In 1934, government men came to Sarah Begay's place in Narrow Canyon, near Kayenta, Arizona, and started killing her goats. Some were hers. Some were her mother's, some her sister's. Begay asked them to stop. "That is enough; it is enough," she told them. They drove the rest of the goats behind a hill and kept at it, beating some to death and shooting others, while the women cried. Forty years later, in a 1974 interview, Begay said the memory still kept them up at night.
The government had decided the Navajo Reservation was carrying more animals than the land could feed, and in the main the government was right. Drought and overgrazing had stripped the ground cover, and the soil was washing down into the rivers. Seventy years after the killings, the Navajo Nation's own drought contingency plan agrees that overgrazing was real and is still a problem. The same document calls the government's program a "nightmare."
Both statements sit on the same page, and neither one cancels the other. What follows is mostly about how you get from the first to the second.
The Wealth They Came For
I spent five years on cargo ships watching freight go around the world, and if I learned one thing it's that the people who put a price on a commodity and the people who live on it are hardly ever in the same room. The government priced a Diné goat (Diné is what the Navajo call themselves) at about a dollar. In 1934 a dollar bought four cans of tomatoes. One goat would feed a family of five for a week and leave a hide worth keeping. But the dollar only covered the day of the sale. It didn't count the milk the goat gave every morning or the kids it dropped every spring. It didn't count the brush it ate that a sheep wouldn't touch, or the fact that it could live through weather that killed sheep outright.
For a Diné family, sheep and goats weren't livestock the way a commodity trader means the word. They were meat, milk, cheese, wool for weaving, hides for clothes and bedding, and something to trade at the local post. They were also the savings account. When drought came, or heavy snow, or somebody got sick, a family sold or butchered animals to get through. Families with big flocks lent animals to poorer relatives, provided meat for ceremonies, paid the healers. The flock was the family bank, and it paid its interest in wool and young.
Women often owned much of a family's sheep and nearly all its goats. Women and girls did the daily work of herding, milking, getting the wool ready, weaving, and butchering. A woman who owned the sheep and wove the rug decided what happened to whatever the rug brought at the trading post. By some traders' accounts, weaving brought in a fifth to a third of a family's store income; other estimates went as high as half.
Margaret Kee said her flock came down from sheep her grandparents got after the Long Walk, the forced march in the 1860s that took Navajo people to a military prison camp at Bosque Redondo. The animals passed from her grandparents to her parents to her, and she figured on them passing to her children and grandchildren. So a flock was food and income, inheritance and family history, all of it wrapped up in one living thing that had to be watered every day.
The government looked at those same animals and wrote down a stocking number.
How the Help Arrived
The program came in stages, and each was worse than the one before.
In the winter of 1933–34, government agents and traders bought more than 86,500 sheep in what were called "voluntary" sales. Owners got to choose which animals went. The idea was they'd cull the old and the weak and hold on to good breeding stock.
That word "voluntary" has earned its quotation marks. Officials let it be understood that the water projects and extra land would come only if the Navajo cooperated. Some trading posts took a family's store debt out before paying, so the cash that arrived was a good deal less than the stated price. Women told officials that the male Navajo council members had no authority to agree to sell animals that women owned. The officials made a note of the objection and went on about their business.
By spring of 1934 the targets had grown. Officials now planned to remove 150,000 animals, mostly goats. There had been a provision to spare poor families with small herds, and officials dropped it, worried that big owners would split their flocks on paper to slip under the cuts. The instruction went out: don't spare the "small man."
Then the system for handling all those purchased animals fell apart. Drought across the Southwest had already jammed the canneries and markets with livestock. A regional official named William Zeh authorized workers to kill up to 70 percent of the purchased animals right where they stood. On the western reservation, workers killed more than 7,500 goats and nearly 3,400 sheep in mass slaughters, close to 40 percent of what had been bought in that area. In some places the carcasses were left to rot, or burned.
It wasn't the same everywhere. In the northeast, families reportedly ate about two-thirds of the animals killed. Other places it was closer to a third. The program's own records show a patchwork, and what a family got depended on which official was in charge and whether anybody bothered to let them salvage the meat.
Martin Johnson, near Sanostee, remembered a rider who came while he and his wife were out with their flock. The rider's message was short: sell 75 goats or go to jail. They took the goats to the trading post and watched them killed. Johnson said his wife cried because she had raised sheep and goats since she was a child. Nobody ever wrote her name down.
Six Owners, One Line in the Book
The government measured herds in "sheep units," a formula that turned sheep, goats, cattle, and horses into a single number. Officials set that total against an estimate of how many animals a given stretch of land could support. The idea had something to it. The way it got carried out was another matter.
Animals were counted at dipping vats, checkpoints where livestock got run through a chemical bath to kill parasites and were then entered in the agency's tally book. One account, drawn from an ethnography of the period, has a woman bringing 810 animals to the vat at Ganado. The agent wrote her down as the sole owner. She said 125 were hers. The rest belonged to her husband, her brother, two daughters, and two sons. Six owners went into the record as one line.
In another case, a married woman listed as 'Asdzáá Yazzie was first recorded as owner of a flock because she was the one who brought the animals to the vat. She did the work. Then her husband told the official some of the sheep were his, and the official struck her name and put the record under his. She dropped out of the count altogether. (An earlier piece in this section traced how Colorado River commissioners made a similar conversion, letting thin hydrologic data harden into an allocation rule that lasted.)
The pressure on the land was real enough. But one number couldn't tell you who in a family owned which animals, how families moved with the seasons, where the water was, or the difference between a young breeding ewe and an old ram that was headed for the pot anyway. The number described the land. The program they built on top of it reshaped people's lives.
Fenced In
Alongside the livestock cuts, the government carved the reservation into 18 grazing districts. Superintendent E. R. Fryer told families who traveled long distances that they'd have to pick one district and stay in it. Crossing a district line took written permission. Cross without it and you got a fine or jail.
Navajo herding had always depended on moving with the seasons, sometimes more than 120 miles. Families wintered down in the low piñon-juniper country and summered up in the mountain meadows. They moved to reach water, firewood, and grass that had come back from the previous season's grazing. Rose Mitchell described winters around Black Mountain and summers near Fluted Rock.
That moving around was land management in its own right. It let the grass regrow. It spread the grazing out instead of piling it onto one patch of ground all year. By drawing district lines, the government shut down a practice that had been doing, imperfectly but for generations, part of the job the government said it came to do.
People talked about grass they could see across a new boundary line and couldn't get to, about husbands and wives who ended up in different districts, about families cut off from canyon land their grandparents had used.
So families wound up with fewer animals and less room to move them, both at the same time, and each restriction made the other one harder to live with.
What Remained
By the mid-1940s, about 500 families had 150 to 300 sheep. About 4,000 families with permits had fewer than 50. About 2,500 families had none.
A permit was official permission to keep a set number of animals, and the average one allowed about 25 sheep units. The Navajo Nation's own drought plan later concluded that was too small to support a family; it took at least 50. Families with the smallest permits were the likeliest to keep more animals than allowed. The plan doesn't treat that as plain rule-breaking. It treats it as what you'd expect from a permit too small to live on, which means the system produced its own violators and then had to go police them.
Women lost the most. After the program, women said they could no longer kill or sell an animal without asking their husbands for the money. In 1940, one mother of six said her family had sheep before, but now they were poor and barely had enough to eat. In the years after, cattle became more common, and men controlled most of the cattle economy. Women's sheep and goat herds never recovered. The program rarely recognized women as owners, and it destroyed the animals that had given women economic say inside their own households.
The drought plan holds both truths at once. Overgrazing is still a real problem: it kills plants, speeds up erosion, and makes drought worse. And the 1930s program made people unwilling to sell animals and may make permit holders distrust the Nation's drought programs today. Those two facts pull against each other, and both of them come out of the same history.
Ninety-Two Years Later
This week a good part of the country took Monday off for Columbus. Out on the Navajo Nation they had a drought to deal with, and have had one since June.
In June 2026, the Navajo Nation declared a drought emergency: long drought, short rainfall, thin forage, low reservoirs, stock ponds choked with mud, broken windmills. About 7,500 stock ponds and a good many other livestock water sites are at risk. The Nation recommended $6.55 million for windmill repairs, livestock water storage, and related infrastructure. It asked owners to take stock of their herds and cut numbers where they had to.
The Navajo Nation is making these calls through its own government, under its own authority, answering to its own people. That counts for an enormous amount. It doesn't change the ground the decisions are being made on.
The Nation also renewed its 2026 rainfall insurance, covering about 13 million acres. Since 2017 the program has returned more than $130 million above the premiums paid. But it pays off a rainfall index for a broad stretch of country, not on whether a particular family's grass actually died. A family can lose its forage and get nothing. Another family can collect a check without losing a thing. Once again the measurement gives you a rough picture of the landscape and not much of the household living on it.
Speaker Crystalyne Curley told Arizona Family that when local wells went dry, some people were driving over an hour for water, 30 to 50 extra miles. The president's office reported more than 3,500 inspections, repairs, or maintenance jobs on livestock water sites, plus 26 miles of new pipeline.
So the Nation is adapting. But it's adapting on land where the last round of outside help wiped out family wealth, ended seasonal movement, erased women from the ownership records, and handed out permits too small to live on. The drought plan says it plainly: the 1930s program made people unwilling to sell animals and may make them distrust today's programs. When the people who come to help break that kind of trust, $6.55 million won't buy it back, and it may be that nothing will.
The land needed help in 1934, and it needs help now. How much a family is willing to accept depends on what happened the last time somebody showed up offering it. Sarah Begay asked the men to stop, and they took the goats behind a hill and kept killing. That's what the current program is working against: degraded rangeland, yes, and also the memory of what help looked like when somebody else was in charge.
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Rainfall insurance's blind spots: USDA cautions that Pasture, Rangeland and Forage coverage is not comprehensive drought insurance, because payments depend on interpolated precipitation for a grid and selected intervals rather than observed forage loss on any individual ranch.
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The BIA archive underneath: National Archives Record Group 75 holds Bureau of Indian Affairs livestock-sale registers, dipping records, and New Mexico rehabilitation files from the 1930s reduction, including the household-level ledgers that recorded — and sometimes erased — individual owners.
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How numbers become permanent architecture: An earlier Climate Past piece traced how Colorado River commissioners turned a limited gauging record into a durable basin-by-basin allocation, a parallel conversion of contingent data into lasting institutional structure.
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Windmills, ponds, and the $6.55 million: The Navajo Nation's June 2026 drought emergency declaration identifies approximately 7,500 stock ponds and numerous windmill-dependent water systems as vulnerable, though no published source breaks the recommended appropriation into project-by-project spending.
