In 1864, [Kit] Carson, by then a U.S. Army colonel commanding nearly a thousand men, reduced the Navajo to starvation by burning their crops and killing their livestock. The campaign, intended to force the Navajo to agree to relocate, was both brutal and unrelenting. Carson estimated that his men destroyed nearly two million pounds of food. In the Canyon de Chelly, a Navajo stronghold, Carson’s troops burned and chopped down three thousand peach trees. Then they burned the Navajos’ baskets and smashed their pots, so that they couldn’t carry or store what little food they had left. “If there was ever a grandeur or majesty to warfare, surely none could be found here,” Sides writes. In the end, nine thousand Navajos left their land, only to be led on a disastrous three-hundred-mile march known as the Long Walk.
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