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

by Hampton Sides

  From Carson’s point of view, the West was filling up fast with what he took to be untrustworthy characters—outlaws, charlatans, religious zealots, opportunists, schemers, boosters, empire-builders. Yet he seemed scarcely to recognize that by guiding Fremont all over the West, he had been an important catalyst in bringing about these changes; in a sense, Carson had unwittingly fouled his own nest, luring to the West the very sorts of people he loathed.

  Everything he touched, it seemed, had withered. The beaver he had trapped were on the verge of extinction. The Indians he had lived among had been decimated by disease. Virgin solitudes he once loved had been captured by the disenchanting tools of the togographers. The annual rendezvous of the mountain men was a thing of the past. Even the seemingly indestructible Bent’s Fort was no more. One day in August 1849, Charles’s brother William decided it was time to start over. Not wanting to sell the great fort to the government, not wanting it to be vandalized and overrun by Indians, he came up with a more dramatic solution: He filled the labyrinthine chambers with kegs of powder and blew parts of his weird, splendid castle to smithereens. If there had been any doubt before, the immolation of Bent’s Fort loudly proclaimed the death of an era.

  In this diminished new world, Carson was an anachronism, a buckskin curiosity who had, it seemed, no role left to play other than as a beloved symbol. And he was beloved: Everyone who encountered him seemed to find him inexplicably endearing. An English writer named George Ruxton, who passed through the West shortly after the American occupation, was intrigued by the contrasts within Carson’s personality—his laconic homeliness on the one hand, and his legendary status on the other. Ruxton wrote, “Small in stature, and slenderly limbed, but with muscles of wire, with a fair complexion and quiet, intelligent features, to look at Kit none would suppose that the mild being before him was an incarnate devil in an Indian fight.”

  William Tecumseh Sherman, then a young army lieutenant, met Carson briefly in California and expressed a similar astonishment at the scout’s appearance: “I cannot express my surprise at beholding a small, stoop-shouldered man, with freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring. He spoke but little, and answered questions in monosyllables.” But, Sherman went on, “Carson’s integrity was simply perfect. The Indians knew it and would trust him any day before they would us [soldiers], or the president, either!”

  “His voice is as soft and gentle as a woman’s,” wrote George Brewerton in a perceptive article for Harper’s Monthly after having ridden with Carson on one of his transcontinental treks. “The hero of a hundred desperate encounters, whose life has been mostly spent amid wildernesses where the white man is almost unknown, is one of Dame Nature’s gentlemen.” For other people, especially women, Carson’s humility came across as a disconcerting awkwardness. “He was uncouth…a lonely man,” recalled Marian Sloan, an Anglo girl who lived in Santa Fe. “His was a great heart and very kind, yet he wore shyness before his face like a veil.”

  The majority of the public apparently saw something beyond the veil, however, for Carson’s fame now spread far and wide. Rivers, lakes, passes, trails, and mountain peaks bore his name. A tiny outpost in Nevada, eventually to become the territorial and then state capital, would be called Carson City. Kit Carson, an elegant steamship launched a year earlier, now threshed the Mississippi and Missouri waters.

  Carson was somewhat oblivious to the attention he stirred. Even if it had occurred to him to cash in on his burgeoning fame, he lacked the talents to promote himself, and this only made him more authentic. The man was just plain hard to reach in remote New Mexico and had, up until the summer of 1849, been so constantly on the move that few reporters had gotten a word with him. Keeping himself scarce whetted the public’s appetite, for nothing stokes a myth like inaccessibility.

  Carson’s reticence led people to fill in the gaps and project upon him whatever qualities they wanted a frontier hero to have. Most magazine and newspaper writers couldn’t resist the urge to make him taller, stronger, more dashing and more eloquent than he actually was. Once, on the Oregon Trail, Carson happened to encounter a man from Arkansas who’d heard the famous scout was in the vicinity. “I say, stranger, are you Kit Carson?” he demanded. Carson answered in the affirmative, and the man studied him doubtfully. “Look ’ere,” the Arkansan finally said, “you ain’t the kind of Kit Carson I’m looking for.”

  It was only a matter of time before popular novelists would take up the character of Kit Carson and shamelessly fictionalize him. That year, 1849, saw the publication of Kit Carson: The Prince of the Gold Hunters, the first pulp fiction paperback featuring Carson as its swashbuckling protagonist. In this forgettable story, written by a hack named Charles Averill, Carson slaughters Indians by the score and predictably rescues a young girl who has been kidnapped by savages. Carson is presented as a great hero who had never lost a battle, a man with “a lynx-like eye and an imperturbable coolness” who is “as little seen as he is widely known.” Carson’s slight stature has, in Averill’s book, swelled to superhuman proportions—he has a “mighty frame,” “massive arms,” “prodigious strength,” and a chest built like “a fortress.” Among other twists, the story involves a prairie fire, a treasure-laden cave, a naïve Harvard student pursued West by an evil miserly uncle, and a perilous escape from Indian captors in which Carson frees his party by having one of his comrades hold a torch to his wrists to sizzle away the ropes that bind him.

  Averill’s twenty-five-cent novel was a “blood and thunder,” as the genre was known, a precursor to the modern western, briskly paced and packed with cliffhangers and hair-raising scrapes. Although he claimed the book was “founded on actual facts,” Averill did not make the slightest attempt to learn anything about the real Kit Carson or seek permission to use his name. As one of his actual facts, Averill fabulously asserts that Carson single-handedly “discovered” the goldfields of California. Yet Prince of the Gold Hunters became wildly successful, a best-seller as measured by the standards of its day. More important, many other writers would soon copy Averill’s formula. His was only the first in what would be a long line of hyperbolic thrillers, pulp novels, and juvenile biographies—some seventy books would be written over the years—starring Kit Carson as avenger, rescuer, horseman, and Indian killer, the “Nestor of the Rockies,” the “Happy Warrior,” the “Knight of the Prairie,” the “Captain of Adventure.” He had become an action-figure hero. This lurid body of literature would catapult Carson into a stratosphere of celebrity that few nineteenth-century Americans would ever enjoy.

  It was difficult to exaggerate how hungry the nation had become for a single heroic character who could personify the surge of Manifest Destiny that was so dramatically changing the country. Of course, many Americans suspected that stealing land from another sovereign power ran counter to the country’s noblest first principles—as did stealing land roamed for millennia by aborigines who just might be human beings. Certainly, there were doubts tugging at the national excitement. Perhaps the public found comfort in the possibility that extraordinary, and yet also quite ordinary, Anglo-Americans already inhabited this new Western world, exalting American accomplishments while simplifying the stickiest themes of the conquest.

  Kit Carson, more than any figure on the Western stage, filled the role. Honest, unassuming, wry around a campfire, tongue-tied around the ladies, clear in his intentions, swift in action, a bit of a loner: He was the prototype of the Western hero. Before there were Stetson hats and barbed-wire fences, before there were Wild West shows or Colt six-shooters to be slung at the OK Corral, there was Nature’s Gentleman, the original purple cliché of the purple sage.

  Carson hated it all. Without his consent, and without receiving a single dollar, he was becoming a caricature.

  In late October, about a week after the bodies of the White party were discovered, a group of Pueblo Indians reported that they had visited the encampment of some Jicarilla Apaches somewhere ou
t on the plains to the east of the Santa Fe Trail. In the camp they had seen a white American female and her baby, obviously captives and in some distress. When this news reached Santa Fe, a company of 1st Dragoons was immediately dispatched from Taos under the command of Maj. William Grier. Their mission was to track down the Indians and bring Ann White and her daughter back alive. Grier’s mounted soldiers galloped eastward through Taos Canyon to Carson’s ranch on the Rayado. After conferring with the tracker and scout, Major Grier persuaded Carson to come along on the rescue.

  Carson was intimately acquainted with the Jicarilla tribe. Since setting up the ranch, he’d had several dealings with them. They were a small branch of the Apaches who ranged across northern New Mexico in tight warrior bands. Like all Apaches, they spoke a dialect of the Athapaskan tongue and were ethnically and linguistically related to, though not friendly with, the Navajos. The Jicarillas had few allies. They were overpowered by larger, better-armed, and more cohesive warrior tribes of the plains, especially the Comanches, who made frequent incursions into their territory.

  The Jicarillas were a cornered people, living in the interstices, in the shadow of stronger nations. Years later a spokesman of the Jicarillas would remember this dark time when everyone in the tribe seemed plunged in fear. “At the first sound, even a shout, they all made for the brush,” he recalled. “And whenever they went out on the plains, they were afraid to stay there.”

  The tribe’s name derived from its proficiency in constructing tight straw baskets—jicarilla means “little basket” in Spanish. The name bespoke the tribe’s peripatetic lifestyle. The Jicarillas were hunter-gatherers who roamed the watersheds in search of berries, roots, seeds, nuts, and wild plants; as a light and portable means of carrying their foraged foods, baskets were an important part of their culture. Their baskets were reputedly woven so tightly that they could hold liquid. One army account described a raid in which Jicarilla warriors stole a herd of milking cows from the Rayado area; pursuing soldiers found the thieves with the stolen cows surrounded by scores of baskets that were hanging from the trees and filled to their brims with milk. “Evidently,” the reporting officer wrote sardonically, “they were planning to go into the dairy business in a big way.” The Jicarillas were also expert hunters—pursuing elk, deer, antelope, and mountain sheep as well as small game like jackrabbits, squirrels, and beaver. Occasionally they moved out onto the plains to hunt buffalo, but they did so cautiously, for these expeditions only invited Comanche attack.

  The Comanches, in turn, were reacting to new pressures of their own. Pushed steadily westward by the rapid settlement of Texas, the slaughter of the Great Plains buffalo herds, and the creation of new reservations for relocated Eastern tribes in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, the Comanche warriors had stepped up their attacks on the Jicarillas in recent years. Old borders were changing, and nomadic tribes that had traditionally operated over huge areas were now brushing up against one another as never before. American expansion had set in motion a complex chain reaction of social displacements; even in the immense Southwest, there was only so much land to go around.

  Since the American occupation of New Mexico, the Jicarilla hunting grounds had consistently thinned as new settlers moved into their already attenuated territory. Squeezed in this way, the Jicarillas turned to raiding. Their agriculture was limited, and they were finding wild game increasingly scarce. They were understandably angered, and at the same time tantalized by new settlements like Maxwell’s growing operation on the Rayado. This was their home turf, and had been for centuries. According to Jicarilla creation stories, their ancestors had emerged into the world not far from here, in a place they broadly referred to as “near the center of the earth.” In the early 1700s, Spanish soldiers had explored “La Jicarilla,” as they called the wild world beyond the mountains, and they briefly considered building a presidio in its midst but then abandoned the idea as impractical—the area was simply too remote and too overrun with warlike Apaches.

  Yet now, a century and a half later, the once-proud Jicarilla tribe was tiny—amounting to no more than 1,000 people, possibly only 500. They were not a twentieth as large or as powerful as their Athapaskan cousins, the Navajos, but they were more desperate. In contrast to the Navajos, who principally stole livestock to increase their already considerable wealth in a risky game of status, the Jicarillas stole to survive. In the three years since the American occupation, the Jicarillas had swiped many thousands of sheep from ranchers in northeastern New Mexico. Carson was not surprised to learn that the Jicarillas were behind the massacre of the James White party and the kidnapping of Ann White, her daughter, and servant. For several years the outrages committed by the Jicarillas had been hotly discussed throughout this part of the territory. An army lieutenant stationed in Taos reported in the summer of 1849 that the Jicarillas were “robbing everywhere throughout the mountains.” Col. George A. McGill at the time described the Jicarillas as “troublesome” and “incorrigible,” and darkly predicted that they would “continue to rob and murder our citizens until they are exterminated.”

  When he was governor, Charles Bent characterized the Jicarilla Apaches as “a great annoyance” to life in New Mexico. They were “an indolent and cowardly people,” he wrote, “living principally by thefts committed on the Mexicans, there being but little game in the country through which they range, and the fear of other Indians not permitting them to venture on the plains for buffalo.”

  Whether these assessments from the capital were accurate, the Jicarilla Apache were not an abstract problem for Kit Carson. To make a success of his ranching enterprise, he had to come to terms with the Jicarillas and the changing constellation of other tribes that surrounded him. The Jicarillas would often drop by Rayado for what Carson and his fellow ranchers called “dinner stops.” They expected food, tobacco, and other presents, and they always came in sufficiently intimidating numbers to lace their visits with the threat of attack.

  In dealing with the Jicarillas, Carson drew on the rough art of frontier diplomacy he had learned as a mountain man, a diplomacy that was entirely pragmatic. He understood the importance of holding peace councils and constantly renewing alliances among tribes, but he did not hesitate to attack any band that had attacked him. He practiced the code of swift reprisal that was almost universally practiced by the Indians themselves: Failure to strike back, he understood, would only be interpreted as weakness and inevitably lead to an even bolder assault.

  A few months earlier Carson was briefly visited by a man named Charles Pancoast, a Pennsylvanian traveling the Santa Fe Trail en route to the goldfields of California. Pancoast’s diaries leave a vivid portrait of Carson’s work on the ranch and his ongoing troubles with the Jicarilla Apaches. Pancoast described Carson as a “Rocky Mountain Hunter” wearing moccasins and buckskins, with shoulder-length hair and a sombrero to block the summer sun. Carson welcomed Pancoast cordially enough, but the visitor was struck by how taciturn and humble the “famous Mountaineer” was; Pancoast had to goad him to talk about himself, but eventually Carson let down his guard and the two men stayed up late around the campfire, discussing Carson’s adventures. At one point, at Pancoast’s urging, Carson even showed him a few old wounds from his mountain exploits.

  Carson was preoccupied with his ranch, which Pancoast said was “not at all stylish.” Carson described the difficulties he’d had in protecting his stock from the ravages of the Apaches. He had made a habit of treating all visiting Indians kindly and lavishing them with gifts, but on at least one occasion he had been forced to ask U.S. soldiers to help him pursue raiders. “Being thoroughly acquainted with the haunts of the Indians,” Pancoast wrote, “he had punished them so severely that they had found it their best policy to make their peace with him. He now enjoyed their Friendship, and often gave them meat; and they no longer molested his stock, although they continued to steal from others.”

  Once, Carson brought his family over to the Rayado. Teresina Bent, Charles Be
nt’s daughter, was living with the Carsons then, and years later she recalled a terrifying encounter the family had with an Indian tribe. Carson had left on a business errand of some sort, and while he was away, a band of Indians, probably Jicarilla Apaches, showed up on the property, demanding food. “We women all set to work cooking,” Teresina recalled, “coffee and meat and whatever else we had.”

  The chief of the war party saw me and wanted to buy me to make me his wife. He kept offering horses—ten, fifteen, twenty horses. We acted friendly with the Indians so as not to make the chief angry. My, I was so frightened! And while I carried platters of food from the kitchen, the tears were running down my cheeks. That made the chief laugh. He was bound to buy me, and when they all got through eating he said that they would wait; if I was not delivered to him by the time the sun touched a hill there in the west, he would take me by force. Then he and the warriors went out a little way and camped right in sight of the house. We started to [make] bullets. We were all ready for a siege when, just as the sun touched the hill in the west, Mr. Carson and a company of soldiers came galloping up the valley. The Indians saw them and went away. Then I cried some more, I was so glad. I did not want to go with the dirty chief.

  Maj. William Grier and Kit Carson took off from the Rayado ranch with a company of dragoons and sped east some forty miles to the scene of the White massacre. Although it had been several weeks since White and his escorts were slain, Grier and Carson discovered the setting much as the Jicarilla assailants had left it. In his dictated autobiography, he noted that they found “trunks that were broken open, harnesses cut, everything destroyed that the Indians could not carry with them.”