Narbona reported his losses as 1 dead and 64 wounded. Massacre Cave in Canyon del Muerto was named for this event. [Illustration: Massacre Cave sits high up on the west wall of Canyon del Muerto, a short way upstream from Mummy Cave.] The Navajos had been held in partial check by Spanish bribes and punitive expeditions, but after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, the Navajos returned to raiding in behalf of all those enslaved by the Spanish. In 1823, 1833, 1836, and 1838 the Mexicans mounted large expeditions against the Navajos, sometimes sending as many as 1,500 men after them. It was during this period that Canyon de Chelly was most often referred to as the stronghold of the Navajos. Although Mexican reprisals often forced the Indians to take temporary refuge north of the San Juan River, they were too sporadic to effectively quell the raiders, who always came back with new attacks. Conditions were so bad that the Navajos boasted they let the Mexicans live on only because they made good shepherds for the tribe. The taunt hardly exaggerated their power at the time. Navajo depredations had very nearly decimated the frontier settlements in the central Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico when the United States went to war with Mexico in 1846. Col. Stephen Watts Kearny had the task of seizing the northern Mexican provinces, an area that is now part of the American Southwest. In late June 1846 he left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Marching over the Santa Fe Trail without opposition, Kearny and his American Dragoons arrived in Santa Fe on August 18, 1846, and proclaimed New Mexico a part of the United States. When Kearny and the Army of the West marched off to Mexico, Col. Alexander W. Doniphan was left behind with orders to invade the Navajo country, release captives, reclaim stolen property, and either to awe or beat the Indians into submission. In August 1846 he led the first United States expedition against the Navajos. Maj. William Gilpin, with 200 men, entered the Navajo country on the north and swung south to meet Doniphan and several Navajo chiefs at Bear Springs near the town of Grants, New Mexico, later the site of Fort Wingate. The treaty signed there turned out to be little more than a scrap of paper. Five more unsuccessful military expeditions were sent against the Navajos between 1846 and 1849 in vain attempts to end the Indian raids. In trying to contain the Navajos, the U.S. Government made the same mistake that the Mexican and Spanish Governments did before them. They all assumed that a single chief led the several Navajo bands. Actually, each local Navajo group had its own leader, and time and again treaties of “lasting peace with the Navajos” were signed by these local chiefs, who spoke only for their own small bands and had no influence with others.