Navajo wars; military campaigns, slave raids, and reprisals

The author said, "In writing this book my principal concern has been to determine the underlying causes of the hostilities that led to almost continuous warfare between the Navajo Indians and white colonizers of the province and territory of New Mexico. Inevitably, a corollary concern was with the treaties that punctuated the temporary lulls between periods of fighting. The effort has engaged the better part of eight years and a search of some thirty thousand documents found in Spanish, Mexican, and American archives.....Unfortunately, almost nothing exists today to document the Navajo side of the case.