The Interior Department is reviewing signs posted at more than a dozen locations managed by the National Park Service, as part of President Donald Trump's agenda to "restore truth and sanity to American history."
One figure featured at the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site on the Navajo Nation is now in the crosshairs. That exhibit — still under review — hasn't been taken down yet, but his name is literally inseparable from this land in northeastern Arizona and its rich history.
To Navajos, Ganado Mucho — or Many Cattle — is like a folk hero. He went on the "Long Walk," marching hundreds of miles by the U.S. Army at gunpoint to be held inside a New Mexico fort.
That often deadly trek to Bosque Redondo was made by more than 10,000 Navajos between 1863 and 1866. While the U.S. called it a reservation in name, many held captive there considered it to be like an internment camp.
Eventually, Ganado Mucho and other Diné leaders signed an 1868 treaty.
"He wasn't defeated in the easy binary of stories that are winners and losers," said Farina King, who is a Diné professor at the University of Oklahoma. "But peacemaker doesn't mean you're not a resistor."
King, who also serves as the Horizon Chair of Native American Ecology and Culture, shared that Mucho's legend may be at odds with how the U.S. wants to remember its past on the heels of the nation's 250th anniversary this Fourth of July.
"The thorn in the side is a disruption to the celebratory stories of Manifest Destiny," added King, "conquering the West, taming it and subjecting, you know, Indigenous peoples as if they're just a part of a wild landscape."
Once freed, Mucho then met fellow trader John Lorenzo Hubbell.
Together, they kept on making peace throughout the Southwest by settling disputes — often between Mormon ranchers and Navajos. In 1878, Hubbell set up his iconic trading post — still open to this day — and would rename that area after him.
Hence why today it's called Ganado, Arizona.
Copyright 2026 KJZZ News
