Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson & the Conquest of the American West Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Hoofbeats

  BOOK ONE: THE NEW MEN

  1. Jumping Off

  2. The Glittering World

  3. The Army of the West

  4. Singing Grass

  5. Blue Bead Mountain

  6. Who Is James K. Polk?

  7. What a Wild Life!

  8. The Ruling Hand of Providence

  9. The Pathfinder

  10. When the Land Is Sick

  11. The Un-Alamo

  12. We Will Correct All This

  13. Narbona Pass

  14. The Uninvaded Silence

  15. On the Altar of the Country

  16. A Perfect Butchery

  17. The Fire of Montezuma

  18. Your Duty, Mr. Carson

  19. Daggers in Every Look

  20. Men with Ears Down to Their Ankles

  21. The Hall of Final Ruin

  22. The New Men

  BOOK TWO: A BROKEN COUNTRY

  23. The Grim Metronome

  24. Lords of the Mountains

  25. The Devil’s Turnpike

  26. Our Red Children

  27. Cold Steel

  28. El Crepusculo

  Photo Insert 1

  29. American Mercury

  30. Time at Last Sets All Things Even

  31. A Broken Country

  32. The Finest Head I Ever Saw

  33. The Death Knot

  34. Men Without Eyes

  35. Blood and Thunder

  BOOK THREE: MONSTER SLAYER

  36. The Fearing Time

  Photo Insert 2

  37. People of the Single Star

  38. The Sons of Some Dear Mother

  39. The Round Forest

  40. Children of the Mist

  41. General Orders No. 15

  42. Fortress Rock

  43. The Long Walk

  44. Adobe Walls

  45. The Condition of the Tribes

  46. Crossing Purgatory

  Epilogue: In Beauty We Walk

  A Note on the Sources

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Art Credits

  Also by Hampton Sides

  Copyright

  Anne

  Epigraph

  I follow the scent of falling rain

  And head for the place where it is darkest

  I follow the lightning

  And draw near to the place where it strikes

  —NAVAJO CHANT

  Prologue: HOOFBEATS

  One morning in mid-August 1846, in the cool hours before dawn, the New Mexican villagers of Las Vegas slumbered anxiously. The Americanos were coming. In distant Washington, D.C., for reasons murky to the inhabitants of Las Vegas, the president of the United States had declared war on Mexico. Now scouts had brought word that the invading gringo army was only a few days away, marching steadily westward, and the townspeople were deeply fearful. They had heard from their priest that the United States would outlaw Catholicism, that the soldiers would rape the women in the village and burn the letters “U.S.” on their cheeks with branding irons. The villagers even debated among themselves the merits of torching their own church to prevent the Americans from using it as a stable or a barracks.

  Las Vegas—“The Meadows” in Spanish—was a hodgepodge of adobe houses, set among rustling cornfields irrigated by a muddy acequia that seeped from the Gallinas River. The town lay at the feet of the Sangre de Cristos—the Blood of Christ Mountains—the magnificent southernmost peaks of the Rockies, which rose more than twelve thousand feet over the prickered plain. Set on the eastern periphery of Spanish settlement, the village was a spore-speck of civilization. Las Vegas was a three-day ride from the capital of the territory, Santa Fe. Its only tie to the larger world was the Santa Fe Trail, which passed along the outskirts of town—the same road the American army would be marching in on. To the east, the prairie seemed to stretch out forever, to the Staked Plains of Texas and the buffalo grasslands beyond—and eventually, if one kept on going, to the land of the American diablos.

  Hunters from Las Vegas, the ciboleros, rode out on the plains in search of antelope and buffalo. Often the villagers made trips to Santa Fe to buy supplies or confer with the military and religious authorities there. But mostly the people kept to their homes, and to the pageants of their church. Impoverished in every way except faith, they were pioneers, resolute in their battles with nature yet accepting of what they could not control. Although Las Vegas was a new settlement, founded by a land grant only eleven years earlier, most of the frontier families living here were descended from Spanish colonists who had arrived in New Mexico as early as 1598.

  The people of New Mexico, especially in rural outposts like Las Vegas, led a defensive, medieval sort of existence, clinging to Catholic folkways ossified by isolation. They labored in the safety of their coyote fences and mud walls, raising peppers and corn, beans, and squash, and tending sheep as their forefathers had in the shadows of the ancient mountains.

  August was always a pleasant month in this part of New Mexico. The nights were cool, the mornings golden. Days were hot and dry, the sleepy afternoons frequently doused by thunderstorms that rumbled in from the west. Gardens swelled with vegetables. Flocks grew fat on the grass that greened in the foothills from the new moisture of the monsoonal rains. By all outward appearances, Las Vegas seemed as it always did in this favored season, and yet the people knew that when the Americans arrived, their world would change utterly.

  Early on the morning of August 12 the fitful quiet of Las Vegas was punctured by the sound of hoofbeats. By the time the villagers heard the sound and discerned its menace, it was already too late: The invaders had cut across their fields and penetrated the town margins. To the people’s surprise, however, these weren’t the anticipated American invaders. This was an attack just as dreadful but much more familiar: Navajos.

  The raiders came boiling out of the mountains, painted for battle. At the last moment they let out a blood-chilling war-whoop that sounded to the villagers something like an owl—ahuuuuu, ahuuuuuu. The Navajo warriors rode bareback or on saddles made of sheepskin, and guided their mounts with reins of braided horsehair. They wielded clubs and carried shields made of buckskin layers taken from a deer’s hip, where the hide is thickest. They had images of serpents painted on the soles of their moccasins to give them a snakelike sneakiness as they approached their quarry. Their steel-tipped arrowheads were daubed with rattlesnake blood and prickly pear pulp mixed with charcoal taken from a tree that had been struck by lightning. Many of them wore strange, tight-fitting helmets made from the skinned heads of mountain lions.

  Before anyone could take up a musket in defense, the Navajos had driven off sheep and goats by the hundreds if not thousands, stolen horses, and killed one adolescent shepherd while kidnapping another.

  Then, as fast as they came, the reivers vanished. In the faint light, they drove their herds on networks of tiny trails that spilled into wider trails, and finally into dusty thoroughfares that were permanently worn down by the hooves of driven stock—great trampled highways of theft winding toward the Navajo country far to the west.

  Book One: THE NEW MEN

  Chapter 1: JUMPING OFF

  In the two decades he had lived and wandered in the West, Christopher Carson had led an unaccountably full life. He was only thirty-six year
s old, but it seemed he had done everything there was to do in the Western wilds—had been everywhere, met everyone. As a fur trapper, scout, and explorer, he had traveled untold thousands of miles in the Rockies, in the Great Basin, in the Sierra Nevada, in the Wind River Range, in the Tetons, in the coastal ranges of Oregon. As a hunter he had crisscrossed the Great Plains any number of times following the buffalo herds. He had seen the Pacific, been deep into Mexico, pushed far into British-held territories of the Northwest. He had traversed the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Mojave Deserts, gazed upon the Grand Canyon, stood at the life-leached margins of the Great Salt Lake. He had never seen the Hudson or the Potomac, but he had traced all the important rivers of the West—the Colorado, Platte, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Columbia, Green, Arkansas, Gila, Missouri, Powder, Big Horn, Snake, Salmon, Yellowstone, Rio Grande.

  Carson was present at the creation, it seemed. He had witnessed the dawn of the American West in all its vividness and brutality. In his constant travels he had caromed off of or intersected with nearly every major tribal group and person of consequence. He had lived the sweep of the Western experience with a directness few other men could rival.

  At first glance, Kit Carson was not much to look at, but that was a curious part of his charm. His bantam physique and modest bumpkin demeanor seemed interestingly at odds with the grandeur of the landscapes he had roamed. He stood only five-feet four-inches, with stringy brown hair grazing his shoulders. His jaw was clenched and squarish, his eyes a penetrating gray-blue, his mouth set in a tight little downturned construction that looked like a frown of mild disgust. The skin between his eyebrows was pinched in a furrow, as though permanently creased from constant squinting. His forehead rose high and craggy to a swept-back hairline. He had a scar along his left ear, another one on his right shoulder—both left by bullets. He appeared bowlegged from his years in the saddle, and he walked roundly, with a certain ungainliness, as though he were not entirely comfortable as a terrestrial creature, his sense of ease and familiarity of movement tied to his mule.

  He was a man of odd habits and superstitions. He never would take a second shot at standing game if his initial shot missed—this, he believed, was “bad medicine.” He never began a project on a Friday. He was fastidious about the way he dressed and cleaned any animal he killed. He believed in signs and omens. When he got a bad feeling about something or someone, he was quick to heed his instincts. A life of hard experience on the trail had taught him to be cautious at all times, tuned to danger. A magazine writer who rode with Carson observed with great curiosity the scout’s unfailing ritual as he prepared to bed down for the night: “His saddle, which he always used as a pillow, form[ed] a barricade for his head; his pistols half cocked were laid above it, and his trusty rifle reposed beneath the blanket by his side, ready for instant use. You never caught Kit exposing himself to the full glare of the camp fire.” When traveling, the writer noticed, Carson “scarcely spoke,” and his eye “was continually examining the country, his manner that of a man deeply impressed with a sense of responsibility.”

  When he did speak, Carson talked in the twangy cadences of backwoods Missouri—thar and har, ain’t and yonder, thataway and crick and I reckon so. It seemed right that this ultimate Westerner should be from Missouri, the Ur-country of the trans-Mississippi frontier, the mother state.

  Out west, Carson had learned to speak Spanish and French fluently, and he knew healthy smatterings of Navajo, Ute, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfoot, Shoshone, and Paiute, among other native tongues. He also knew Indian sign language and, one way or another, could communicate with most any tribe in the West. And yet for all his facility with language, Kit Carson was illiterate.

  Although he was a mountain man, a fraternity legendary for swilling and creative profanity, Carson was a straight arrow—“as clean as a hound’s tooth” as one friend put it. He liked poker and often smoked a pipe, but he drank very little and was not given to womanizing. He was now married to a Hispanic girl from Taos, Josefa Jaramillo. Slender, olive-skinned, and eighteen years his junior, Josefa possessed “a beauty of the haughty, heart-breaking kind” according to one smitten writer from Ohio who got to know her, “a beauty such as would lead a man with the glance of the eye to risk his life for one smile.” Only fifteen years old when she married Carson, Josefa was a bit taller than her husband. She was a dark-complected, bright-eyed woman whom one family member described as “very well-built, and graceful in every way.” Cristóbal, as Josefa called him, was utterly devoted to her, and to please her family, he had converted to Catholicism.

  Especially now that he was a married man, Carson gave off none of the mountain man’s swagger. “There was nothing like the fire-eater in his manner,” wrote one admirer, “but, to the contrary, in all his actions he was unassuming.” An army officer once introduced himself to Carson, saying, “So this is the distinguished Kit Carson who has made so many Indians run.” To which Carson replied, “Yes, but most of the time they were running after me.” His sense of humor was understated and dry, usually delivered with a faint grin and a glint of mischief in his eyes. When amused, he was prone to “sharp little barks of laughter.” He spoke quietly, in short, deliberate sentences, using language that was, according to one account, “forcible, slow, and pointed, with the fewest words possible.” A friend said Carson “never swore more’n was necessary.”

  Yes, Christopher Carson was a lovable man. Nearly everyone said so. He was loyal, honest, and kind. In many pinpointable incidents, he acted bravely and with much physical grace. More than once, he saved people’s lives without seeking recognition or pay. He was a dashing good Samaritan—a hero, even.

  He was also a natural born killer. It is hard to reconcile the much-described sweetness of his disposition with his frenzies of violence. Carson could be brutal even for the West of his day (a West so wild it lacked outlaws, for no law yet existed to be outside of ). His ferocious temper could be triggered in an instant. If you crossed him, he would find you. He pursued vengeance as though it were something sacred, with a kind of dogged focus that might be called tribal—his tribe being the famously grudge-happy Scotch-Irish.

  When called upon to narrate his exploits, which he did reluctantly, he spoke with a clinical lack of emotion, and with a hit man’s sense of aesthetics. He liked to call his skirmishes pretty—as in “that was the prettiest fight I ever saw.” He spoke of chasing down his enemies as “sport.” After participating in a preemptive attack—others called it a massacre—on an Indian village along California’s Sacramento River, Carson pronounced the action “a perfect butchery.”

  By the macabre distinctions of his day, he was regarded not as an Indian killer but as an Indian-fighter—which was, if not a noble American profession, at least a venerable one. But Carson did not hate Indians, certainly not in any sort of abstract racial sense. He was no Custer, no Sheridan, no Andrew Jackson. If he had killed Native Americans, he had also befriended them, loved them, buried them, even married them. Through much of his life, he lived more like an Indian than a white man. Most of his Indian victims had died in what he judged to be fair fights, or at least fights that could have gone the other way. It was miraculous he was still alive: He’d had more close calls than he could count.

  Because Carson’s direct words were rarely written, it’s hard to know what he really thought about Indians, or the violence of his times, or anything else. His autobiography, dictated in the mid-1850s (and turned into a biography by a tin-eared writer who has charitably been described as an “ass”), is a bone-dry recitation of his life and leaves us few clues. It was said that Carson told a pretty good story around a campfire, but his book carefully eschews anything approaching an insight. His refusal to pontificate was refreshing in a way—he lived in a golden age of windbags—but at the same time, his reticence in the face of the few big subjects of his life was remarkable. He was, and remains, a sort of Sphinx of the American West: His eyes had seen things, his mind held secrets, but he k
ept his mouth shut.

  Christopher Houston Carson was born in a log cabin in Madison County, Kentucky, on Christmas Eve of 1809, the same year and the same state in which Lincoln was born. A year later the Carson family pulled up stakes and trekked west from Kentucky to the Missouri frontier, with little Christopher, whom they nicknamed “Kit,” facing forward in the saddle, swaddled in his mother’s arms. The Carsons chose a spot in the wilderness near the Missouri River and hacked their farm from a large tract that had been part of a Spanish land grant bought by the sons of Daniel Boone, prior to the Louisiana Purchase. It was known indelicately as “Boone’s Lick,” for the salt deposits that attracted wild game and which the Boone family successfully mined. The Boones and the Carsons would become close family friends—working, socializing, and intermarrying with one another.