"Recently, on a visit to the New Mexico State Library and State Archives, I viewed an interesting exhibit in the lobby. It was a display of documents and books dealing with a little-known Navajo disturbance in November of 1913.

At the center of the storm were two men, the Navajo Indian agent W. T. Shelton and an aged medicine man and band leader named Bi-joshii. At issue was a government attempt to enforce assimilation.

In 1913, he released a new edict prohibiting Navajo men from having more than one wife. When the agent learned that Little Singer, son of Bi-joshii, had three wives, he instructed the Navajo police to bring the miscreant and his trio of spouses to Shiprock for questioning.

Upon returning, the angry agent sent notice of the breakout to the U.S. district attorney in Santa Fe, demanding warrants be issued for arrest of the offending Indians. He described them as a bunch of �desperadoes and violent men, incapable of reason.�

When he made additional public utterances of an inflammatory nature, the press picked them up, and the nation was led to believe the Navajos were in open revolt.

The Albuquerque Journal reported the tribe was organizing a raid on the Shiprock agency. According to The Santa Fe New Mexican, �San Juan farmers have sounded the call to arms against hostile Indians.�

Farther afield, the Washington Herald in our nation�s capital declared the government staff at Shiprock lived under the threat of massacre. And it added that raids against settlers had already taken place. Some residences had been pillaged and burned, and had livestock stolen.

These news stories sounded like a case of frontier warfare ripped from the pages of 19th-century history. In reality, none of it was true."

Get the Story:
Marc Simmons: Government ban on multiple wives sparks Navajo uprising (The New Mexican 9/30)
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