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Show THE COMING OF THE SPANIARDS 83 Navajos against each other. They hoped that would keep the Indians too busy to bother New Mexico's settled peoples. Cachupm had great success because he was a skillful diplomat. His successors were not as skilled. They could not keep peace among the many peoples of New Mexico. The Navajos began to think of attacks on the Spaniards and the Pueblos as a means of making up for their many losses. For all of these reasons, the unusual era of peace on the northern frontier of New Spain came to an end in the 1770s. The Utah Navajos after the Spanish Conquest Just when the Navajos first moved into the northern and western parts of their nineteenth-century homelands is not known. In the past, historians thought that, during the early Spanish period, Navajo lands were confined to the region known as the Dinetah. This homeland was in the Gobernador-Largo Canyon region of northern New Mexico. It is now clear that the Navajos had a much larger homeland at that early date. Even then, Navajos were living in large parts of New Mexico to the west of the Rio Grande and to the north of Zuni and Acoma Pueblos. The earliest dated Navajo site in Utah north of the San Juan River is a hogan in the White Canyon area west of Bear's Ears. Tree-ring dating shows that this hogan was probably built about 1620. Science and Hopi tradition also agree that by 1629 Navajos were living north and west of the Hopi Pueblos. A map made by Governor Diego de Penalosa in 1665 showed Navajos living on Black Mesa and north of the San Francisco Mountains. By 1700 the Navajos had two reasons to move north and west, possibly into Utah. To escape Spanish revenge, refugees from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 sought homes far away from the Rio Grande. During the early eighteenth century, many Navajos also moved out of the Dinetah because of Ute and Comanche raids. They sought homes as far away as Utah, north of the San Juan. There they may have joined relatives who had been in the area since the People migrated out of the Far North. Both science and Spanish maps clearly show that, during the 1700s, Navajos were north of the San Juan. Many of them may have used this area mostly for seasonal hunting and gathering. But at least some of the People lived permanently in these northern parts of Navajoland. |
