BATTLE AT MEXICAN CRY MESA

MEXICAN The Incident On CRY MESA

Navajos, fleeing slave traders, escaped from a sneak attack to stage an ambush of their own Few Americans think of Indians when they think of slavery. Slavery, most believe, was an institution of the Deep South that was remedied by the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. But slavery was well-established in the New World in North and South America when the Europeans arrived in 1492.

In the Southwest before it became part of the United States, slavery was a brutal reality. For centuries before the Spanish arrived, Indians captured and enslaved members of other tribes with whom they were at odds. With the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, a second type of slavery was introduced to the region: Spanish slave raiding and trading.

The Navajos probably suffered more from the slave trade than any other Southwestern tribe. Slave-raiding stories are still retold today by Navajos living near a massive butte called Mexican Cry Mesa in far northeastern Arizona.

"The quickest way for a New Mexican to get rich was to sell Navajo slaves," said Harry Walters, a Navajo historian and director of the Hatathli Museum at Navajo Community College in Tsaile.

The New Mexicans who hunted Navajos and Apaches and turned them into captive servants were motivated by greed. Indian slaves, they discovered, were a very marketable commodity on the homesteads of New Mexico. Navajos between the ages of 12 and 25-both males and females were viewed as valuable because the boys typically had agricultural skills and the girls could function not only as housekeepers but as weavers.

The Spanish colonists raided Navajo camps in what is now northern Mexican Cry Mesa on the Navajo Indian Reservation endures as a poignant memorial of the tribe's struggle against the Spanish and Mexican slave traders.

Navajos started attacking the slavers before they got near the access point. The slavers had reached a flat spot close to the mesa but evidently were unsure how to get to the top. The area where the New Mexicans camped that day is still called, in the Navajo language, "where the Mexicans chopped wood."

Walters said it was a spot where the slavers were exposed and vulnerable. Navajos at the top of the mesa began hurling rocks and shooting arrows down on the intruders. The slavers went looking for a way to pursue the Indians but found the rock impregnable. "The New Mexicans circled from either side but couldn't find a way up the mesa," Walters said. "To go up the way the Navajos did was not an option because you would be at the mercy of the people above you."

So the New Mexicans came up with a different plan: They packed up and left. That, at least, was what the Navajos thought. As Walters explained: "These New Mexicans went all the way to Red Rock Valley [about 10 miles away], and they built a fire. The people on the mesa could see the fire, and they thought, 'Well, they've left.' But they came back in the darkness. The Navajos had thought they were gone for good so they had neglected to tie up their watchdog. So these New Mexicans came back under cover of darkness and started climbing up, one person at a time. Around dawn, the Navajos realized the New Mexicans were coming up, and they were trapped."

The fleeing Indians found a relatively shallow place along the cliffs. They tied sashes and yucca strands together, making a rope, of sorts, that could be let down to the bottom.

"They were going down this cut in the west side of the mesa, and meanwhile the New Mexicans were coming up the other end. My guess is that it would have taken five or six hours for all of the New Mexicans to get up. At the same time, the Navajos started lowering their people down the other side. One young woman carrying a baby in a cradleboard slipped, and she and the baby were killed."

One of the Navajos volunteered to remain at the top of the mesa and cut the rope after everyone else was down. Others helped him make a camouflaged hideout in a shallow cave under a ledge, and dirt was piled around him, to keep him concealed. He was never discovered, though the New Mexicans evidently were only a short distance from him.

"By the time the New Mexicans got to the place where the Navajos had descended, they could see the Navajos below running off in the trees," Walters said. "The Navajos could hear them calling from the top, 'Diné hágo,' Navajos, come here."

The Navajos kept running up the canyon, which was about a mile wide at its mouth but narrowed to a mere 25 feet in a box at its end. The New Mexicans, meanwhile, could see no alternative but to go back down the mesa using the handholds they had used coming up. This gave the Navajos plenty of time to prepare their strategy.

On the north and south walls above the canyon's narrowest point, they piled rocks and the largest boulders they could move. Some of these rocks they kept in place with strands of rope made from yucca. The plan was to release the rocks on the north side first, which would scare the slavers into fleeing toward the narrowest spot in the canyon; then a barrage of the red boulders would be released from the south side, trapping and crushing the enemies.

The attack evidently worked as planned.

"There was a mixture of horses, mules and people screaming all at once," Walters said. "According to the Navajos, only a few New Mexican slavers escaped. Two days later, the survivors came back with reinforcements and picked up their dead. They placed two corpses on each mule and tied them down. They buried them to the north of Cove. I know where they're buried because I went looking for the burials, and I found them, but I don't want to say where they are because I don't want people going there."

MEXICAN CRY MESA

Walters, whose father and grandfather are buried in a small private cemetery on the mesa, grew up herding sheep around Mexican Cry, and he knows from personal experience how difficult it is to get to the top. The steep and dangerous handholds gouged into the rock on the east end were used until the 1950s as a way to lead rams to the top of the mesa to segregate them from the ewes and keep them from mating too early in the year, he noted. Walters said he pieced together the story about the incident on Mexican Cry Mesa from conversations with relatives and others living in the sparsely settled Cove area, an isolated valley north of the Chuska and Lukachukai mountains.

"In most of the stories I heard around Cove, the people always attribute this incident to the Kit Carson Campaign," Walters said, "but I don't believe that. Kit Carson was only in the field from July 1863 to February 1864."

Carson, the former mountain man, scout, Indian agent and resident of Taos, had been commissioned a colonel in the U.S. Army at the outbreak of the Civil War, and in June 1863, he was ordered by the Army to force all Navajos to move to a reservation at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. The Navajos, who for two centuries had been fighting, harassing and stealing from the New Mexicans, had simply transferred their raiding practices to the newcomers, the Americans. Carson and his New Mexico Volunteers were ordered to subdue the Navajos, who had broken six treaties with the government, and move them to a reservation. After a nine-month campaign and numerous skirmishes, he defeated the Navajos in Canyon de Chelly and moved them to Bosque Redondo. After five years, the Navajo were allowed to return to their homelands and never again did they attack an American settlement.

"The Navajo Campaign was only three or four generations ago," explained Walters. "People are still living whose grandfathers made the Long Walk," 300 miles from Fort Defiance, Arizona, to incarceration at Bosque Redondo on the Little Pecos River in eastern New Mexico, and their stories are still fresh.

"But the event on Mexican Cry Mesa is different. A lot of the old people around Cove have heard about it, and they pass it along, but there are no descendants of the people who fled up to the mesa alive in Cove. If it were something that happened as recently as the Carson campaign, the stories would be fresher. You'd still hear people say my grandfather said his father told him, and so on."

Walters also doubted the incident at Mexican Cry Mesa could have been a military operation involving Carson and his troops. "I think these had to be New Mexican slave raiders because, you know, these people chased Navajos into a narrow canyon [and then followed them), and military people would have had better sense."