SACRED SHEEP OF THE NAVAJOS

Should the spirit of adventure ever lead you into that wide Southwestern land where four states corner and red sandstone pillars rise above the desert plain for a thousand sheer feet, you will travel through a seeming eternity of sage and sand and stunted junipers and emptiness. As you bump along the rutted wagon roads you will occasionally pass squat gray hogans built of the dried earth, and in the vicinity of these dwellings you may see small bands of Navajo sheep tended by child shepherds.

Look closely at these flocks. If your travels have carried you far into the back country beyond the influence of white men, yours may be the good fortune to find a flock led by a ram with four great, looping horns.

This is Denetsah Bideen, the sacred ram of the Navajos. Look carefully upon him, for his numbers are few and you may never in your life encounter another of his kind.

Indian legendry, in most instances, is at wide variance with written history; but in the case of the sacred ram, the pattern of folklore is shot through by many threads of truth.

Back in the Beginning, according to the legend recounted around juniper campfires by succeeding generations of the Old Ones, the Navajos were rendered destitute by Naxo'ilpai, the Gambler of Kinteel, who won from them every possession but their land. With this wealth, he gained for himself a place as chief of the Mexican people.

Many moons later-so runs the story-word came to the Navajos from their gods that they should journey south to the Land of the Female River (the Rio Grande) where they would find the people of Naxo'ilpai living in adobe dwellings.

"Remove from their pens a few of Naxo'ilpai's female sheep," the gods importuned. "Bring them home with you. From one of these ewes will spring the sacred ram which will restore to your nation its former wealth and prosperity."

The Navajos did as the gods directed; and when one of these stolen ewes later gave birth to a male lamb with four horns, the medicine men were wild with joy.

"Behold!" they cried. "It is Denetsah Bideen the sacred ram which our gods have held in trust for us. We must guard him as we would our lives, for he is the sign of perpetuality. Every flock led by his kind will prosper and its keeper grow rich and powerful!"

And so it was, that as long as the sacred rams led their flocks the Navajos were lords of the desert, feared by all men, red or white. But as the four-horned rams disappeared, so the Navajo nation was shorn of its power and reduced to poverty.

Such is the story told by the doddering Old Ones who live largely in the past.

The white man's version is less picturesque. The white man declares that Denetsah's dam was not a supernatural gift from the gods but an ordinary Churro sheep of lowland Spain, stolen in a Navajo raid on one of the Franciscan missions of New Mexico. As for the sacred ram's identifying characteristic-the four great, looping horns - cold science sees these only as a genetic result of long continued inbreeding.

According to Spanish archives, the first domesticated sheep introduced into the New World were Merinos and Churros imported into Mexico from Spain in 1538 by Hernando Cortes, who subsequently distributed the animals among the missions of that country. Two years later, when Coronado left Campostela to search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, he took with him 5000 of these sheep-the first domesticated sheep known in the present states of Arizona and New Mexico.

As Coronado's army pushed northward across the desert, many of its animals succumbed to starvation and lack of water; others were butchered for meat to feed the troops. By the time the expedition reached the Tewa pueblo of Cicuye', near present Santa Fe, the handful of sheep remaining were left in the care of Father Luis de Escalona.

It is altogether possible that possession of these sheep had something to do with Father Escalona becoming one of this country's first Christian martyrs, for in 1542 the old priest was murdered by Indians-not necessarily Navajos-who thereupon helped themselves to his few remaining head of livestock. In 1598, the Spaniards again introduced sheep into the Southwest, and again many fell victims of Indian raids.

Presumably it was one of these stolen, inbred ewes which gave birth to the "sacred" ram-sacred because the superstitious Navajos never before had seen an animal endowed with such a multiplicity of horns!

During the three centuries elapsing between introduction of sheep by the Spaniards and American occupancy of the desert Southwest, the Navajo flocks increased rapidly. Environment wrought its effect. The Churro's body became lighter and thinner; his legs grew long and stout that he might gain livelihood in this desert land of sparse forage and scant water. At the same time his wool fibers increased in length and coars-ened in texture, making his fleece ideally suited to hand weaving of rugs and blankets-then, as now, the chief occupation and financial bulwark of the Navajos.

With individual flocks numbering 5000-and-more ani-mals, the tribe prospered and grew rich; and the Old Ones nodded in satisfaction, for each year's issue was certain to in-clude a few of the sacred four-horned rams.

For 300-odd years there had existed a state of almost constant warfare between the invading Spanish-Mexicans and the haughty Navajos, traditional owners of the land. As result, when Uncle Sam assumed control of New Mexico Territory in 1848, it followed that he must inherit the invader's end of this perpetual feud.

After fifteen years of bargaining and negotiating with the independent desert rulers had yielded no appreciable results, the United States Army in 1863 sent into the Navajo country Brigadier General James W. Carlton and Colonel "Kit" Car-son; their orders, to subjugate the Navajos at any cost and by any necessary means.

The campaign which followed might serve as a pattern for aggression. For two years the Navajos were hounded from pillar to post, refuge to refuge. The buildings and crops they were forced to leave behind were laid waste. Flocks of sheep numbering thousands of head were wantonly destroyed. Women and children were taken captive and men were given a deadline for surrender, those who failed to comply with the order being shot on sight.

Summer of 1865 found the Navajo nation broken spirit-ually and financially and no longer able to offer further resist-ance. Approximately 8500 captives were driven on the long gruelling "death march" to Bosque Redondo (Fort Sumner), where the survivors were imprisoned for three years.

As it became increasingly evident that the Indians could not be held forever at Bosque Redondo, a treaty of peace was negotiated with them, one of its provisions being that Uncle Sam should restock the Navajo's 16,000,000-acre homeland with 15,000 sheep and goats as partial reimbursement for the tens of thousands of sheep slaughtered in the course of subju-gation.

Purchased from Vicente Romero of Mora county, New Mexico, the sheep and goats were delivered in the spring of 1870 to Fort Defiance, New Mexico, where 7500 Navajos gathered for the distribution of two animals each. Two years later, another purchase of 10,000 animals enabled an additional distribution of roughly one sheep per person.

In the wild Monument Valley area of northeastern Ari-zona and southern Utah, and in the Red Rocks country of western New Mexico, the repatriated tribesmen located a few small bands of sheep which had escaped slaughter by the troops and subsequently had subsisted for nearly four years on the poorest sort of desert brush and in the face of almost con-stant thirst and ever-hungry predators. Included among these survivors were a few of the cherished four-horned rams.

With these and Uncle Sam's beggarly allotment of three sheep each, the Navajos set out to rebuild their flocks. So de-termined were they to succeed that when a new-born lamb was left motherless, it is said that the Navajo women would suckle it at their own breasts.

Apparently the first attempt to improve the quality of Navajo sheep was made in 1882 by United States Indian Agent D. M. Riodan. In a report to his superiors, Riodan pointed out that highbred sheep would produce five times as much mutton and wool as the scrub animals then prevalent on the reservation, yet would require no more water or grass-the latter, a point for question.

In compliance with the agent's suggestion, authorization was given for the purchase of 75 improved rams, those selected being 15/16 pure California Merino, shearing 15 to 25 pounds of wool, while the Navajo sheep only in rare instances clipped more than two pounds.

The 75 Merino rams were delivered to Fort Defiance in April, 1884. If a single one of these rams was ever loaned to the Indians for flock service, or was ever put to any use whatever, there is no record of it.

In July of that same year, Riodan was succeeded by a new Indian agent, J. H. Bowman, who likewise interested himself in rehabilitation of the Navajo flocks and requested authority to purchase 800 or 900 highbred Cotswold ewes, the offspring of which he proposed to issue judiciously to the most deserving Indians. Although authorization for such purchase was repeatedly sought by Mr. Bowman, no action seems to have been taken.

Indian agents came and went with the years. Nearly every one of them experimented with improved rams of one species or another. Before a breeding program barely had time to get underway, the agent sponsoring it would be relieved of his post and another appointed. Almost without exception the program launched by one agent was discontinued by his successor and a wholly different program substituted. Indian traders and other persens sympathetic to the cause, likewise imported highbred rams at their own expense, believing that only in this manner might the sorry flocks of the Navajo be improved.

As so often is the case of food intentions, these disorganized and overlapping efforts proved ill-advised; the result of so much indiscriminate crossbreeding being detrimental rather than beneficial to the flocks of the nomadic Navajo people.

To end this chaos of conflicting and short-lived programs, the United States Congress in 1935 appropriated funds to establish a permanent laboratory where full-time research might be devoted to the Navajo sheep problem and its ultimate solution. Eventually cooperating in the effort were the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the U. S. Department of the Interior, and the Soil Conservation Service and Bureau of Animal Husbandry, of the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

The Southwestern Range and Sheep Breeding Laboratory, at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, is the result of that threeway collaboration.

In the decade-and-a-half elapsed since launching of this cooperative program, a tremendous amount of hard work and research has been accomplished by a small group of sincere and conscientious men. That their efforts have resulted in solving the Navajo sheep breeding problem-or even a major portion of that problem-still cannot be said. No one would be quicker to deny such a statement than Laboratory Director James O. Grandstaff.

In a paper presented before the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations Scientific Conference, meeting in August, 1949, Director Grandstaff outlined the purpose of the laboratory, pointed out the main problems necessary of solution, and described the efforts being made toward that end.

In improving the type of sheep from small, coarse-fleeced animals dressing out possibly 40 pounds of meat and shearing a pound or two of wool, many angles must be considered, Director Grandstaff pointed out. Most of these difficulties stem from the harsh environment of the Navajo reservation where the only forage is always of poorest quality and scarce to nonexistent, and flocks must oftimes go without water for two days at a time.

As result of nearly 400 years of natural selection, said Director Grandstaff, the old type Navajo sheep were extremely hardy and thoroughly adapted to environment of the area. They had the strong teeth necessary for long life on arid ranges; had a high level of fertility and reproduction, and the ewes possessed a well-developed maternal instinct and were excellent milk producers, the last named factors enabling them to raise a high percentage of their lambs.

In recent years, the Conference was told, these old type Navajo sheep have practically disappeared from the ranges of the reservation as a result of the grading-up of Navajo flocks with purebred rams, principally of the Rambouillet breed. This process of flock improvement through cross-breeding has not been a complete success was conceded by the director, who said that in the course of grading-up "the superior qualities inherent in the Navajo breed with respect to the adaptability. longevity of life, fecundity and maternal instincts are gradually ing type of wool is unsatisfactory for Navajo hand weaving."

As the weaving of native wool into rugs and blankets represents more than one-fourth of the Navajo's total income from livestock and provides employment at a time of year when other sources of income are almost wholly lacking, it is especially important that the Indian wool clip be suited to the purpose of hand spinning and weaving. At the present time, 61,000 Navajos are raising around 300,000 lambs yearly. Of this number, approximately one-third are sold as feeders in the fall, the remainder being held for food and replacements.

Experimental cross-breeding is still going forward at the laboratory on a full-time basis and it is the hope of Director Grandstaff that there may be eventually developed here a crossbred sheep combining most of the desirable qualities and hardihood of the old Navajo type with the much greater financial return possible from improved breeds, and at the same time yielding a wool suited both to home weaving and commercial sale. It is a big order to fill.

Meanwhile, the Old Men of the Navajo nation wag their heads despondently and speak of Denetsah Bideen-the sacred ram of the four horns, now disappeared from all but a few small flocks in the most isolated portions of the reservation. To the Old Men, Denetsah has ceased to be a flesh-and-blood creature. Instead, he has become a symbol-the last living link with those golden days when the Navajo nation was prosperous and strong and the grass was green and high.