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Show 108 VIII. BILAGAANA NINAAD44' troops from the canyon walls, but they could not keep Sumner from destroying their crops. Though Sumner had to turn back without forcing the Navajos into a clear-cut battle, he had decided to control the Indians on their home ground. He would build a fort deep in Navajoland at Canyon Bonito. The post was called Fort Defiance. It was built on a Navajo sacred site. Though it was hard for the army to supply the remote fort, Sumner was sure this would be the best way to control the Navajos. He knew that a single campaign could not end an old Indian war. And he feared that the Navajo tribe would have to be destroyed if the Fort Defiance plan failed. Fort Defiance did not have the sudden impact its founder desired. Navajo raids went on. Increased tension between the army and civil leaders in New Mexico helped delay an answer to the problem. Governor Calhoun was upset by the ongoing war. He heard the complaints of New Mexicans who thought that they should have the right to arm themselves against the Navajos. As head of the army, however, Sumner refused to give arms to people who, he said, were little more than "Mexican marauding parties." He knew that mutual raiding had gone on between Navajos and New Mexicans for two hundred years. He saw that the country needed to change the old pattern instead of repeating it. Fort Defiance was Sumner's answer. But it could only work, he knew, if it protected as well as punished the Navajos. This argument between the two leaders kept them from forming a common front. Both wanted to punish the Navajos, but they could not agree about how to do it. Sumner would not take Indian agents with him when he dealt with the Navajos. Calhoun and New Mexico's citizens would not place any volunteers under army control. At last, the Navajos solved the problem by asking for peace talks. The Navajos knew that Fort Defiance was a serious threat. Their homes, crops, and livestock were open to soldiers from the post. And the distant United States government had decided that the. problem in New Mexico needed peaceful solutions. Both Sumner and Calhoun, who had felt a need to punish the Navajos, were now overruled. On Christmas Day, 1851, they met with two |