9781422278871

The Long Walk Profound changes came to the Navajo way of life after the Mexican- AmericanWar ended in 1848. The United States had won the war, and now it claimed huge areas of land that had previously belonged toMexico. The Navajo had lived on some of this land, and nowwere squeezed into smaller and smaller territories. Tensions rose between them and the white men forcing them to move. When the Civil War began in 1861, it created upheaval not only in the eastern part of the country, where the war was being fought, but also on the western frontier. The Navajo took advantage of this uncertainty to stage raids against American settlers. The U.S. government was deter- mined to stop this, and General James Carleton was in charge of forcing the Navajo to move to an Indian reservation called Bosque Redondo, near

US Army soldiers oversee Navajos during the forced migration known as the Long Walk that pushed Navajo people out of the land they had claimed for centuries.

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