(1864-1868)
"...When we saw the top of the mountain (Mt. Taylor) from Albuquerque, we wondered if that was our mountain and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so..."
-Spoken by an unknown Navajo man-
(Horgan, Holt, Rhinehart, Winston, 1954. Vol. 2, 333.)
They were then taken to Fort Sumner, New Mexico to await transportation to then Indian Territory, which is now known as the state of Oklahoma with the other Indian tribes. For four years the Navajo people suffered from shortages of supplies (food, medicine, etc.) infertile soil for planting and outbreak of disease. Two thousand Navajo men, women and children died.
Four years later on June 1, 1868 Navajo leaders and the federal government signed a treaty and they were allowed to return to their homeland. They were granted a 3.5 million acre reservation in their ancestral homeland. And the surviving 8,000 member tribe returned home.
Nearly a century later, the Navajo tribe managed to turn themselves into a nation; in 1969 the tribe renamed themselves to Navajo Nation. By the end of 1991, the nation claimed 17.5 million acres of reservation lands, a land larger than the state of West Virginia and when the 2000 Census took place, the Navajo Nation had an estimated 300,000 members. Making them the largest Native American Tribe in the United States.