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

by Hampton Sides

  And so he hacked away at the corpse’s face until it was a sodden tangle—until, as Fremont later put it, “He knocked his head to pieces.”

  Chapter 15: ON THE ALTAR OF THE COUNTRY

  In the blast heat of mid-August, the New Mexicans waited for General Kearny. More than three thousand men had answered their governor’s call to patriotism. They had streamed from their villages and ranches and cornfields, rich and poor alike, boys on burros and peasants in their tattered sombreros and old men hobbling on arthritic feet. Chanting Crush the gringo invaders! Stop the infidels!—they toted antique muskets, lances, swords, bows and arrows, clubs. They assembled fifteen miles southeast of Santa Fe in a narrow defile called Apache Canyon, so named because the Apaches had for years used it as a place to ambush wagon trains.

  Apache Canyon was the eastern gateway to Santa Fe, a parched and rattlesnakey place well suited for defense: As the Santa Fe Trail passed through its tight jaws, the road became so constricted that travelers could enter only one wagon at a time. From the high rock walls, screened behind trees and boulders, a well-positioned army could rain unmerciful fire down upon any invading force. And so, just as the Americans had suspected and feared, the New Mexicans would mount their final defense here.

  After weeks of indecisiveness in the face of conflicting rumors about the size and precise intent of the American advance, the New Mexicans now had to work fast. They hauled some old cannons from Santa Fe and set them up in strategic places along the canyon walls. They stockpiled ammunition. They chopped down trees that obstructed the lines of fire and began to dig themselves in.

  They were, all in all, an abysmal army, untrained and laughably ill equipped. But they enjoyed one advantage: They loved their country, most of them, and were keen in their desperation to defend it. They had become convinced that the Americans meant to destroy their ancient way of life, to ravage their women, and even to abolish their faith. Santa Fe was plunged into pandemonium. Many of the clergy packed up and fled. Officials proposed destroying the city’s churches to prevent the enemy from desecrating them as barracks. Wealthy families boarded up their homes and joined relatives in the south. The rest sent their women into the mountains, and then picked up whatever weapons they could find and made their way to Apache Canyon.

  For days, as the canyon’s defenders improved their fortifications, dissension brewed in their ranks. No one was quite sure who was in charge, and there were conflicting ideas about how best to hold the canyon. Finally, after many unexplained delays, the governor rode into camp accompanied by a retinue of one hundred presidial soldiers and most of the members of the New Mexican legislative assembly. With his strong presence, it seemed the defenders’ efforts would gain new focus.

  The governor, Don Manuel Armijo, was a master of court intrigues who had been in and out of power for years. Having risen through cunning from humble peasant origins near Albuquerque, Armijo had a reputation for shameless corruption. He was not above outright stealing: It was said that as a boy he had made his first wealth by robbing a few thousand head of sheep from a prominent man and then selling them back to him. After the Santa Fe Trail opened, he had finagled a post as the collector of customs, and by levying (and personally pocketing) exorbitant tariffs against the American traders, he had amassed a fortune. By charging $500 for every wagon-load that entered Santa Fe, regardless of the contents, Armijo reportedly collected as much as $60,000 per year.

  As governor, Armijo was an avid gambler, a secretive breeder of racehorses, and a composer of florid but deeply cryptic proclamations that left the public not quite knowing where he stood. He was arbitrary in his affairs and thought nothing of stealing from his own people without pretext or provocation. “God rules the heavens,” he liked to say, “but Armijo rules the earth.” One army lieutenant who later investigated him reported that it was “Armijo’s practice, in peace or in war, to seize the person or property of anyone who fell under his displeasure.” Armijo was called a general, but that was just a bit of title inflation he permitted himself; he had no military training whatsoever. Still, he loved to wear flamboyant uniforms—with bright sashes, glinting swords, and feathery plumes. He was a decorous and gracious host. At the Palace of the Governors he would entertain far into the night, always generous with his imported delicacies and decanters of El Paso brandy. Though married, he kept several mistresses. He had a round, jowly face that was not unhandsome, but he was extremely, almost operatically, obese—“a mountain of fat” in the estimation of one English travel writer who passed through New Mexico.

  Armijo was, above all, a survivor, and while he put on a bold face, he could be an impressive coward when cornered. “It is smarter to appear brave,” he liked to say, “than to be so.”

  Earlier in the summer, when Armijo first received word that the American army was pressing toward Santa Fe, the “general” behaved strangely. First, he kept to his quarters and did nothing at all. Then he hastily held a meeting of prominent officials in which he called for “a great sacrifice on the altar of the country” while simultaneously indicating that any resistance was doomed. At one point he even asked his own ministers, to their shock, “whether I ought to defend New Mexico…or not.”

  Shortly after that, he secretly entertained an American emissary sent ahead by Kearny, offered him a sumptuous meal, and patiently considered his arguments. The emissary was James Magoffin, brother-in-law of Susan Magoffin, still recovering from her miscarriage back at Bent’s Fort. President Polk himself had given the savvy trader what amounted to plenipotentiary powers to negotiate a deal with Armijo. He had come straightaway from Washington to Bent’s Fort with high-level orders cloaked in absolute secrecy.

  In early August, James Magoffin left Bent’s Fort with a small escort of dragoons. A jovial sophisticate, he traveled in style as was his wont, puffing opium and sipping claret in his carriage as he sped to Santa Fe. Behind closed doors at the Palace of the Governors, Magoffin may have offered Armijo a considerable sum of money if he would promise not to take up arms. Whether the governor accepted this outright bribe has never been proven, and the details of their conference are shrouded in conjecture. But given everything that is known about Armijo’s rather legendary venality, and his erratic behavior leading up to the American invasion, it seems quite likely that he did.

  Even while he was hosting Magoffin, the governor liquidated his own considerable business holdings and cleaned out the church coffers. Then he sent a series of formal letters to Kearny through express runners. These oddly worded messages seemed to float opaquely somewhere between capitulation and tepid defiance. “You have notified me that you intend to take possession of the country I govern,” one of Armijo’s letters read. “The people of the country have risen en masse in my defense. If you take the country, it will be because you are strongest in battle. I suggest you to stop…and we will meet and negotiate on the plains.”

  Armijo was stalling for time. He was shrewd enough to keep his true intentions to himself. He wrote nothing down—he was, in fact, only half literate. But, truly, he found himself in an impossible situation. His government was bankrupt. His army was a joke. If he put up a fight, the Americans would surely have him hanged. His only slender hope was for his superiors in faraway Chihuahua to send up military reinforcements, and when by mid-August those failed to arrive, he was left in a fretful predicament—“forced,” as one historian put it, “to heave from position to position.”

  Other New Mexican leaders, however, unequivocally insisted that Governor Armijo defend the homeland—to the last man, if necessary. Foremost among these stalwarts was Col. Diego Archuleta, an influential politician and a courageous soldier who was Armijo’s second-in-command. In temperament and character, Archuleta was the very opposite of Armijo. For him, it was not a question of whether the war could be won; it was simply a question of honor. Archuleta was astounded that Armijo could even think of deserting the cause. At all costs, the New Mexican people must repulse the invaders, or die tryin
g.

  Archuleta had been the prime mover in mustering the volunteers who assembled at Apache Canyon, and he was optimistic about their success. He realized that the American lines of communication, not to mention its supply trains, were now spread out over many hundreds of dismal, Comanche-infested miles. Kearny’s troops must surely be hot, hungry, sick, and demoralized, their livestock jaded, their will to fight withering under the high plains sun as they marched a thousand miles from their home. Besides, the New Mexicans outnumbered Kearny’s force by more than two-to-one. If they had time to get themselves properly dug in, Apache Canyon would be nearly impossible to breach.

  The faithful defenders at Apache Canyon, by and large, were not privy to Armijo’s behind-the-scenes vacillations; as far as they knew, their governor remained a staunch protector of the province. That was, at least, the pose he had assumed in public. On August 8, Armijo had circulated a war proclamation that sounded, on its surface, like a clarion call: “Fellow Patriots,” it read, “the moment has come at last when the country requires from her sons the bottomless sacrifice which circumstances claim for her salvation.” He asked them to show the “highest devotion to homeland,” assuring them that “he who actually governs you is ready to sacrifice his life and interests in defense of his beloved country.” On the other hand, anyone who closely parsed the governor’s call to arms may have detected undertones of equivocation. At one point Armijo urged his subjects to “seek victory…if it be possible, for no one is obliged to do what is impossible.” He told the citizens that, regrettably, they would have to foot the bill themselves, and then basically left the whole matter in their hands: “Your governor is dependent upon your pecuniary resources, upon your decision, and upon your convictions.”

  On August 16, as the governor rode into the mouth of Apache Canyon, he wore one of his snappiest uniforms and straddled a prized horse that groaned under his staggering weight. He surveyed the breastworks his men were constructing and seemed to like what he saw. He mouthed a few encouraging words about the coming battle. Armijo was a good thespian and knew how to rally a crowd. But even while he bellowed and spluttered and shifted his “mountain of fat” in his beautiful silver-trimmed saddle, restlessly working his horse’s ribs with the enormous rowels of his spurs, the governor seemed troubled, his gaze distracted by far-off concerns.

  Chapter 16: A PERFECT BUTCHERY

  On the morning after the Klamath attack, it was already decided: Fremont would return to California just as he’d been angling to do all along. His scientific expedition would metamorphose more frankly into a military one, and he would meld what he considered his own shining future with that of a soon-to-be-continental nation.

  But before he could turn south, Fremont had another, less glorious matter to attend to—avenging the deaths of his three comrades. The Klamaths must suffer a terrible price, he vowed. It was a matter of honoring Lajeunesse and the two fallen Delawares, but it was also the principle of the thing: No exploring party, now or in the future, should ever have to suffer an unprovoked attack like this again. “For the moment,” Fremont wrote, “I threw all other considerations aside and determined to square accounts with these people before I left them.”

  Fremont decided to make a northward clockwise circuit around the entirety of Klamath Lake, eventually intersecting with the others in his expedition party who were camped on the north shore. As he crept along the timbered shoreline, Fremont planned to search for Indian villages and exact retribution wherever he went. Carson had no problem with this course of action; his outrage over the loss of his old friend Lajeunesse was still keen. “The Indians had commenced the war with us without cause,” Carson later said. “I thought they should be chastised in a summary manner.”

  That morning, May 10, 1846, Carson and the others wrapped the bodies of Denny, Crane, and Lajeunesse in blankets and slung them over the pack animals. Carson wanted to bury them in some nice spot by the lake near the main camp, where they had shovels to dig a proper grave. But as the party threaded through the thick timber, the now-rigid corpses kept thudding and smacking against the trunks of the trees, “becoming much bruised,” according to Carson. Realizing they could not in good conscience continue this ghoulish procession, the men scraped a shallow hole with their knives and solemnly buried their friends together, covering the grave with logs and brush to avoid detection. Fremont, exercising the explorer’s prerogative, named the nearby brook Denny Creek—a name it still carries to this day.

  Fremont’s party resumed the march north. The Delaware Indians were the first to detect Klamaths in the bush. They took off in pursuit and in a few moments came the reports of their long rifles. Soon the Delawares returned, bearing two bloody scalps. “Very sick before,” one of them said. “Better now.”

  They kept moving along the shoreline. Fremont picked Carson and ten other men to scout an area where he believed a Klamath settlement was located. Carson’s group surged ten miles ahead and soon found the hamlet. They crept up and viewed it from the cattails. It was a large fishing village, named Dokdokwas, built near a marshy place where the Williamson River flowed into Upper Klamath Lake. The village had more than fifty lodges and bustled with life: Dogs yapped, women wove mats out of the lake reeds, fishermen glided about in their dugout canoes. Fillets of salmon and sucker-fish dried in the curing smoke.

  Suddenly the villagers became agitated, and Carson realized they’d spotted him. He called for an immediate charge, and although they were greatly outnumbered, the eleven men cantered across the shallows and raced into the now-swarming village. Carson’s small party fired away with impunity. Most of the Klamath men were out fishing or hunting, and those few present were armed only with bows and arrows. In a few minutes Carson and his men had killed twenty-one Indians. Frantically the surviving villagers scattered for the hills, and the Delawares slaughtered many of them in their hiding places. Some of the Klamath boys swam away beneath the water, breathing through hollow reeds.

  It was, as Carson might say, a perfect butchery—by any standards, pure and literal overkill. “We gave them something to remember,” he said. “They were severely punished.” Although Carson claimed his men “did not interfere with” women or children, one of his men later wrote that he found at least one “old Indian woman” dead in a canoe. Klamath accounts of the attack on Dokdokwas insist that many women and children were massacred.

  Carson then ordered the village destroyed. “I wished to do them as much damage as I could,” he later reasoned, “so I directed their houses to be set on fire.” His men fanned out and torched the Klamath lodges, semi-subterranean hovels made of mud and logs woven together with patterned reeds that, being brittle and dry, were extremely flammable. Soon the whole village was ablaze. It was, Carson thought, “a beautiful sight.”

  Fremont saw the billowing smoke from a distance and raced to catch up. When he galloped into the burning village, the captain was sorely disappointed to have “arrived too late for the sport.” But he seemed immensely satisfied. Said Fremont: “It will be a story for them to hand down while there are any Klamaths still living on their lake.”

  (True to Fremont’s prediction, the massacre at Dokdokwas is indeed a story handed down among the Klamaths—and it still serves as a reminder of what happened in their people’s very first encounter with an official party of Americans. The tribe never rebuilt what was then their largest fishing village; today Dokdokwas is a pristine and desolate swath of reedy shoreline, with no markers to indicate what happened there. According to historian David Roberts, who writes perceptively about the curious friendship between Fremont and Carson in his fine study A Newer World, the tragedy at Dokdokwas is deepened by the fact that most scholars now agree that Fremont and Carson, in their blind vindictiveness, probably chose the wrong tribe to lash out against: In all likelihood the band of Indians that had killed Lajeunesse and the two Delawares were from the neighboring Modocs, another lake-land tribe centered closer to the Oregon-California border. The Klamaths wer
e culturally related to the Modocs, but the two tribes were bitter enemies.)

  Later that day, one of the Klamath warriors returned to Dokdokwas and, realizing his village had been destroyed, drew a bow on Carson in the deep woods. Spying him, Carson raised his gun but it misfired. The Klamath was about to let his poison arrow fly when Fremont—riding a fearless gray warhorse he called Sacramento—glimpsed Carson’s predicament. He wheeled Sacramento and trampled the hapless warrior, whose arrow flew awry. Sagundai, a Delaware chief, then descended on the injured Klamath and pummeled him to death with a club. From that moment on, Carson felt he owed Fremont his life. “In all probability, if he had not run over the Indian as he did, I would have been shot,” Carson later said. “I owe my life to them two—the captain and Sacramento saved me.”

  As Fremont and his men completed their long, brutal circuit around Klamath Lake, they continued to kill Indians in a desultory fashion, in ones and twos, but their anger was spent. Even Fremont had reached the bottom of his revenge. “I had now kept the promise I made to myself and had punished these people well for their treachery,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Now I turned my thought to the work which they had delayed.”

  Fremont headed due south now, crossing out of the realm of the Klamaths and on into California. Yet as he and his expedition members dropped out of the Sierras and into the Sacramento Valley, they were nearly continuously hounded by Indians of various tribes—Yahooskins, Modocs, Shastas—whose warriors were clearly riled by reports emanating from Klamath Lake. Carson felt a constant hint of attack, an awareness that the party was being watched. At one point Carson suggested that they bypass a deep gorge where, he rightly suspected, Indians had planned an ambush. Some of those Indians followed Fremont’s party, however, and Carson decided to ride into their midst and flush them out. Suddenly one of them emerged from behind a rock. “He came from his hiding place and commenced firing arrows very rapidly,” Carson narrates in his autobiography. “I dismounted and fired. My shot had the desired effect.”