Over three hundred Navajos die making the…

Over three hundred Navajos die making the journey from their home lands to the Bosque Redondo reservation, a forty-square-mile (one hundred square kilometer) area where over nine thousand Navajo and Mescalero Apaches have been forced to live because of accusations that they have been raiding white settlements near their respective homelands.

The fort is named for General Edmond Vose Sumner.

The U.S. Army had fought the Navajos and Apaches in the Southwest and the Comanches in Texas throughout the late 1850s and early 1860s..

On October 31, 1862, Congress had authorized the creation of Fort Sumner.

General James Henry Carleton had initially justified the fort as offering protection to settlers in the Pecos River valley from the Mescalero Apaches, Kiowa, and Comanche.

He has also created the Bosque Redondo.

The stated purpose of the reservation is for it to be self-sufficient, while teaching Mescalero Apaches and Navajos how to be modern farmers.

General Edward Canby, whom Carleton has replaced, had first suggested that the Navajo people be moved to a series of reservations and be taught new skills.

Some in Washington, D.C. had thought that the Navajos did not need to be moved and a reservation should be created on their land.

Some New Mexico citizens have encouraged death or at least complete removal of the Navajo off their lands.

General Carleton had ordered Col. Christopher "Kit" Carson to do whatever necessary to bring first the Mescaleros and then the Navajos to the Bosque Redondo.

All of the Mescalero Apache were there by the end of 1862, but the Navajo do not get there in large numbers until early 1864.

The Navajos refer to the journey from Navajo land to the Bosque Redondo as the Long Walk.