Ex-Fighter Pilot Helps Navajo Dream Come True With Trees Program : Agriculture: Kit Carson’s 1863 raid destroyed most of the tribe’s fruit trees. Replanting program promises to give the Navajo more self-sufficiency.

Francis Draper, retired champion steer wrestler, wrestles his four-wheel-drive through miles of rough sand in Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto, mystical lands of ruined dwellings in red sandstone cliffs where his Navajo forebears lived 2,000 years ago.

He pulls to a stop at Twin Trails and looks with pride at the trees thriving in his apple orchard.

They are a living answer to a tragedy that befell the Navajo 129 years ago at the hands of frontier folk hero Kit Carson.

An Army colonel in the fall of 1863, Carson led his troops through Canyon de Chelly, burning hogans, slaughtering livestock and destroying crops, including about 5,000 peach trees.

Carson’s mission was to force the Navajos to surrender and be herded into imprisonment at Ft. Sumner in eastern New Mexico.

The freezing 300-mile trek, known as the “Long Walk,” still haunts today’s 200,000 Navajos. Thousands of their ancestors died on the walk or at the fort before an 1868 treaty permitted them to return to their homeland.

More than a century after Carson’s devastation, the land remained nearly devoid of fruit trees.

Then an old Navajo woman dreamed that trees would be planted in Canyon de Chelly before she died.

Bill Johnson made her dream come true.

Johnson, 59, is a weathered former fighter pilot who lives with a white wolf dog named Nickel in a geodesic dome in the Rocky Mountain hamlet of Buffalo Creek, Colo.

A few years ago, he founded the nonprofit organization Trees for Mother Earth to restore the Navajo trees.

Since 1986, the first year of the effort, more than 18,000 trees have been planted on the Navajo reservation. This homeland of the largest Indian nation in the United States is roughly the size of West Virginia. It spreads across 25,000 square miles of high, dry land, mostly in northeastern Arizona.

The tree planting is done primarily by high school students. Johnson, the organization’s president, was teaching at a high school in Evergreen, Colo., in 1985 when a former student, James A. Mischke, now a professor at Navajo Community College in Shiprock, N.M., heard about the old woman’s dream and alerted the school.

The next spring, 23 Colorado youngsters planted 2,000 trees in Canyon de Chelly. Navajo wariness of the exuberant outsiders took a while to dispel.

Toward the end of their stay, the students and their adult advisers were invited to a community song and dance. They were the only non-Navajos there. A tribal spokesman greeted them in English, then spoke in his native tongue.

“Before he was through, he was crying,” Johnson recalled. “It meant so much to have somebody there for no reason other than to give them trees. It was quite a powerful experience.”

Millie Roanhorse and her husband, John, now cultivate a small fruit orchard on Walkabout Creek in Canyon del Muerto. Despite her initial uncertainty, she said, “Now I really want this to work.”

Navajo leaders concur. “Before Kit Carson, we were self-sustaining. One reason was the orchards,” Joe Shirley Jr., an Apache County supervisor and a delegate to the Navajo Nation’s Tribal Council, told National Geographic.

With a boost from Trees for Mother Earth, Shirley said, “I feel that we have a better chance of standing on our own two feet. I’m not sure we’re looking at making money per se. We’re looking at giving a couple of trees to every Navajo.”

Johnson’s ultimate goal is to turn Trees for Mother Earth over to the Navajos. He has helped involve them at all levels, and a few months ago hired a Navajo, Wanda Clark of Chinle, as the program coordinator.

Ethelou Yazzie, community service coordinator for the Navajo Nation’s Tselani-Cottonwood Chapter, praised the program. Materially, the apples, peaches, apricots and pears from the new trees can be traded. “Spiritually, the trees are a blessing on Earth. They can bring food, herbs, seeds.”

At Window Rock, Laura Wauneka, director of New Dawn, a Navajo-administered, federally financed program to promote agricultural self-sufficiency, said, “Somehow these programs fit very nicely together.”

Johnson’s intermediate goals include not only planting trees--evergreen windbreaks as well as fruit trees--but conserving water through new catchment systems and saving energy with solar-heated hogans.

This spring he expects 16 groups of students from California, Colorado and Arizona to plant another 8,000 trees. In two years, he hopes to see trees in all parts of the vast reservation.

“This has meaning far beyond anything we meant to do,” he said. “We didn’t know the trees were going to have this power. Every kid who’s been down here has walked away with a new attitude. They like themselves and are proud of themselves.”