Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1484_aplc.pdf
Page Number: 26.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

5 

GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

disastrous crop failure after another.”  Id., at 255.  Further 
feeding  the  crisis,  Carleton  “badly  underestimated  the
number  of  Navajos  who  would  end  up  at  the  Bosque  Re-
dondo.”  Ibid.  All told, the relocation proved a “catastrophe 
for the Navajo; 2,000 died there in four years.”  Commission 
Report 8. 

B 
“By 1868 even the U. S. government could see” that the
present conditions could not persist.  Ibid.  So it set out to 
relocate  the  Navajo  once  more.  To  that  end,  the  United 
States sent members of the Indian Peace Commission to ne-
gotiate a new treaty with the Tribe.  Kessell 257–258.  Led 
by  General  William  Tecumseh  Sherman,  the  Commission 
disfavored allowing the Navajo to return to their homeland. 
Ibid.  Doing that, the Commission feared, risked rekindling 
old hostilities.  Id., at 257.  So Sherman tried to persuade
the Navajo to relocate someplace else.  Understanding the
importance of water to the Navajo, he offered them assur-
ances  that  other  locations  would  have  “plenty  of  water.” 
Treaty Record 5. 

The Navajo would have none of it.  Their lead negotiator,
Barboncito, refused to “go to any other country except [his]
own.”  Ibid.  Any place else, he said, could “turn out another
Bosque Redondo.”  Id., at 5–6.  “[O]utside [our] own coun-
try,” Barboncito told Sherman, “we cannot raise a crop, but 
in it we can raise a crop almost anywhere.”  Id., at 3.  “[W]e
know this land does not like us,” he said of Bosque Redondo,
and “neither does the water.”  Ibid.  Along the way, he spoke
of “the heart of Navajo country,” which he described as in-
cluding a place where “the water flows in abundance.”  Id., 
at 8.  In the end, “[t]he will of the Navajos—personified in
the  intense  resolve  of  Barboncito,”  won  out.  Kessell  259. 
Sherman  came  to  realize  that,  if  he  left  the  Navajo  at
Bosque Redondo, the dire conditions—including “ ‘the foul
character  of  [the]  water’ ”—would  eventually  induce  them