Navajo Scouts During the Apache Wars

An in-depth account of the reasons, risks, and rewards that impacted the Navajos who enlisted in the American military in the late nineteenth century.

2019 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards eBook Nonfiction Winner

In January 1873, Secretary of War William W. Belknap authorized the Military District of New Mexico to enlist fifty Indigenous scouts for campaigns against the Apaches and other tribes. In an overwhelming response, many more Navajos came to Fort Wingate to enlist than the ten requested. Why, so soon after the Navajo War, the Long Walk and imprisonment at Fort Sumner, would young Navajos volunteer to join the United States military? Author John Lewis Taylor explores this question and the relationship between the Navajo Nation and the United States military in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“Relates the story of those men, chronicling their role in the army’s attempts to subdue the Apaches who resisted the reservation system being imposed on them.” —Farmington Daily Times