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History: Navajo-Churro
HISTORY: NAVAJO-CHURRO, NORTH AMERICA’S FIRST DOMESTIC SHEEP
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ARTICLE BY JOEL JOHNSON WITH DR. LYLE MCNEAL AND DR. DON BIXBY
In the middle of the 16th century, as Spanish soldiers pressed north from Sonora, they were accompanied by the clank of armor, the pounding of horse hooves, and the bleating of sheep. The Spanish actually introduced cattle, pigs, and goats at this time as well, but it is the Navajo-Churro sheep breed that is recognized by the Livestock Conservancy and nominated to SlowFoodUSA’s Ark of Taste as “North America’s earliest domesticated livestock breed-type.”
As is often the case in Southwestern history, the story of the Navajo-Churro begins an ocean away. Spain’s Queen Isabella used money obtained from the wool industry to finance Columbus’ journey to the New World, and quite fittingly, he brought sheep along for the ride, some of which he left in the Caribbean isles of Cuba and Santa Domingo. Several decades later, it is believed that the sheep that accompanied Cortez in his journeys throughout Mexico and the Southwestern United States were descendants of the Columbus sheep: an ancient Iberian breed, the Churra. Twenty years after that, the Churra were on the move once again; this time with Francisco Coronado in 1540.
In each case, the sheep provided a mobile supply of meat for the ever-moving Spanish conquistadores, which Andrew Gulliford, author of The Wooly West, describes as “moveable mutton meals.” Over long distances, these sheep, “rough, half-wild Churros . . . well adapted to the deserts and mountains of the Southwest,” Gulliford writes, outperformed cattle, as their flocking instincts allowed them to eat on the move and obtain much of the hydration they needed from dew and the water content of their forage.
Though Coronado would soon abandon New Mexico without the gold of Cíbola in hand—cut him some slack; he was thoroughly concussed after several falls from his horse and he missed his wife terribly—some of the Churras that accompanied him remained behind. “42 sheep and their progeny were left with three friars near what is now Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he and his army returned to Mexico in 1543,” explains Dr. Lyle McNeal, founder of the Navajo Sheep Project. “The friars were killed and history failed to record the fate of the sheep, but most historians assumed they were
consumed for food, and not bred.”
Since Coronado’s sheep likely ended their time in the “New World” on a dinner plate, “The sheep that were to help build the Southwestern sheep and wool industries were those of Spanish Basque explorer, Don Juan de Oñate,” Dr. McNeal clears up. “Oñate’s sheep numbers were close to 5,000 head of Churras. In July 1598, Oñate, as ordered, established the headquarters of the New Mexico colony in what is now Santa Fe, NM.”
“He ruled as Governor over not only the Spanish settlers, but also the Pueblos, and other Native American communities and tribes of the region,” says McNeal. “Because of the many sheep he had with his initial exploration army, many of the sheep were distributed to not only the Catholic missions and friars, but also the Pueblos. It was Oñate’s actions with the large Churra numbers he had initially, and [the ensuing] dispersal, that led eventually to the Navajo people getting access to them and [their] eventual notable wool weaving skills and artisan work in the 20th century and beyond.”
The legacy of these sheep would eventually become far richer than the gold Coronado once sought. “Trapper, soldier, miner and cowboy may claim title to the romance of the West, but its economic success was made certain by the great sheep trails,” write Charles Towne and Edward Wentworth in Shepherd’s Empire. Indeed, the hardy breed took well to life in the Southwest. Enslaved Native Americans learned sheep husbandry and textile skills at the Spanish missions from the earliest days of conquest, and many Navajo people and neighboring tribes adopted the livestock into their life rhythms and cultures. By 1779, Gulliford relays, there were over 15,000 sheep recorded at the Zuni Pueblo. Though the sheep promised security in an often-withering landscape, wherever they went the Navajo-Churro seemed to be followed by the violence and conquest in which they were introduced to the continent. In 1850, a military inspector reported the Navajo people had stolen 47,300 head of Churros from Pueblo Indians in a year-anda-half’s time. In 1863, exactly ten years after he delivered 6,500 Churros to Sacramento for a $30,000 payday (the most lucrative adventure of his career), mountain man and recently commissioned lieutenant colonel Kit Carson was
Pictured left: Elmer Yazzie N-C Saddle Blanket. Pictured above: Agarita Creek -Churros shearing day. Below: Mary Begay at Hesperus, CO before first summer grazing on Mt. Hesperus, CO sacred peak in 135 years.
tasked with rounding up the Navajo people as if they were sheep themselves.
When the Navajos resisted being imprisoned on reservations, Carson and his men employed the army’s scorched-earth practice. They burned Navajo crops, peach orchards, and their hogan family communities, slaughtering their livestock (which included thousands of Churro sheep) before forcing 8,000 Navajo men, women, and children to take the “Long Walk”—an over 300-mile journey to the prison camp of the Bosque Redondo Reservation. Less than half of the Navajos survived the walk and the three-year internment that followed before being allowed to return to their ancestral lands.
Some Navajo families escaped by living and hiding in remote areas of the region, and with them, some Churro sheep survived the extermination as well. Later, government agents sought to “improve” the breed in typical save-the-sheep-killthe-Churro fashion by crossing Churros with rams of Rambouillet, Merino, and dozens of other breeds. The introduced breeds were supposed to produce larger carcasses and better fleece, but as Dr. Don Bixby, former Executive Director of the Livestock Conservancy notes, “neither of these things
happened. The smaller Navajo-Churro ewes had difficulty delivering and raising the larger lambs on the available forage, and the crossbred fleece still did not conform to commercial needs” of the Eastern US woolen mills. The “improvements” rendered the Churro crossbreeds decidedly less adapted to the desert landscape. The Churro faced another threat of nearextinction when the federal government ordered dramatic “livestock reductions” during the Great Depression years to increase market prices. This mandate was applied with extra vigor to the NavajoChurro sheep—a movement Dr. McNeal describes as a “Navajo Holocaust” of the sheep and goats that sustained the Navajo people. In fact, it was the very sustainability of the Navajos that prompted such action, McNeal explains. Navajo independence (not needing government assistance) in the early 1900s was viewed as a threat. “The federal government wanted more control, thus the overgrazing and premature siltation of the new Hoover Dam was used as an excuse to reduce their self-empowerment,” says McNeal. “As studies showed, the [majority] of the silt deposits in the Colorado River came long before it [reached] the Navajo Reservation. The terrible ‘Stock Reduction’ era
Lyle McNeal searching for sheep on the Navajo Reservation in 1977
imposed on the Navajo People, starting in 1933, continued into the mid 1940’s, and the sheep numbers went from over 2 million head owned by the Navajos, to 57% of them terminated, and numbers less than 860,000 head, and no reimbursements paid. The focus of the federal government policies during the ‘Stock Reduction’ was to terminate first, those scrubby, unimproved Churro sheep.” Yet, through all the tribulations, the NavajoChurro endured, and, along the way, they became a symbol of the endurance of the Navajo people themselves, and the spirit of the Southwest.
“By 1972, a Navajo Tribal Census found that less than 435 head of the ‘original oldtype Navajo sheep’ were alive,” Dr. McNeal recalls, “and the majority of sheep on the Reservation were white-man’s so-called ‘improved’ sheep breeds.” When Dr. McNeal, then a professor of Animal Science at Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo found this out, he felt it was time to locate the remnants and breed them back from the brink of extinction(“Remember, extinction is forever!” McNeal reminds). In 1977, Dr. McNeal established the Navajo Sheep Project, a non-profit to, in small ways, pay back the Navajo People for the “wrong doings of previous
generations, and especially the federal government’s imposition of the 1863-1868 Long Walk and the 1933-1948 Stock Reduction Era.” In July 1979, Dr. McNeal relocated the Navajo Sheep Project ‘nucleus flock’ of 37 head to Logan, UT after being requested to serve as a professor of Animal Science at Utah State University. Roughly a decade later, after years of working with Navajo shepherds and artisan weavers, as well as the Hispanic shepherds and artisan weavers of New Mexico, Dr. McNeal with the support of other breeders, founded the National Navajo-Churro Sheep Association (N-CSA) in Los Ojos, NM in June of 1986. Since then, numbers of Navajo-Churro sheep have been making a comeback via the Navajo Sheep Project and the Navajo-Churro Sheep Association. The 23rd “Sheep is Life Celebration,” held on the Navajo Nation in June was a reminder of the spiritual and sacred importance of the Navajo-Churro in particular. Clan Head Goldtooth Begay captured this importance when she told Dr. McNeal, “I am over ninety years old now and I was worried about my children and grandchildren, the livestock and the land, but now I see my children and grandchildren working together with the
livestock and the land...I am happy when I hear my children and grandchildren talk about the sheep and I am happy when I see and hear the sheep in the corral and know my children and grandchild love the sheep.”
Navajo-Churros are now numbered at 5,000 head in the U.S. and counting. Visit NavajoSheepProject.org, NavajoLifeway. org, and LivestockConservancy.org to further connect with the sacred story of North America’s first domesticated sheep.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joel Johnson is the Trades and Agriculture Interpreter at Fort Nisqually Living History Museum. His work and writing can be viewed at NarrativesofPlace.com
Dr. McNeal & Nancy at former HQ in North Logan UT, 1986
Sarah Natani with her sheep & sheep crook in her corral
