DAY 9
FRI 5 OCT 2012

Canyon del Muerto is a legendary place, one that figures prominently in Diné oral history.

Ben Teller tells the story of how the Navajo, in the winter of 1864, used the Canyon as a hideout when Kit Carson and his troops came rampaging and pillaging through the Canyon.

The Navajo men men gouged toeholds into the rock, and used ladders and ropes to stockpile water and food supplies such as smoked turkey, piñon nuts, wild potatoes.
Some 300 men, women, and children hid among the ledges and in the caverns. As the siege took hold with American soldiers marching into the canyon and burning corn fields, slaughtering sheep, destroying crops, and killing Navajo men, women and children; U.S. Army troops would camp near the base of Fortress Rock, beside a stream called Tsaile Creek, and attempted to starve the Navajo into final submission.
But unknown to the soldiers, the Navajo formed a human chain along the sloping rock, down to Tsaile Creek, when the soldiers were sleeping. They dangled gourds from yucca ropes, dipping the containers into the cold running water and filled gourd after gourd and steadily passed the vessels from hand to hand back up the sheer rock face to the summit, and that way, the Navajo outlasted the siege and survived.

The story ends sadly; eventually all the resisters were captured and were forced to join the long walk to the incarceration camp at Bosque Redondo, NM.

See this LINK