag of truce when the US Seventh Cavalry sent troops to disarm his warriors before allowing them to travel farther to the Indian agency. As the troops disarmed the Indian warriors, a gun went off. The 500 troops opened fire, killing the warriors, and chased down some 250 women and children. They killed 146 men, women, and children and wounded 51, leaving a trail of bloodied Sioux bodies that stretched for miles in what is known as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Photographer George Trager made a series of photographs of the frozen bodies in the snow that were widely distributed and reproduced.

  *Summary of Bosque Redondo and subsequent Navajo reservation in Healing v. Jones: “Additional land was added to the southwest corner of the Navajo reservation by another executive order issued on January 6, 1880. Despite the vast size of the Navajo reservation at that time, this semi-arid land was considered incapable of providing support for all of the Navajos. Moreover the boundaries of the Navajo reservation were not distinctly marked. It is therefore not surprising that great numbers of the Navajos wandered far beyond the paper boundaries of the Navajo reservation as it existed in 1880. By 1882 Navajos comprising hundreds of bands and amounting to about half of the Navajo population had camps and farms outside the Navajo reservation, some as far away as one hundred and fifty miles.”

  PART III

  CHAPTER 9

  LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS

  The temperature was 112 degrees on May 15, 1905, when Senator William Clark came to establish the new town site for his railroad depot. He had bulldozed forty acres clear of desert scrub, laid out the main streets in a grid, and announced an auction to sell numbered lots on a map. The bidders were speculators from Los Angeles and agents for eastern investors. Some bidders brought their own tents. Others stayed in a tent hotel named Hotel Las Vegas. The auction platfo
rm was erected roughly where the Plaza hotel-casino stands today in the old downtown.

  The investors were bidding on twelve hundred parcels. Each lot was 25 feet wide and 140 feet deep, marked out on a large map. Some offerings were double lots. These lines on paper represented a future town with streets, stores, saloons, housing, churches, schools, electricity, plumbing, and a septic system. In the spirit of Gilded Age speculation and the town’s gambling future, Senator Clark’s auction drew the speculators into a frenzy of bidding for numbered squares on a map at grossly inflated prices. The chance to buy property—even if it was only on paper—in a new railroad depot town was the equivalent of buying into a hot IPO stock offering today. Senator Clark was the forerunner of the real estate capitalists that built the urban Southwest. When the auction was over, Clark had earned $250,000 in profit ($6 million in today’s dollars). He had paid Helen Stewart $55,000 ($1,275,000) for her ranch and its water rights at Big Springs.

  Helen Stewart was the unlikely owner of the land and water rights from the original Mormon settlement, a missionary colony that Brigham Young had sent out in 1855 to a desert oasis that the Spanish called las vegas and Anglos called The Meadows. Like Tuba City, the site had abundant water sources from a large aquifer that had been collecting snowmelt and water runoff for a thousand years. The Mormon mission had lasted less than two years, done in by Paiute hostility, the poor desert soil, and too many people for the small agricultural base. (The restored old Mormon Fort can still be seen on Washington Street in Las Vegas.) Helen Stewart’s husband had taken over the ranch from Octavius Gass, who had successfully farmed and ranched in the same spot for twenty years. But in the late 1870s Gass was seized by gold fever. After the Comstock silver strike near Reno, everyone in Nevada was filing gold or silver claims in the surrounding mountains. Even today Nevada has a major mining industry and is the fourth-largest producer of gold in the world. In 1880 Gass took out a $5,000 mortgage against his ranch and went off into the mountains to seek his fortune in precious metals. But he never struck gold and defaulted on the mortgage. His banker, Helen Stewart’s husband, foreclosed.