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battle, Kit Carson spent the rest of the war once again fighting Indians. His commanding officer for much of that time, coincidentally, was General James Carleton, the same man who while a major had rescued Carson’s caravan from the Cheyennes. After the Confederate attempt to capture New Mexico had been repulsed, Carleton took aim at the Indian tribes—in particular, the Navajos. Navajo raiding parties had taken advantage of the war to become a serious threat to settlers, a threat that Carleton, who didn’t share Colonel Carson’s respect for the native tribes, was determined to remove.
    In 1862, Carleton ordered the Mescalero Apaches moved from their lands in the Sacramento Mountains to newly constructed Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo, the Round Forest, on the Pecos River. He issued an order: “All Indian men of that tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them…. If the Indians send in a flag of truce say to the bearer … that you have been sent to punish them for their treachery and their crimes. That you have no power to make peace, that you are there to kill them wherever you can find them.”
    Carson was appalled. He had lived his life with honor, and now he was being forced to choose between disobeying a direct order, which would mean facing a court-martial, and committing despicable acts. No one knows what went on his mind, but he might well have realized that even if he refused the order, the man who replaced him would not—and that man probably would not understand the tribes as he did. While he accepted the command to force the Apaches into confinement, he refused to follow the rest of General Carleton’s orders. Instead he met with the elders of the tribe and convinced them to surrender. Within a few months, he brought four hundred Apaches to Bosque Redondo.
    The Mescalero campaign was simply the beginning. Carleton then gave Carson command of two thousand troops and ordered him to capture the Navajos and imprison them on the same reservation as their enemy, the Apaches. “You have deceived us too often,” Carleton warned the Navajos, “and robbed and murdered our people too long, to trust you again at large in your own country. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, now that we have begun, until you cease to exist or move. There can be no other talk on the subject.”

During his campaign against the Navajos, Carson’s commanding officer, the brutal general James Carleton, told his troops that Indians “must be whipped and fear us before they will cease killing and robbing the people.”
    That was too much for Carson. He resigned his commission, stating, “By serving in the Army, I have proven my devotion to that government which was established by my ancestors…. At present, I feel that my duty as well as happiness directs me to my home and family and trusts that the General will accept my resignation.”
    The reason for what happened next will never be known, but the result has caused the name Kit Carson to be reviled by the tribes of the Southwest from that time forward in history. Carleton somehow convinced Carson to change his mind. Some historians believe General Carleton gave him assurances that once the Navajos were on the reservation they would be allowed to live peacefully. It also is true that Carson had come to believe that Indians and settlers could never live peacefully together and urged their separation. He may well have believed that by carrying out this policy he actually was ensuring the safety of both the Native Americans and the new Americans. Whatever the cause, Carson agreed to round up the Navajos.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Navajos, here crossing Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona, had settled peacefully on this land, as negotiated by Carson.
    Rather than standing and fighting the army, the Indians dispersed and fled into the hills. The army retaliated by burning their crops and orchards, their cornfields and