Congress authorized construction of Fort Sumner (near Bosque Redondo), a military post that became central to the confinement of Navajo and Mescalero Apache peoples during the 1860s.
U.S. forces under Col. Kit Carson entered Canyon de Chelly during winter operations ordered by New Mexico’s military leadership, destroying food stores and shelters to compel surrender—an immediate precursor to mass capitulation and forced removal.
A large group of Diné (Navajo) captives began one of the best-known forced marches from Fort Defiance toward Bosque Redondo/Fort Sumner, marking the start of the Long Walk as a mass removal event in 1864.
Forced removals continued in waves: dozens of separate marches between 1864 and 1866 brought thousands of Diné to the Bosque Redondo internment site near Fort Sumner, making the captivity a prolonged process rather than a single trek.
By the mid-1860s, the Bosque Redondo population far exceeded original plans, contributing to chronic shortages and harsh living conditions (food scarcity, unsafe water, disease) that drove high mortality during internment.
By 1868, the Bosque Redondo experiment was widely recognized as unworkable; the Navajo were not allowed to leave until the U.S. Army agreed the reservation and Fort Sumner arrangement had failed.
Lt. Gen. William T. Sherman and Commissioner Samuel F. Tappan reached Fort Sumner with authority to negotiate, initiating final treaty talks with Diné leaders to end internment and define a return to a reservation in their homeland.
Diné leaders and U.S. commissioners signed the Treaty of 1868 at Fort Sumner. The agreement ended war, established a reservation, and provided for the Diné to leave Bosque Redondo and return home under U.S.-imposed terms.
The treaty moved through federal approval after signing; the Senate’s ratification step (as recorded in treaty documentation and commemorative federal materials) advanced the agreement toward full legal effect.
Presidential proclamation finalized the treaty’s federal execution, formally putting the 1868 agreement into effect and reinforcing the framework for Diné return and reservation boundaries set out in the treaty articles.
Following the 1868 treaty framework and the determination that Bosque Redondo was a failed project, internment ended and Diné families began leaving Fort Sumner/Bosque Redondo to re-establish communities within the new reservation.
Under the treaty’s articles, the U.S. committed to establish an agency presence and provide schools, tools, seeds, and livestock—provisions intended to shape post-return life, even as later historical assessments note many promises were inconsistently fulfilled.
Navajo Long Walk, Return, and Treaty Formation (1864–1870)
