For over a thousand years, the deserts and forested mountains of what would become the U.S. Southwest were the homeland of the Navajo people. In the 1840s, American settlers began claiming that land for themselves. The Navajo developed a reputation as fierce resistors. ​​Truces and treaties were brokered and broken. A Navajo leader was scalped in 1849. The U.S. Army embraced a policy of Navajo extermination.

On this day in 1864, the Army forces a march of 9,000 Navajo people to the Bosque Redondo internment camp . One third die from starvation, exposure, assault, and disease.

However, the camp becomes too expensive for the Army to maintain. The 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo permits the Navajo to return to a piece of their homeland in return for sending their children to American schools for “re-education.”