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Rh 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 Redondo.” Ibid. All told, the relocation proved a “catastrophe for the Navajo; 2,000 died there in four years.” Commission Report 8.

“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 negotiate 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 assurances 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 country,” 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 including 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