Matt Fitzsimons

The Counterfeiters of Bosque Redondo Matt Fitzsimons

Discover the staggeringly true story of how the first Navajo silversmiths fed and freed a nation.

Old Pounder, they called him -- the very first Navajo silversmith. Yet Herrero Delgadito's greatest legacy is measured in lives, not ounces: the scores of Navajo women and children he plucked out of slavery in 1864, the hundreds of exiles he risked everything to feed in 1865 and the thousands of people he helped lead back home in 1868. A remarkable portrait of human resilience, Delgadito's story upends conventional narratives of the West, revealing an illicit slave system that began with the Conquistadors and reached its apex under the Union Army. Even as US officials fought to end slavery in the South, they weaponized human trafficking against the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. Matt Fitzsimons traces the trajectory of the prisoners of Bosque Redondo who forged a path to freedom.