Canyon de Chelly National Monument: History
The first known inhabitants of the canyon were Ancestral Puebloan Basketmakers, around 300 AD. During the next thousand years, they advanced from living in pit houses dug into the soil to building elegant cliff dwellings, and developed fine pottery and weaving. For some centuries after the Ancestral Puebloans left the area, the Hopi came here to farm each summer, returning for the winter to the mesas to the east, but as time went by, Navajo migrants from the north and west eventually displaced the Hopi altogether.From 1583 onward, the Navajo were locked with the Spanish in a bloody cycle of armed clashes and slave raids. The US Army in turn failed in repeated attempts to dislodge the Navajo, but no treaty could restrain the rapacious hunger for land by New Mexican settlers. The end appeared to have come with the brutal round-up and deportation (the " Long Walk ") of the entire Navajo people, completed by Kit Carson in 1864 when he starved the last of them down from Navajo Rock and destroyed their homes and livestock. So barbaric was the Navajo's imprisonment at Fort Sumner, however, that Congress soon allowed them to return. To this day, 25 Navajo families still farm the Canyon de Chelly in summer, the matrilineal descendants of the women between whom it was reapportioned in the 1870s.
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