In 1864, during a period of destabilization among U.S. settlers, Spanish inhabitants, and Native Americans, the U.S. government singled out the Navajo and some Apache as responsible for raiding. Thousands of Navajo people were forcibly marched from Canyon de Chelly by Colonel Kit Carson, under orders of Brigadier General James H. Carleton, to Fort Sumner four hundred miles away. Eventually 7,000 Navajo were imprisoned there. The captives endured four years of drought, hunger, and cold in deplorable conditions until it was no longer feasible to hold them. After the Peace Treaty of 1868 was signed, the Navajo were released. At Fort Wingate, livestock and other supplies were distributed, and from there the Navajo dispersed along the Rio Puerco, where Gallup was later founded in 1881, to their ancestral homeland, now a defined reservation.
