05/16/2026
1934.
The Navajo Shepherd Who Walked 200 Miles for His Flock
In 1934 the U.S. government implemented the Navajo Livestock Reduction Program.
The policy required Navajo families to reduce their sheep herds — by 50% in some cases — to address soil erosion on the reservation. The government's goal was conservation. The method was slaughter — federal agents came to Navajo grazing lands and shot sheep by the thousands in front of the families who owned them.
For the Navajo, sheep were not livestock.
They were wealth, identity, spiritual practice, and food — the center of everything a Navajo family was in material terms. The reduction program destroyed not just animals but the economic and cultural foundation of Navajo life in a single policy.
A sixty-year-old Navajo shepherd named Hosteen Tso had a flock of 200 sheep on his family's grazing allotment near Chinle, Arizona.
The government told him to reduce to 100.
He refused.
Federal agents came and shot 80 of his sheep in front of him.
He was left with 120 — still above the limit, but the agents had miscounted.
He moved the remaining 120 sheep.
He walked them — alone, over six days, 200 miles across the Arizona desert in August — to a remote canyon in the Lukachukai Mountains where federal agents had not yet reached and where the grazing was good and the water was available from a seasonal creek.
200 miles. In August. In Arizona. Alone. With 120 sheep.
He arrived.
He grazed his flock in the canyon through 1934 and 1935, living in a temporary hogan he built from available materials, coming down to his family's main camp every two weeks for supplies.
In 1936 the reduction program enforcement eased. He walked his flock back.
They were all there. All 120.
His family — his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law — were waiting when he came down out of the Lukachukai Mountains with 120 sheep.
His wife did not say: you should not have gone.
She said: how many?
"One hundred twenty," he said.
She counted them herself.
One hundred twenty.
She made the specific sound that Navajo women make when something has been preserved that should have been lost — not a word exactly, more than a word.
Hosteen Tso lived until 1951. His sheep — the descendants of those 120 animals — were still on the allotment when he died.
His granddaughter still runs sheep on that allotment today.
"He walked 200 miles in August Arizona heat to hide his sheep from the government and walked them back two years later with every one alive. He did it because they were his and because what was his was his. That is not a complicated idea. It was just very hard to execute." — Navajo Nation oral history archives, 1960
