The Long Walk Photo Essay

There are many ways to tell a story. Sometimes simplest is best.

It’s close to 150 years since the Long Walk of the Navajo, the forced relocation of more than 8,500 people from their homes to internment at Hwéeldi, the Place of Suffering, at Bosque Redondo in southeastern New Mexico.

Thousands met their deaths from disease and starvation and exhaustion.

Magazines rely on the printed word, with illustrations to provide insights into the text.

Here photographs tell their own story. Start on this page, the cover of a photo album called Souvenir of New Mexico. The actual album, which resides in the Photo Archives of the Palace of the Governors, has a brown leather binding bearing its title embossed in gold lettering. It’s similar to, if more austere than, other early Victorian photo albums chronicling military campaigns of the period.

In this case, the album draws us into New Mexico’s history, presenting a photo essay that was at one time a souvenir — a remembrance of a time in the life of a member of the 1st New Mexico Cavalry, perhaps an officer, the photo album’s anonymous creator. He was most certainly creating a campaign keepsake, a remarkable chronological photographic record.

We can imagine him at the center of the plot, “starring” in his own narrative but curiously absent.

Turn the page, and it’s impossible not to be struck by how the story unfolds. The syntax is hard to know — who did what, and then, and then, and then — 150 years later, in a story whose borders and shadings surround our everyday lives.

If we study history (or we watch Ken Burns documentaries), we’re accustomed to antique photography. Long before the advent of casual

snapshots, much less Instagrammed selfies, portraits were posed and formal, stilted. The sitter’s gaze — often directly into the camera’s lens — had a guarded quality we don’t find in contemporary portraits. There’s an uncanny stillness in early images. We gaze at the faces, and they gaze back at us. We wish they could speak.

Essays by contributing editor Khristaan Villela on Page 62 and Devorah Romanek on Page 88 offer background and considerations of the photos in Souvenir of New Mexico. That this photo album is not in a private collection means it can be shared, discussed, and interpreted. It’s one of the many treasures held in trust by the State of New Mexico at the Photo Archives. The photo essay in this issue can also be seen on Pasatiempo’s website.

— Kristina Melcher

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Khristaan D. Villela

For The New Mexican

Remembrance of times Southwest

S

ouvenir of New Mexico is a remarkable album of mounted photographs from the 1860s that is one of the jewels of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. According to notes preserved with the album, architect John Gaw Meem acquired it in the 1930s from New York rarebook dealers Dauber and Pine. The album, which was donated in 2007 to the Palace of the Governors, contains 64 photographs, each measuring 7 by 9 inches and mounted one to a page, with captions in pencil. The photographs were made using the wet glass plate collodion technique and reproduced as either a salt or albumen print. The album spans the transition between salt prints, which were more characteristic of photography up to 1860, and albumen prints, which were the main variety after that date. They are bound in an album with the title on the front cover.

The collection was almost certainly assembled shortly after the Civil War by a U.S. Army officer serving at one or more of the forts and posts in New Mexico Territory.

The photos were intended to remind their owner of the important faces and places in New Mexico during this period, and they reveal the dramatis personae of the era — U.S. soldiers, Mexican politicians, and Native Americans. Of the military installations photographed in New Mexico and Texas, the largest number of images show Fort Sumner’s buildings and soldiers and the Navajos and Apaches forced to move and live there between 1864 and 1868. These are likely the earliest photographs of the Navajo or Apache, and they were made during a particularly dark period in the history of relations between the U.S. and Native American tribes.

Souvenir of New Mexico begins with studio portraits of Mexican president Benito Juárez (1806-1872) and members of his

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cabinet, including Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, minister of foreign affairs and later president of Mexico; General Ignacio Mejía, minister of war; and José María Yglesias, minister of public education. While portraits of Mexican politicians might seem out of place as the introduction to an album assembled in New Mexico, they illuminate the broader geopolitical situation of the U.S. and Mexico after the end of the Civil War in 1865 and during the French intervention in Mexico.

The French army had invaded Mexico in 1862 to advance the interests of Emperor

These are likely the earliest photographs of the Navajo or Apache, and they were made during a particularly dark period in the history of relations between the U.S. and Native American tribes.

Napoléon III in the Americas. The U.S. could not respond to this direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine because it was at war with secessionist states. Part of Napoléon’s plan for Mexico was the restoration of a monarchy, in the person of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Habsburg, younger brother of Franz Joseph, ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although Juárez’s republican army had defeated the French in 1862 at the famous May 5 battle of Puebla, he and his cabinet soon were forced to evacuate Mexico City.

For the next five years, Juárez fought a guerrilla war against the French and, after the summer of 1864, against Emperor Maximilian. Some parts of northern Mexico were never under French control, and Juárez shuttled between the cities of Monterrey, Chihuahua, and El Paso del Norte — what is now Ciudad Juárez. In El Paso del Norte, on the Mexican side of the border, a studio photographer captured the image of Juárez that’s included in Souvenir of New Mexico. In the article “President Juárez at Old El Paso,” published in November 1915 in the Bulletin of the Pan American Union, L.S. Bartlett, the former acting customs officer at Franklin — today’s El Paso — recalled how the Mexican president spent 10 months on the border beginning in August 1865. The portrait of Juárez in the article is the same as in the album, so Bartlett and the unknown owner of Souvenir might have purchased a print from the same photographer.

From the end of the Civil War to the execution of Maximilian in June 1867, the U.S. funneled arms to Juárez’s forces, sometimes secretly and often overtly. In one incident of many, Bartlett recalled how a confidential agent of Juárez crossed into the U.S. in early 1865 and traveled to Santa Fe to meet with Major General James Henry Carleton, commander of the military department of New Mexico. The agent then traveled to Washington, D.C., for negotiations that resulted in the U.S. government’s condemning of 1,000 guns as unserviceable, along with a large quantity of ammunition. At an auction in Las Cruces, all of the arms were purchased at low cost by one of Juárez’s confidants and shipped to Mexico. Bartlett noted that all of Juárez’s mail from Europe and the U.S. was conveyed across the plains to Santa Fe and from there to El Paso, as there was no secure route through the southern United States. Communiqués from the Mexican minister in Washington, D.C.,

also passed through U.S. government offices in Santa Fe and then Franklin, Texas.

Much socializing took place between the U.S. officers and their Mexican counterparts. When Juárez planned to leave the border in early November 1865, a farewell ball was planned at Fort Bliss, two miles from Franklin. Because the Mexican president wouldn’t cross the border into the U.S., the party was held in El Paso del Norte, at the home of Rafael Velarde. Juárez soon returned from Monterrey and fortified El Paso del Norte with 10 American artillery pieces. This time he stayed until the summer of 1866, when he departed northern Mexico for the final battles with Maximilian’s forces, which had been abandoned by the French army. Maximilian was eventually betrayed by one of his officers and was tried and executed by Juárez’s order on June 19, 1867.

Band of blue coats The next portraits in Souvenir of New Mexico are of U.S. Army officers, government officials, and one civilian — N. Webb, the sutler to the American forces in Franklin, at Fort Union, and elsewhere in Southern New Mexico. Probably the most arresting of these portraits is of Carleton, who marched Union troops in 1862 from California across Arizona into New Mexico after Confederates were forced to retreat from New Mexico following the Battle of Glorieta Pass in April.

Carleton is best recalled for his role in fighting the Mescalero Apaches and the Navajo during this period. More than anyone else, he is responsible for initiating the campaigns that led to the Long Walk, the forced removal of Native peoples to Fort Sumner.

The album also has portraits of Henry Cuniffe, the U.S. consul at Franklin; the U.S. paymaster; and three officers who served at Franklin and forts Union and Sumner.

Included among these are Major William McCleave, the commanding officer at Fort Sumner. Most of the portraits were created in front of the same studio backdrop and props as the images of Juárez and his cabi-

net, which suggests the same photographer made them. These images of well-known personalities are grouped with pictures of people who are little more than historical footnotes. But one notorious figure from this time in our region’s history is conspicuously absent from Souvenir: Christopher “Kit” Carson, who is often paired with Carleton and equally condemned for his actions against the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche.

It seems certain that photographic portraits, probably cartes de visite, of Carson would have been available for purchase in Santa Fe, as the town had at least one photographic studio. St. Louis photographer Nicholas Brown and his son William opened that business in August 1866, according to R. Rudisill’s Photographers of the New Mexico Territory, 1854-1912 (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1973). The Browns may have been responsible for all these portraits along with the important photographs of Native Americans that close the collection.

Following the pictures of officers and officials are significant early views of U.S. Army installations, as well as some of the first photographs of the Santa Fe Plaza.

Fort Union images include the old and new officers’ quarters, the hospital, workshops, storehouses, corncribs, and earthen fortifications. Santa Fe is first glimpsed from the hill where Fort Marcy once stood: the image shows the U.S. Army buildings and officers’ quarters along what are now Lincoln and Washington avenues and also the old parroquia, or Santa Fe parish church, which Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy began to replace with the existing Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in 1869.

Between Fort Marcy and the parroquia is a large field of corn. One image shows the U.S. hospital, two others show Fort Marcy, and one is of General Carleton’s quarters in Santa Fe; judging from the hill behind the general’s quarters, it was close to the corner of Washington Avenue and Paseo de Peralta.

Because Carleton was reassigned toward the end of 1866, the image was probably taken before then. The three views of the Santa Fe

Plaza show the west side and the southeast and southwest corners. The Plaza itself is enclosed by a white picket fence, and corn grows within. The surrounding buildings are a collection of ramshackle adobes; one has a sign reading “Bakery.”

After Santa Fe, the images in the album head back south, down the Río Grande Valley, to the post at Los Pinos, near presentday Los Lunas, and to Fort Craig, about 35 miles south of Socorro. Then it returns to Texas, with a view of a store in Franklin that bears the sign: “S. Schutz & Bro. Tienda Barata” — the 1860s version of the five-anddime. Several views of nearby Fort Bliss follow — including one showing officers’ quarters, ruined when the Confederate forces evacuated in 1862, and other buildings under repair.

All of these photographs of forts and buildings are salt prints, produced from glass negatives that were coated with collodion, a toxic and potentially explosive chemical mixture. This laborious technique required that the plates be prepared just before exposure and then immediately developed. Photographers who used this technique often erected tents or used wagons, all of which would have been sweltering and poorly ventilated. Photo Archives curator Daniel Kosharek believes the U.S. Army Signal Corps made these images of military installations.

Faces of diaspora The last and largest group of photographs in Souvenir of New Mexico depicts life in the Bosque Redondo and Fort Sumner for U.S. Army soldiers and their Navajo and Apache captives.

The idea to remove the Mescalero Apache and Navajo to the newly built Fort Sumner in Bosque Redondo originated with Carleton. Almost as soon as he took command of the military department of New Mexico, he faced an ongoing war continued on Page 64

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Remembrance, continued from Page 63 between the Navajo and Apache on one side and U.S. government forces and native Mexicans and Hispanos on the other. Many of these conflicts stretched back into the Mexican period — and even before 1821, into Spanish colonial times. As James F. Brooks details in his book Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), land pressures caused friction between the Hispanos on one side and Pueblo Indians and Navajos on the other, and all sides played out these hereditary conflicts by raiding neighboring communities for slaves and property.

Women and children were often stolen and either ransomed or put to work as servants.

Carleton’s solution was to remove what he considered the “offending” tribes from their homeland and “civilize” them by teaching them to become farmers and Christians, while sending their children to American-style schools. Carleton began with the Mescalero Apache, who were living in the Sacramento Mountains in the southcentral New Mexico. On Oct. 12, 1862, he ordered Carson to pursue the Mescalero Apache with these words, as recorded in the Condition of the Indian Tribes, Report of the Joint Special Committee, Appointed Under Joint Resolution of March 3, 1865 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1867): “All Indian men of that tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them. The women and children will not be harmed, but you will take them prisoners, and feed them at Fort Stanton until you receive other instructions about them.” In his biography of Carson, Blood and Thunder (Doubleday, 2006), Hampton Sides notes that while Carson refused to carry out these orders to letter, he subdued the Mescalero in two months and persuaded several of their leaders to surrender to Carleton in Santa Fe. They were the first to march their people to the Bosque Redondo. The Navajo were next.

Although Carson tried to resign before that campaign, Carleton persuaded him to lead a large army into the Navajo heartland in the summer of 1863. Fort Defiance, near today’s Window Rock, Arizona, was renovated and renamed Fort Canby, after which Carson directed his troops to make war on the Navajo. Because the Navajo lived in dispersed settlements, finding them was

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not easy, so federal troops destroyed Navajo crops, livestock, and homesteads. At the end of the year, Carson and Carleton decided to clear the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly.

In January 1864, two U.S. armies occupied the canyon, and many Navajo capitulated — mostly because of hunger, as their means of subsistence had been destroyed and their water sources were spoiled or guarded

by Ute tribesmen working for the United States. Sides writes that Carson ordered the canyon’s 3,000 peach trees to be destroyed, but it was impractical to cut them down in the winter. The trees were not burned until the next summer, when Carson was beginning a brief tenure as superintendent

Manuelito is the only Native individual identified by name in an album in which every white man is named.

at Fort Sumner. When Canyon de Chelly fell to U.S. forces, Navajos began surrendering in large numbers.

The Navajo call their forced relocation the Long Walk. All through 1864 and 1865, some 9,000 men, women, and children trudged to the Bosque Redondo by several indirect routes. The walk took a great toll.

Not only were the Navajo poorly dressed for the elements, but many authors describe deaths from starvation, as well as ongoing raids by New Mexican slave traders, who preyed upon the columns of walkers. Their destination was not suited to be a large reservation, as Carleton’s men had warned him before Fort Sumner was founded: it had little firewood, and the Pecos River was so alkaline that its waters worked like castor oil on the digestive system. U.S. government provisions were never enough. Mortality was high. Farming, religious conversion, and schools all failed. The Navajo called Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo Hwéeldi, which, Sides writes, was a loan

word from the Spanish fuerte, or “fort.”

Whatever the case, the term today means “place of suffering.”

In November 1865, the Apaches all escaped. By 1866, Carleton’s experiment was costing more than $1 million a year, and the general and the reservation he oversaw were immensely unpopular in New Mexico, frequently the subject of withering critiques in Santa Fe newspapers. Sides recounts how in June 1865, Congress sent Senator James Doolittle to New Mexico to investigate Carleton and determine why the Navajo imprisonment at Fort Sumner was so controversial. Doolittle was distressed to learn from Carson that slavery existed in New Mexico after the U.S. had just completed a crippling war over slavery and other conflicts. The resulting report, Condition of the Indian Tribes, noted that one-third of the Navajos were serving as slaves or debt peons in New Mexican households, including in Carson’s Taos home. Apart from the moral concerns, the great cost of the imprisonment doomed the project. In September 1866, Carleton was relieved of his position in Santa Fe, and soon the reservation was officially transferred to the Department of the Interior’s Office of Indian Affairs. The misery at Bosque Redondo continued until May 1868, when General William T. Sherman brokered a new treaty with the Navajo and they began returning to their homelands.

The photographs in the last section of Souvenir of New Mexico convey the suffering of those years. When we see photos of Native Americans dressed in traditional clothing and posed in a studio, the work of Edward Curtis comes to mind. His monumental project The North American Indian (1907-1930) defined the popular idea of how Natives should look in photographs.

But Curtis did not invent this genre: Souvenir was compiled decades before he took his first image of a Native person in 1896 — his photograph of Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Seattle.

Although many of the compositional characteristics used in the late 1860s to create compelling images are present in Curtis’ photographs, they also convey much about their time and place. A few seem to show Navajos and Apaches building structures at the fort, perhaps as early as 1864. Other

images show large groups of people who are probably Navajo (and not Apache, whom the Navajo outnumbered almost 20 to 1) in desert settings, perhaps when they were being counted. Other pictures appear to show the seven-mile acequia the Navajo were compelled to dig, as well as cornfields — perhaps even the bumper crop of 1864 that was ruined by cutworms.

Other photographs must date from later on, like the portrait of Manuelito, a prominent Navajo, which has the caption “Pistol-Bullet, 6 ft. 4 in.” Jennifer Nez Denetdale, University of New Mexico associate professor of American Studies, writes in her book The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile (Chelsea House, 2008) that Manuelito was among those who signed the first of a series of treaties between his people and the U.S. (these eventually culminated in 1868 with the Treaty of Bosque Redondo).

In the following decades, he became a respected and wealthy figure among the Navajo, even leading a force of a thousand warriors against Fort Defiance in 1860.

Although he made a clandestine visit to Bosque Redondo in 1865 to learn about the condition of the Navajo there, he did not surrender with his band until September of the following year. So the studio portrait in Souvenir of New Mexico probably was made in late 1866 or 1867. Manuelito is the only Native individual identified by name in an album in which every white man is named.

The album includes a number of studio portraits of young Navajo women. Several are posed with the same rough Pueblo-style textile and in front of the same backdrop seen in the images of Juárez and his cabinet and the U.S. officers. A photograph titled “Belle of the Navajo” shows a young woman reclining in a pose that recalls an Orientalist odalisque. At first glance, the picture might remind viewers of later Curtis images, which he intended as documents of a race that appeared to be vanishing and to present his subjects in a dignified manner.

But this “belle” has no real name. She and other Navajo women and girls in the collection are photographed as passive objects, to be consumed by the male gaze, recalling similar images made during the period of women in North Africa.

A medical report filed from Fort Sumner on Sept. 6, 1866, by Michael Hillary, an assistant U.S. Army surgeon, may hint at a

darker motive for these photos of Navajo women. In it, Hillary noted that syphilis far outnumbered any other ailment treated in the hospital, which he described as “only fit to keep pigs in,” adding that “the Indian women have not the slightest idea of virtue, and are bought and sold by their own people like cattle.” The Navajo were so desperate at Fort Sumner, Sides writes, that they were willing to do anything, even prostitute their family members, for more provisions.

“Belle” calls to mind names adopted by women in frontier brothels.

Many of the pictures show men holding the same group of props, especially a bow and arrows, as they strike harmlessly bellicose poses. (Who, for instance, would shoot an arrow while sitting down?) In general, the photographed Navajos look worn down, with ragged clothes and jewelry passed from sitter to sitter. No matter what the buyers thought they were purchasing from the photographer, these are portraits of misery.

In general, the photographed Navajos look worn down, with ragged clothes and jewelry passed from sitter to sitter.

No matter what the buyers thought they were purchasing from the photographer, these are portraits of misery.

Souvenir of New Mexico has never been published in its entirety, but many of the images have been published separately. It’s no surprise that the person who assembled the album was not the only one who bought photos of Benito Juárez and some studio portraits taken at Fort Sumner. When these photographs were taken, it was common for photographers to sell negatives or copy negatives for other photographers so more copies could be made from prints, especially if the images were popular and sold well.

The photo of Juárez in the album is widely known, and a copy hangs in the Juárez memorial rooms at the National Palace in

Mexico. Copies of some of the Fort Sumner images are found at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and were used in an episode of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary The West (1996).

Souvenir of New Mexico is referenced in print as early as 1944, in John Adair’s The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. The dearth of silver visible in the Fort Sumner portraits could be evidence that silversmithing had not yet developed among the Navajo. A few years after Adair, Albuquerque attorney and amateur historian William A. Keleher wrote Meem that he had had an opportunity to look at Souvenir of New Mexico and “never saw such an interesting photograph of General Carleton. All the photos of him that I have seen are taken from the group photo of 1865 of the men who ran New Mexico during the Navajo War, Kit Carson, [Charles P.] Clever, [Major Daniel H.] Rucker, et al.” This photo hangs in Santa Fe in the Montezuma Lodge No. 1 of New Mexico Freemasons.

The letter, which is preserved with the album in the Photo Archives, requests permission to publish some of the images in his book Turmoil in New Mexico, 1846-1868 (Rydal Press, 1952). More recently, both Denetdale and Sides published images from the album in their books.

Souvenir of New Mexico is a rare glimpse of a vanished time and place, of key figures in Mexico and the American Southwest in the late 1860s. The album seems to tell a story, and a sense of agency is evident in its order and contents, even if we cannot say who assembled the photographs.

While no comparable photographic albums from New Mexico during this period are known to exist, similar examples were made in Mexico by French officers serving Maximilian. The Getty Research Institute and the Library of Congress have scanned French albums made in Mexico in the 1860s; the Getty has Louis Falconnet’s Mexique, 1865 and the Library of Congress has Portraits of Rulers, Politicians, Military Figures … Relating to the Reign of Maximilian of Mexico, 1864-1867. Both albums contain images of leaders and military officers, Natives, cities, and country landscapes. ◀ All the images in “Souvenir of New Mexico” can be viewed online at econtent.unm.edu, selecting “Palace of the Governors Photo Archives Collection,” and searching for “Meem.”

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Negative No. 038166

Negative No. 038164

General Ignacio MejĂ­a, Minister of War, Paso del Norte, Mexico, 1866

President of Mexico Benito JuĂĄrez, Paso del Norte, Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 009152

Negative No. 023138

Captain David Hammett Brotherton, 5th United States Army Infantry, 1866

Major William McCleave (1823-1904), United States Army, 1866

Negative No. 022938

Brevet Brigadier General James Henry Carleton, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 038174

Officers quarters, Fort Union, New Mexico, 1866

Negative No. 001839

Repair workshops at Fort Union, New Mexico, 1866, photo United States Army Signal Corps

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Negative No. 014543

United States Army General Hospital, Fort Union, New Mexico, 1866, photo United States Army Signal Corps

Negative No. 038175

Government storehouses, Fort Union, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 038176

Santa Fe, New Mexico, looking south, showing La Parroquia Church, 1866

Negative No. 038178

Southwest corner of the Plaza, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 023136

West side of the Plaza, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1866

Negative No. 038179

Southeast corner of the Plaza, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 038180

General J.H. Carleton’s quarters, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1866

Negative No. 001700

United States Hospital (1846-1875) at Fort Marcy, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1866, photo United States Army Signal Corps

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Negative No. 038181

View of Fort Marcy looking west, Santa Fe, New Mexico, circa 1870

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Negative No. 038182

View inside Fort Marcy looking east, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1866

Negative No. 038183

Street scene in Franklin, Texas, 1866

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Negative No. 038188

Repairing adobe buildings, Fort Bliss, Texas, 1866

Negative No. 001816

Indian captives building the fort, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 001817

Group of soldiers and Indians gathered in street, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

Negative No. 023128

Soldiers and tents, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866, photo United States Army Signal Corps

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Negative No. 023130

Navajo Chief Manuelito [Pistol Bullet], Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 038194

Large group of Indian captives at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 038195

Apache boy at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 038199

The Belle of the Navajos, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 003242

Navajo woman and baby at Fort Sumner, Bosque Redondo era, New Mexico, circa 1864-1868

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Negative No. 038202

Navajo man at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

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Negative No. 038203

Navajo thieves at Fort Sumner, Bosque Redondo era, New Mexico, circa 1864-1868

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Negative No. 038204

Navajo Indians at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866, photo United States Army Signal Corps

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Negative No. 038205

Navajo Indian prisoners husking corn, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, Bosque Redondo era, circa 1864-1868

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Negative No. 038206

Navajo chiefs accused of counterfeiting ration tickets at Bosque Redondo, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866, photo United States Army Signal Corps

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Negative No. 038207

Navajo women and children at Fort Sumner, Bosque Redondo era, New Mexico, circa 1864-1868

All images courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA) PASATIEMPOMAGAZINE.COM

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Devorah Romanek

For The New Mexican

A Certain Regard

P

hotography arrived in New Mexico at about the same time as Mexico lost the territory to the United States. Souvenir of New Mexico — dating to 1866, some 20 years after the first known photographic image was taken in New Mexico — contains the earliest images of Navajos and Mescalero Apaches yet discovered.

Of all the photographs in the album, the images of Navajos and other Native Americans at the back are the most intriguing and the most troubling and painful. The pain is related to both the history portrayed and the anonymity of those pictured, the anonymity rendering the viewer mute, unable to call their names.

Reciting a name may be the most powerful human act there is. In this way, the album calls to mind Susan Sontag’s 2003 publication, Regarding the Pain of Others. In that book, the last Sontag published before her death in 2004, she considers whether it is possible through a photograph to understand the pain that others have lived through if we have not experienced it ourselves.

That’s a question to bear in mind when moving through Souvenir.

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Negative No. 030332

Conquest of place and people The photographs in this album record many things, including post-Civil War American expansionism. They are part of the chronicle of the controlled, orchestrated, and violent campaigns that were launched in pursuit of land and resources in the West. The seemingly innocuous and static photographs of military forts can be understood as simple documentation of the existence of these military structures and outposts, but they can also be seen as subtle attempts by the forces that commissioned them to legitimize the interests of Anglos and the expansionist policies of the United States.

Images like “Government storehouses, Fort Union” (Negative No. 038175), “Indian captives building the fort, Fort Sumner” (Negative No. 001816), and “Repair workshops at Fort Union” (Negative No. 001839) all speak to an application of order and control with the introduction of hard-edged symmetry into the

Navajo men, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866

Western landscape. Perhaps the most conceptually interesting of these photographs of military forts is the image “Buildings and corrals at Fort Union” (Negative No. 014545). Fort Union was established as a frontier post in 1851 in Mora County, about 100 miles from Santa Fe, and was largely abandoned by the end of 1863.

Particularly poignant in this image is the sixsided structure in the center, reminiscent of a Navajo hogan but also suggesting the panopticon of institutional control. The panopticon is an 18th-century design of Englishman Jeremy Bentham that was used for observation and oversight, employed in numerous designs for prisons and forts.

The images of Fort Sumner and the largescale incarceration of Navajos and Mescalero Apaches are the first in which the military landscape becomes inhabited by imprisoned Native peoples and U.S. army personnel. Those images are too vague and blurry to specifically depict any of the action caught on camera, but the vast number of people in a bleak landscape under military guard is evident (as in “Navajo Indians at Fort Sumner,” Negative No. 038204).

Multiple photographers might have taken the images of forts in this album for the Army Signal Corps, though the most likely candidates are J.G. Gaige, who contracted with the chief quartermaster of the New Mexico military district in 1865 to photograph the military posts, or William A. Smith, engaged through the Army Signal Corps in New Mexico at the time.

The most provocative of all the images are at the end of the album: the portraits of Navajos, Apaches, and Utes. Roughly two years before these pictures were taken, the U.S. government began its forced removal of the Navajo from their lands. During the Long Walk, Navajos traveled more than 300 miles by foot to an internment camp on the Pecos River, the Bosque Redondo reservation next to the military outpost of Fort Sumner.

The portraits of Native people in the album, as well as the portraits of Mexican politicians, were almost certainly taken by Nicholas Brown, who established a studio on Aug. 11, 1866, in Santa Fe, with his son, William Henry Brown.

The Browns photographed numerous forts in New Mexico in 1866. In 1867, Nicholas Brown left for Chihuahua to set up a studio, and he also opened studios in Durango, Ixtlaxco, and El Paso. The captive-Navajo photographs having

been circulated as cartes de visite (photographic prints mounted on a card typically measuring 2 1/2 by 4 inches — the most popular photographic format between 1860 and 1870), these images are found in various archives, most often on cards with backmarks from Brown’s studios, noted as either “N. Brown and Son” or, in Spanish, as “N. Brown e Hijo.”

These portraits were made under the brutal conditions of imprisonment, and they picture people who were starving and ill. The anonymity of the subjects is striking in multiple ways. Not only are most of the images lacking captions and names, but the studio setting in which they were taken is empty and plain, with many of the props reused in numerous images and with multiple sitters. In the portraits of Native Americans, only one person is named, Navajo leader Manuelito (023130), born to the Bit’aa’nii (Folded Arms People) Clan. Manuelito sits shirtless, upright in a chair, and holds a bow and arrows. Like the other Native portrait sitters in this series, his face expresses his defeat and oppression. Often in the analysis of photographic portraits, such assumptions seem like reaching, but in this instance, the anguish of the people portrayed is palpable and undeniable.

Naming names The painful history of these images and the lingering, nameless anonymity attached to them was the motivation to undertake the research necessary to try to identify as many of the pictured Natives as possible. One archive, the Library of Congress, had copy prints of five of the portraits (Negative Nos. 038208, 023130, 003242, 038192, and 038200); three had captions naming sitters, but the names were improbable, and the photography credits were erroneously given to John Gaw Meem, who purchased the album but didn’t take the photographs. Finding these five mislabeled copy prints explained where numerous internet retailers had sourced these images to copy, mislabel, and sell as posters online. Wading through mountains of images at various archives yielded the identities of four more of the men from the Native American portraits.

“Navajo man with bow and arrow and lynx” cap (Negative No. 038200) is a portrait of Ganado Mucho, born into the Tatsohnii

(Big Water) Clan. He is shown and named in portraits from 1874 by C.M. Bell and is the central standing figure in a group portrait of Navajo men by German-born photographer Charles Weitfle taken around the same time, although that group is oddly mislabeled “Three Ute Indian Braves.” In the group portrait, Mucho is posing with two other Navajo leaders: Tienesuse and Mariano Martinez.

Martinez, from the Táchii’nii (Red Running Into Water) Clan, also appears in “Navajo men, Fort Sumner” (Negative No. 030332). He is seated on the bottom right, and Navajo leader Narbona Primero is the central seated figure, wearing a top hat and checked shirt. Martinez and Primero appear together in another 1874 group portrait by Bell that also shows Manuelito and other Navajo leaders who had traveled that year to Washington, D.C., to discuss provisions of the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo between the U.S. and the Navajo. Primero, called “Sub-Chief Narbona Primero of the Western Navajo” in all discovered portraits, is not the same Narbona Primero who participated in the Navajo wars and was killed by U.S. soldiers on Aug. 30, 1849.

The portrait “Navajo man at Fort Sumner” (038202), in which the sitter holds a bow and arrow and wears a cap with a visor and a beaded choker-style necklace, is not of a Navajo man after all; it portrays the Southern Ute Capote chief Sobita. The Southern Ute allied themselves with the Americans after the Mexican-American War, aiding the U.S. military in its campaigns against the Navajo and Apache.

The same portrait of Sobita is found in the archived photo album of American artist James E. Taylor, along with a letter from Lieutenant Colonel Albert A. Pfeiffer to Taylor, in which Pfeiffer recounts his efforts to track Navajo with Sobita’s help.

It’s moving to be able to name some of the people in the portraits — to be able to link the images to stories and lives. But the portraits of most Native people in the album remain unnamed, including nearly all images of women and children. Who were they, and what became of them? ◀ Anthropologist Devorah Romanek is curator of exhibits at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

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Futher reading Bailey, Lynn R., The Long Walk: A History of the Navajo Wars, 1846-68. Los Angeles: Westernlore, 1964.

Bailey, Lynn R. Bosque Redondo: An American Concentration Camp. Pasadena, California: Socio-Technical Books, 1970.

Bial, Raymond. Great Journeys: The Long Walk — The Story of Navajo Captivity. New York: Benchmark Books, 2003.

Bruchac, Joseph. Navajo Long Walk: The Tragic Story of a Proud People’s Forced March From Their Homeland.

(Illustrated and edited by Shonto Begay) Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2002.

Denetdale, Jennifer Nez. The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile. New York: Chelsea House, 2008.

Iverson, Peter. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Keleher, William A. Turmoil in New Mexico, 1846-1868.

Santa Fe: Rydal Press, 1952.

Kelly, Lawrence. Navajo Roundup: Selected Correspondence of Kit Carson’s Expedition Against the Navajo, 1863-1865.

Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Publishing Company, 1970.

McNitt, Frank. Navajo Wars. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972.

Remley, David. Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

Roberts, Susan A., and Calvin A. Roberts. New Mexico.

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988.

Roessel, Ruth, ed. Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period.

Tsaile, Arizona: Navajo Community College Press, 1973 Sides, Hampton. Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

Simmons, Marc. The Little Lion of the Southwest: A Life of Manuel Antonio Chaves. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1973.

Thompson, Gerald. The Army and the Navajo: The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment 1863-1868. Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 1976.

Turner, Ann Warren. The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl, New Mexico, 1864 (Dear America Series). New York: Scholastic Inc., 1999.

Wallen, Henry D., Andrew W. Evans, and Jerry D. Thompson. New Mexico Territory During the Civil War: Wallen and Evans Inspection Reports, 1862-1863.

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

O’Dell, Scott. Sing Down the Moon. New York: Dell Laurel-Leaf, 1970.

All images courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA) 90

PASATIEMPO I August 22 -28, 2014