Navajo Scouts
military unit
The Navajo Scouts were part of the United States Army Indian Scouts between 1873 and 1895. Generally, the scouts were signed up at Fort Wingate for six month enlistments. In the period 1873 to 1885, there were usually ten to twenty-five scouts attached to units. United States Army records indicated that in the Geronimo Campaign of 1886, there were about 150 Navajo scouts, divided into three companies, who were part of the 5,000 man force General Nelson A. Miles put in the field. In 1891 they were enlisted for three years. The Navajos employed as scouts were merged into regular units of the army in 1895. At least one person served almost continuously for over twenty-five years.
Service history
Enlistments
Between 300 and 400 Navajos served enlistments as Indian Scouts. Most of them came from the south eastern part of the reservation and the checkerboard area. Over 125 Navajo Scouts or their spouses received pensions between the 1920s and the 1940s.
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This entry incorporates text from “Navajo Scouts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.