Where there was no treaty in place, the Union War Department would declare war on Native communities and force their surrender. Then they would be removed to reservations, where they could be monitored by Union troops, taught “the arts of civilization” and converted to Christianity.

In the New Mexico Territory, James Henry Carleton, a Union brigadier general, put this policy into action in the fall of 1862. He sent troops to fight Chiricahua Apaches in the south and ordered his favorite officer, Colonel “Kit” Carson, to make hard war first upon Mescalero Apaches, and then Navajos in the north.

Carleton intensified these campaigns the next year because in the summer of 1863, gold had been discovered in the mountains of central Arizona Territory. Once the Union Army removed Apaches and Navajos from their homelands — the plan went — miners would lay claim to the Arizona diggings. Farmers would follow, planting the fields that would feed them. Lincoln’s War Department and General Land Office supported these campaigns.

“The immense mineral resources of some of those Territories ought to be developed as rapidly as possible,” the president wrote in his annual address to Congress in 1862. “It is worthy of your serious consideration whether some extraordinary measures to promote that end cannot be adopted.”

In January 1864, Lincoln signed a measure creating a reservation for Navajos and Mescalero Apaches at Bosque Redondo in central New Mexico. Suffering from Carleton’s mismanagement and a series of environmental disasters, the reservation was a calamity from the start.

The more than 8,000 Navajos and Mescalero Apaches incarcerated there endured bad water, exposure to the elements, spoiled rations and rampant disease. They called the reservation “Hwéeldi” — Land of Suffering.

Reports of these conditions sparked multiple congressional investigations, and by 1864, Lincoln was calling for new policies that would “provide for the welfare of the Indian.” But at the same time, he was advocating to render the western territories “secure for the advancing settler.”