by Jenna Vandenberg
You can tell that thousands of Navajo Indians have walked up this canyon. Years and years of constant steps have worn natural footholds up and down the orange walls. They look as if they’ve been intricately carved. And in a way, they had been.
“Could you ever get lost up here?” Amanda asked Calvin, our sure-footed Navajo guide.
“No.” He answered.
I smiled at the typical mono-syllabic answer, but Amanda and I kept up our lines of questions. When pressed, he finally told us of the time he had been sent out in the middle of the night to find a group of Park Ranchers who’d gotten lost here in Canyon de Chelly (pronounced de Shay). He’d talked them down one cliff and walked them up another. He knows this place by heart, even in the dark.
Calvin isn’t exactly a Park Ranger, although he had been one in the past. He is part of a small group of Navajo’s who grew up in the Canyon de Chelly valley. When the US National Parks Service wanted to protect and nationalize the park, they did so with the stipulation that Navajos could continue to live here in conjunction with the National Park Service. The only way tourists can go down into the canyon floor is with a Navajo tour guide.
This is a rule that I can get behind, especially after Calvin pulled our 4×4 from the mud and told us about pulling hikers from of flash flood waters. But the guided-only rule isn’t just for safety. It’s a respect thing. The Navajo’s don’t want anyone else messing with their land. They’ve had enough of that. Bitter stories of conquistadors or explorers had made their way through my tours of the Zuni and Acoma pueblos, but Calvin’s story of The Long Walk hit me the hardest.
Calvin started talking about fires, Kit Carson, and The Navajo’s Long Walk once we reached the top of a cliff and were staring down below. We were sitting on the orange sandstone rocks, overlooking the farms and traditional hogan homes that were tucked around trees in the valley below. It was fall, so those trees were decked out in brilliant yellow and red colors. Gorgeous colors, but reminiscent of fire.
“He burned all this,” Calvin said, spreading his arms out across the valley below us. The “he” of Calvin’s accusations was Colonel Christopher Carson, better know as Kit Carson.
By the time that Kit Carson strode into the southwest, the US army was knee deep in their so-called “Indian Problem.” American settlers wanted land, security, and distance between themselves and Native Americans. Colonel James Carleton and Kit Carson were the ones who were going to solve the “problem.”
For Carleton and Carson, Canyon de Chelly was the root of the Navajo problem. The crevices in the sandstone walls and hidden footpaths across the canyon gave the Navaho a distinct home field advantage here. Many had hidden and sought refuge in the canyon during battles in the past. Navajos continued to do so during this “Fearing Time” when the threats and guns of Kit Carson’s men could be heard around the canyon walls.
Kit Carson knew how to solve this canyon problem though. Fire. In 1863 his “Scorched Earth Campaign,” burned all Navajo property in and around the canyon was burned. Traditional hogan homes, peach trees, and grazing animals were all destroyed. With no crops, little food, and only the charred remains of their homes, Navajo’s fled up the walls of Canyon de Chelly. But without canyon protection, they were easy targets for Carleton and Carson’s men and the many Ute Indians who were working with the colonels. Navajos spotted were giving a choice to make at gunpoint: surrender or be shot on site. Although a few people escaped, the majority of the tribe surrendered. Kit Carson’s plan worked.
Thus began the long walk. Navajos walked past Mt. Taylor where they believe that First Woman threw a turquoise stone to create the southernmost of their four sacred mountains. Navajos walked past the Laguna and Acoma pueblo people, Natives whom were used to mistreatment themselves. Navajos walked past Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains. Some Navajos were forced to detour north through Santa Fe, where they were marched down the capitol city streets and plazas in a parade of shame. The Navajos then headed towards Texas, stopping in the barren salt flats of eastern New Mexico. Water, firewood and fertile soil were not plentiful here.
Today’s I-40 runs roughly along the nearly 500 miles that the Navajo’s walked. As seems to be the case with all of history’s forced marches, conditions were not good. Elderly people, slow walkers, and women giving birth were shot as they failed to keep up the twelve-mile-a-day pace. The freezing weather, dysentery, raids along the way, and lack of general provisions led to the death of an estimated 1/10th of Navajo Natives during The Long Walk.
Fort Sumner in the Bosque Redondo Reservation would be the Navajo’s new home. General Carleton described the area as a paradise for Navajos (“Carletonia,” he dubbed it), where the Natives would cast off their “latent longings for murdering and robbing,” and become “the happiest and most delightfully located…Indians.” Happiness surely did not come the first year, as crops failed in the poor soil. Nor did it come the second year when hundreds of Navajos froze to death as they attempted to plow their useless fields. The four years the Navajos spend at Fort Sumner were marked by death and loneliness, not joyful westernization and utopia.
Conditions were so bad at the Fort that even soldiers recognized things were not going as advertised or planned. In 1867, General Carleton was relieved from his command, and the next year several Navajos were appointed to travel to Washington D.C. They met with President Andrew Johnson, and under the Navajo leadership of Manuelito and Barboncito, negotiations were made that allowed the Navajo’s to return back to home. On June 18th, 1868, the Navajos started their long walk back home.
They returned to Mt. Taylor and to Shiprock and to Canyon de Chelly. Inside the canyon, Calvin’s great-grandparents and then grandparents re-built their hogans, and re-laid their crops, and found new goats and sheep to herd within the canyon walls. Life began again and The Long Walk was not often discussed. Calvin explained to me that his grandparents did not like to “return to that time of suffering.”
But Calvin knows all his grandma’s stories – even the sad ones. According to Navajo tradition, the grandmother chooses one grandchild (out of dozens, in Calvin’s case) to keep in the ancestral home and instruct in traditional Navajo ways. So as Calvin’s parents and siblings eventually left the enclosed walls of Canyon de Chelly for jobs in Gallup and Phoenix, Calvin stayed behind. He played in the prehistoric cliff dwellings high in the canyon walls and he tended to goats on the valley floor. He hunted skinwalkers and slept in hogans and learned from his grandmother. When he was twelve, the US government discovered that there was an un-schooled child living down in the canyon and officials came to take him to school at Fort Wingate. Upon overhearing that his long hair would be chopped off the next day, Calvin embarked on a mini-long walk of his own, finding his way back to his grandmother and those orange canyon walls. She had breakfast waiting for him.
Calvin did return back to school in the following days (hiding underneath his grandma’s bed could only last so long), but his heart and ancestral land are still within Canyon de Chelly. Although he admits to being a snowbird, heading towards warmer Arizona cities in the winter, Calvin still spends most of his time down in Canyon de Chelly. He points out cliff dwelling and ancient rock paintings to travelers, and takes hikers and campers (like Amanda and me) into the canyon. He tells people about The Long Walk and laments that more Navajo kids don’t understand the secrets and stories of Canyon de Chelly. “All they know of ‘canyon’ is it is a hole in the ground,” he says.
By the end of our hike, I realized that I’d been wrong about Calvin. I thought that I had to keep asking questions to pry words out of him, but these stories were ones that he had wanted to tell all along. The Long Walk may not be as well known at the Cherokee’s Trail of Tears, but Calvin and other Canyon de Chelly guides are in the eager business of sharing their canyon and its tales of the past.
Ancient Spirits of the Canyon from Flagstaff
If You Go:
www.bluedesertguideco.com – To tour Canyon de Chelly with Calvin, contact Amanda and Vino. They can customize tours around Native history, outdoor activities, shopping, or sightseeing.
About the author:
Jenna Vandenberg is a Seattle based writer, runner and teacher. She has taught middle schoolers in China, Norway, and Las Vegas. Although she often gets sidetracked keeping score at baseball games and eating muffalettas in New Orleans, she is currently working on running a race in every state. Follow the quest at runningthroughthisworld.com.
All photographs are by Jenna Vandenberg.
To get the furs to Fort William, the 90-pound bales of furs were loaded into 25-foot Northwest birch-bark canoes, along with the outpost’s agent and supplies needed for the trip, and paddled on the liquid highway by four to six voyageurs. Each canoe carried up to 1-½ tons of cargo and people. The canoes were developed by the Ojibway Indians in the area and the Northwest Company went to great lengths to keep their competition from having access to that flat-bottomed canoe, the perfect watercraft vehicle to navigate the shallow rivers and streams of Northern Minnesota and Lower Canada. The Hudson Bay and American Fur Companies use the less efficient “York” canoe.
The brigades coming in from the Yukon in the far west stayed about a week at Rendezvous before they had to start back to the outpost before the rivers froze. Those coming in from closer outposts, such as one of the Fond de Lac’s outpost on Minnesota’s Snake River (near modern day Pine City, MN), stayed longer.
Today, you can experience Grand Rendezvous the second weekend of July each year or explore the fort anytime. I wanted to experience what is was like paddling a Nor’west canoe on the Kaministiquia River just as the voyageurs did in the early 1800s. Free 20-minute trips leave the wharf several times each day between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm. Don’t worry – each of the six to eight modern “voyageurs” per canoe must wear a lifejacket and learn the commands of paddling. Each canoe has a period-costumed experienced bowman in the front and a steersman in the back.
Once back at the wharf, I walk toward the main gate leading into the fort. Just before going under the gate archway, on the right is a small voyageur encampment. One of the voyageurs just finished cooking some fish over the campfire. The voyageurs were not allowed to stay inside the fort palisade. The fort interior was reserved for gentlemen, such as clerks, bourgeois and tradesmen, along with the elite of the company – the company partners.
I scanned the room looking at his equipment and “medicines” and noticed a saw lying on a table. Doc explains the limb amputation process and that he used it as a last resort – the success rate is not good as only about one out of every two ever healed and lived. Most of the amputees succumbed to infection. Those requiring long-term convalescence were moved to the hospital on the other end of the square. An amputation ended the person’s employment as a voyageur. Voyageurs needed both strong arms to paddle for weeks on end and both strong legs to haul the equipment over portages, some as long as 14 miles.
In the kitchen and bakery, three “cooks” are busy preparing fare for the noon meal. With fowl hanging and some already cooking in the reflector oven, one cook is breaking home-baked bread into pieces in preparation for making bread pudding. Another is cutting scallions as one ingredient for use in a prepared dish. With 1,200 in camp, it was a busy two months for the cooks keeping up with the hungry demands.
Our final stop is at the Wintering House of Kenneth McKenzie and his family. McKenzie was the Northwest’s chief operating officer at Fort William. Officially established in 1784, NWC was actually a loosely knit coalition of independent traders based in Montreal that operated under an arrangement of agreements with fur traders and Indians in the interior. They never did have an official charter as did their rival the Hudson Bay Company. At the head of the company was Simon McTavish, a Scottish Highlander, who ran the company from its beginning until his death in 1804. Each summer for a couple of weeks, he would come out from Montreal to visit Fort William. In the Great Dining Hall, a room off to the side was always kept ready for his arrival. McTavish brought three of his nephews William, Duncan and Simon McGillivray into the fur business. William rose to head the company after his uncle’s death.
Northwest’s interior headquarters was not always located on the Kaministiquia River near Thunder Bay. Before 1803, their depot was located on the shore of Lake Superior. However, being a British company and with the border between the United States and Canada not yet drawn, they feared they would end up as part of the United States and end up paying large pay custom duties, so they moved north so they would be well inside Canada. It was a wise move as Grand Portage did end up in the United States. In 1821, the Northwest Company ceased to exist as they were swallowed up by the Hudson Bay Company, a chief rival of theirs since 1793.
On this sunny afternoon I have a special destination in mind: a visit to the Old Mission Santa Barbara to discover the city’s past. I hop onto a tourist trolley down by the Presidio. On the way through the picturesque streets, the handsome driver tells us that he’s a descendant of the Chumash Indians who occupied this land long before the arrival of the Spaniards. In 1602 a Spanish explorer named Sebastian Vizcaino sailed up the channel between the coast and Channel Islands, and claimed the land in the name of the king of Spain. He gave it the name “Santa Barbara” because it was the Saint’s Feast day.
Over time the original buildings were damaged or destroyed by earthquakes. The present friary was restored then later built after another quake in 1927. The church represents an amazing engineering achievement combining the efforts of the Chumash, Spanish and Mexican artisans. I tour the rooms where the missionaries slept, the kitchen where a meager menu is shown: little more than beans and rice. In the chapel room are displays of skills taught there including candlemaking, pottery, weaving and ironwork. Galleons from Manila and China clippers brought Asian culture to the area and some of this reflects in the artifacts and embroidered silk vestments displayed in the chapel museum. The church itself is decorated with Mexican art, some 200 years old.
Passing under a low doorway decorated with skulls I enter the mission cemetery where Santa Barbara‘s culturally diverse early settlers are buried along with Chumash Indians. When the Presidio was formed in 1783 the Spanish soldiers were of varied ethnic origins including Mexican Indians, Sephardic Jews and Africans. The heritage of Santa Barbara is reflected in the names and backgrounds of those buried there.
There are various ongoing events throughout the season including a theatre where you can watch old silent films, a blacksmith demonstration, carolers, a Christmas scavenger hunt, rug hooking demonstrations, children’s crafts and even a visit from Father Christmas. When you arrive at the ticket office, they’ll give you the day’s scheduled events and the location of where you can see them.
At the Elworth house it’s Christmas eve at the 1922 home of the Bateman family. It gives you a real sense of stepping back into the past. There’s also a replica of a log house decorated to resemble a gingerbread house, straight out of Hansel and Gretel (there’s no witch inside, though). Traditional Christmas decorations including a tree decorated with handmade ornaments are displayed in the Jesse Love farm house (circa 1893). And there’s a group of mannequin carolers in period costume in the living room ready to sing in a caroling diorama. In one of the bedrooms the bed is covered with a hand-made quilt demonstration the quilting skills of women in those days.
A ride on the vintage C.W. Parker Carousel is a must no matter what age you are. This is my one of my favourite activities at the Museum. The carousel originally operated at the PNE for many years and I remember riding it when I was a youngster. It was later restored, with each pony or sled carefully painted and repaired by donations from various people or organizations. Ride on the beautiful prancing horses, accompanied by the tunes of an original Wurlitzer organ. Great fun! At the gift shop next door you can buy those last minute trinkets to fill the Christmas stockings.
There’s lots to see at the Heritage Village, with hirty-two displays as well as the scheduled events. The afternoon I visited, a musical duo from Guatemala was playing “Feliz Navidad” and other seasonal songs inside the little church. After my tour I refreshed myself at the ice cream parlour with some lemon cake and a hot cup of cocoa. They also provide full meal service.
There are not many places on the Pacific Coast where we know for certain Vancouver walked, but this is one: the beach of Cape Mudge at the southern tip of Quadra Island, across Discovery Passage from Campbell River, British Columbia. In 1792, while charting the coast, Captain Vancouver visited here with his two ships, the Discovery and the Chatham. At that time, a Coast Salish village known as Tsa-Kwa-Luten thrived atop the sandy cliff. While the British ships sat at anchor on July 13, 1792, the natives paddled out in canoes and greeted the crews with fish and wild fruits in exchange for European articles of trade.
Captain Vancouver’s log mentions a distinctive giant boulder in the village and I find it half-obscured by grass and shrubs. I imagine Salish children’s laughter as they clamber up this boulder and slide down its sloping sides, their mothers admonishing them to keep back from the precipitous cliff. I envision cedar-plank houses over-looking the sea, racks of salmon drying over wood-fires.
An array of masks is the main feature: ravens, wolves, bears, killer whales, mosquitoes, double-headed serpents, all used in potlatch dances. Included in each description is the original owner, and some of their photographs are also on display. Many have Anglicized names such as Billy Assu and Amos Dawson, but their Kwakwaka’wakw names translate to honourifics such as “Always Giving Potlatches” or “High Ranking in Feasts”.
I learn that after Captain Vancouver’s voyage, a branch of the Kwakwaka’wakw known as the Lekwiltok descended from the north in their war canoes, with firearms acquired from European traders. Between 1792 and 1850, they raided and occupied numerous Salish villages and eventually commanded all of Discovery Passage—all save Tsa-Kwa-Luten, the village atop the sandy cliffs at Cape Mudge. So well fortified by nature, the Lekwiltok decided it was impossible to attack.
Tsa-Kwa-Luten Lodge is one way the native people of Cape Mudge have met the challenge of living in today’s society. The spacious lounge is designed like a Big House with a vaulted ceiling, the walls decorated with traditional art, including cedar paddles and button-blankets. The dining room features contemporary First Nations art. I feast on cedar-planked salmon, sip local Quadra Island wine, and gaze at the sunset over Vancouver Island.
