ABSTRACT
From its origins in the Pagosa Mountains in Colorado, the San Juan River forms an arch within the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States-that point in the high desert where the borders of the modern states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. As the arch descends southwestward toward the Colorado River, it is met by Chinle Wash, which winds for nearly 100 miles through a landscape of red rock buttes and mesas, multi-hued canyons thick with cottonwoods, and small family farms. This is the heart of the Navajo Nation. It is the place where people settled with their livestock after leaving Dinétah, the Diné (Navajo) homelands near present-day Farmington, New Mexico. It was also the site of some of the most intense Navajo resistance when, in the autumn of 1863, Colonel Kit Carson led a scorched earth campaign through the Chinle Valley and adjoining Canyon de Chelly, burning fields and homes, slaughtering family sheep, and precipitating the exile and incarceration of 8,000 Navajos at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
