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

by Hampton Sides

  His four-year tenure was a testament to the potential power of one-man diplomacy: While Dodge was agent, the Navajos remained substantially at peace, and reports of their raiding were scarce. For a brief time even the tenor of the talk about them changed. William Davis, a Harvard-trained lawyer and circuit court judge who was also a writer of some note and had made a trip with Dodge and other peace emissaries deep into Navajo country in 1855, theorized that the Diné may well be a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel (a fashionable anthropological topic of his day). “In many respects the Navajos are the most interesting tribe of Indians in our country,” Davis wrote in his perceptive study of New Mexico, El Gringo, published in 1856. “The modern doctrine of ‘Women’s Rights’ may be said to prevail among them to a very liberal extent. Women are admitted into their councils and sometimes control their deliberations. The Navajos are mild in disposition, and very seldom commit murder.” They were, Davis concluded, “a superior race of Indians.”

  With Henry Dodge tirelessly soliciting on their behalf, the Navajos’ reputation as the incorrigible thugs of the Southwest was softening. But in 1857 this brief period of amity came to an abrupt end. While hunting in the Zuni Mountains, Red Sleeves was murdered, reportedly by Apache Indians.

  Everything Dodge had worked for soon evaporated; the relationship between the Diné and the Americans never recovered.

  The conflict between the bilagaana and the Navajos came to a flash point in the spring of 1858, when Manuelito insisted on grazing his cattle herds on the grounds of an American fort called Fort Defiance, deep in the Navajo red rock country, on the present-day border between Arizona and New Mexico. From the moment of its construction in 1851, the Americans had intended Fort Defiance, as its name suggests, to be an irritant and a provocation to the Navajos—and it was. When the American soldiers instructed Manuelito to remove his animals from U.S. property, the headman refused. “The water there is mine, not yours,” he reportedly said, “and the same with the grass. Even the ground it grows from belongs to me, not to you.” And so on May 29, soldiers marched out in the field and shot every last head of Manuelito’s cattle herd—some sixty in all—and left the carcasses to rot in the field.

  A month after the herd was slaughtered, an anonymous Navajo came to Fort Defiance to trade with the soldiers. When no one was looking, the Navajo turned and fired an arrow into the back of a teenage black slave owned by the American commander, Maj. William Brooks. While the Navajo made a clean getaway, the stricken boy, whose name was Jim, attempted to pull the arrow out himself, but the shaft broke off with the arrowhead lodged deep in his body. Jim died of his wound several days later. Interpreting the incident (probably correctly) as a personal attack, Major Brooks threatened to obliterate the Navajos if they did not produce the murderer at once. A few weeks later the Navajos obliged, hauling in the corpse of the man they said was the culprit. But the fort surgeon conducted an autopsy on the cadaver and determined that the Diné were trying to pull a fast one: The body was that of a Mexican who met almost none of the physical descriptions of the murderer.

  After that, the situation escalated into a fairly hot war, with the American army leading multiple forays into Navajo country to hunt down Manuelito. But like a Navajo Rob Roy, the shadowy headman stayed just a few steps ahead of the soldiers. Then in April 1860, Manuelito organized a thousand Navajo warriors and staged a full-frontal assault on Fort Defiance. Striking before dawn and armed primarily with arrows, he and his warriors occupied a number of the fort buildings, killed a United States soldier, and produced numerous casualties. However, Manuelito’s near triumph at Fort Defiance did nothing to change American policy in the end, but it cemented his reputation as the preeminent warrior of the Navajo.

  By all accounts and photographs, he looked the part: Black Weeds was tall and dark with a distinct air of menace, the sort of man who made people, even other Navajos, edgy. His shoulders were broad, his chest muscular, his torso long and lean. He had a scar on the left side of his chest from a gunshot wound sustained in a fight with Comanches. He carried himself with great confidence, for he was one of the true ricos of the tribe, blessed with many thousands of sheep, numerous children, and at least two wives—Narbona’s daughter and a Mexican woman named Juanita he had stolen in a raid. His chin was scruffed with a wispy beard, and his facial features, chiseled and vaguely Asian, made him look like a Mongol chieftain. Nearly every photograph of Manuelito shows the scowl of an all-consuming wrath. A biography now taught in Navajo schools describes Black Weeds this way: “An angry fire burned within him, and he refused to put it out.”

  He was born in 1818, a son of the Bit’ahni, or Folded Arms clan, and grew up in a place called the Bear’s Ears, in present-day Utah. Because his homeland was close to the mountain country of the roving Ute Indians, he grew up trilingual, fluent in both Navajo and Ute as well as Spanish. Even as a child he carried himself with a jaunty arrogance that made people notice. His friends teased him that even though he had not been on a single raid, he walked around as though he were a headman.

  Young Manuelito replied, “I walk like a headman now so that when I become one, I will already know how to behave.”

  In 1835, at the age of seventeen, he participated in his first great battle, the ambush on the invading Mexican army at Copper Pass organized by Narbona. He donned a war helmet, carried a buckskin shield, and painted serpents on the soles of his moccasins. He dipped his arrows in a poison made from rattlesnake blood and yucca-leaf juice. During the battle he made a name for himself by attacking and killing a Pueblo Indian in a hand-to-hand fight. He scalped his victim, and later chewed on the bloody skin so that he might draw power from it and become “a true warrior.” From his actions that day he won the nom de guerre Hashkeh Naabaah, or Angry Warrior.

  He married Narbona’s daughter and lived with the great leader’s outfit. As a young man he traveled to Santa Fe with Narbona and watched him confer with Mexican leaders in the Palace of the Governors. An account in Navajo Biographies notes that during his sojourn in Santa Fe, Manuelito found an unexpected pleasure: “When he stepped boldly into the sunlight, he laughed to himself at the reaction of the timid citizens who jumped in spite of themselves at the sight of the imposing young Navajo. He held his face stern and solemn, never looking to the left or right. He could feel the shock of his appearance and delighted in frightening the passersby. He laughed later, ‘Those little Mexicans—they jump around like rabbits!’”

  As he grew into full manhood, Manuelito came to think that his father-in-law’s efforts at peacemaking were wrongheaded, naïve, and ultimately ruinous for the tribe. He was present at Bear Springs when Narbona and Doniphan signed the first big treaty, and he was present when Col. John Washington’s men cut Narbona down.

  Through it all, Manuelito had seen where diplomacy led. He had felt his world shrinking. He had watched his people’s pride wither under the politics of concession. And so he urged his countrymen: No more.

  If Manuelito was an absolutist, other Navajos were willing to bend and accommodate. They frequented the American forts to trade and drink, to gather whatever sorry crumbs might be tossed their way. Some Navajo women became whores for the soldiers. Other Navajos hired themselves as quislings, spying on their own people or guiding military expeditions into their homeland. One man in particular, a notoriously clever Navajo traitor named Sandoval, became so good at playing both ends against the middle that his band acquired the name Diné Ana’aii, the Enemy Navajo—an aspersion by which his descendants are known to this day.

  Despite what Manuelito said about them, the Americans weren’t all bad. In response to the drought, the fort commanders had pursued a policy of mercy (or at least one calculated to deter raiding) by dispensing rations to the hungriest Navajos. It was easier to feed Navajos than fight them, went the new catchphrase. From the gates of the fort, soldiers handed out supplies of meat and flour to the Navajo throngs. Ration day became a festive affair, a day of good cheer—one captain at
Fort Fauntleroy sensed a new “friendly feeling” within the tribe. It was only natural that the Navajos and soldiers would hatch the idea of crowning the day with a series of horse races. The spirited contests seemed to symbolize the tentative détente.

  Now the moment had come, the day’s grand finale. Rafael Ortiz and the young Navajo rider nosed their horses up to the starting line. As was traditional at the fort, the racers did not wait for a gun to start; instead they relied on an informal honor system in which either rider could call for a restart if he thought his opponent had bolted early. Three times the Navajo boy turned back, but on the fourth attempt, the two riders sprinted across the dusty flats as the liquored crowds roared in delight.

  At first the two horses kept pace with each other, but by the end of the first furlong the spectators could tell something was wrong with the sorrel. The Navajo rider was having trouble controlling his mount, and soon he veered completely off the track. Ortiz continued on, his thoroughbred galloping effortlessly across the finish line.

  The Navajos were shocked and then outraged. Their inspection of the sorrel suggested foul play: Its bridle had been slashed, they said. Someone had sabotaged the horse. They demanded a rematch.

  But the soldiers refused. Dr. Kavanaugh’s thoroughbred had won fair and square, they insisted. They collected their wagers and marched around the parade grounds with Kavanaugh’s horse, flaunting their victory. Said one participant: “A procession of the winning party went whooping and hallooing” to the sound of “drums beating, and fifes and fiddles screeching.”

  The Navajos returned to their camp and sulked. Like so many other times since the Americans had arrived, the Diné felt they’d been double-crossed. There was much discussion about what to do next. Most thought they should cut their losses and go home. But a group of hotheads, drunk like their soldier counterparts, had other ideas. They rose up and stormed over to the fort. They swaggered over to the guardhouse, yelling insults and half-audible threats, demanding that their wagers be returned.

  Then, from within the gates, the crack of a rifle pierced the afternoon air, and Fort Fauntleroy was plunged into chaos.

  The officer in charge of Fort Fauntleroy, Col. Manuel Chaves, was a legendary Indian-fighter hugely admired within the territory, second in reputation only to Kit Carson himself. Short, stocky, and fierce-tempered, Chaves had a crinkled face of olive skin, a thick beard, and long raven hair that skimmed his shoulders. The forty-three-year-old Chaves hailed from a venerable family that dated back to the first colonists of New Mexico, and whose Portuguese and Spanish ancestors had won glory in crucial battles that drove the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula.

  Manuel Antonio Chaves was born along the bosque near Albuquerque and grew up in the tiny frontier settlement of Cebolleta on the contested edge of Navajo country (the same isolated village the young warrior Narbona had nearly destroyed in his great siege of 1804). As a young man, Chaves had traveled widely—St. Louis, New Orleans, New York City, even Cuba—but most of his life he spent in the open country of the New Mexican borderlands, living as a sheep rancher, occasional slave-raider, and, when called upon, captain of the local militia. He was a beloved, larger-than-life figure, a favorite son of the province. His bravery in the field of battle had won him a nickname: the Little Lion.

  Ironically, the Little Lion had won his fame chiefly for fighting Navajos. Nearly all his life he had lived close to the Diné, had grown up with their outrages, had pursued and killed them. He could name more than two hundred relatives, including two of his own brothers, who had been slain by Indians—most of them at the hands of Navajos.

  Chaves had nearly died in a Navajo clash. Only sixteen at the time, the pluck he demonstrated in the incident made him a household name throughout New Mexico. The year was 1834. His older brother Jose decided to lead a slave raid into Navajo country and invited young Manuel along as a kind of initiation rite. (The men from Cebolleta, capitalizing on their geographical proximity to Navajo lands, had long specialized in hunting slaves and had made it a considerable part of their local economy.) Departing from Cebolleta, the small, well-armed party traveled deep into Dinehtah, looking for some unsuspecting woman or child to capture. To their bewilderment they never saw a soul—the country seemed strangely flushed clean of people. But when they came to the rim of Canyon de Chelly and peered down into the great gulch, they found their answer: Thousands of Navajos were gathered on the sandy floor, reveling in an enormous ceremonial dance, their horses all herded together in a tight branch of the canyon. Alarmed by the large numbers of the enemy, Jose Chaves realized he was tempting fate. He directed the party to turn around and leave at once.

  But they were too late. Diné scouts had spotted them, and soon hundreds of warriors appeared. They knew that these invading Nakais, as the Navajos called New Mexicans, had come to hunt slaves. So the warriors attacked with righteous fury. The Chaves party was assailed by a storm of arrows. Young Manuel fought as best he could until he lost consciousness. The Navajos, satisfied that they had killed every last man, finally ceased fire. After taking the party’s guns and ransacking the supplies, they returned in triumph to the canyon.

  Manuel awoke several hours later to discover that he had seven arrow wounds. He was disoriented and desperately weak from blood loss. Everyone in the party, including his brother, was dead. Manuel took measure of his predicament: He was more than two hundred miles from home, in a hostile country he did not know, sixteen years old and lacking a weapon, with several thousand Navajos encamped close by. Manuel buried his brother in a shallow grave, then started trudging south by southeast. After two days of walking in desolate desert country, he came to a familiar place—Bear Springs, future site of Fort Fauntleroy. In the cool spring water, he washed his wounds and assuaged his hunger by sucking the sour pads of prickly pear cactus. Feverish, his arrow punctures hot and swollen, he somehow summoned the strength to continue walking. At times he lost consciousness and frequently fell into hallucinations, but a few days later young Manuel Chaves staggered into Cebolleta, the sole survivor of the expedition.

  Chaves later fought with distinction alongside U.S. troops in the 1847 counteroffensive against the Taos insurrectionists, but he was a volunteer, not a career army regular. In 1861 it was an unusual arrangement for a territorial volunteer, even one as accomplished as he, to command a U.S. fort of such importance. But these were unusual times: Back east, the Civil War had begun. News of Fort Sumter had finally reached New Mexico, and soldiers were steadily departing the territory in droves and heading east for reassignment. To take their place, New Mexican volunteers had been hastily raised to man outposts like Fort Fauntleroy and keep a lid on hostilities as best they could.

  While these new Hispanic recruits temporarily solved the manpower crisis, their presence in Navajo country had less-than-savory implications. Professional U.S. soldiers could at least claim some level of objectivity in the conflict. Not so with the New Mexicans. Their hatred of the Navajo was personal, ancestral, seemingly irreconcilable—and the Navajos, of course, felt the same way. The two groups, locked in their age-old antipathy, were the Southwestern equivalent of Jews and Arabs, or Turks and Greeks: There was too much bad blood between them, the patterns too firmly ingrained.

  Photo Insert 2

  “God in a war-torn country”: Brigadier General James Henry Carleton, commander of New Mexico and architect of the Navajo Long Walk.

  “Much is expected of you, both here and in Washington”: Colonel Kit Carson, field commander of the Navajo campaign.

  Odd fellows: A gathering of Masons in the Santa Fe hall, 1865. Carson (center) is seated beside Carleton (right) in front.

  “No command should ever again enter it”: The great sandstone chasm of Canyon de Chelly.

  Masada of the Southwest: During the winter of 1863–64, starving Navajos took refuge atop Fortress Rock, deep within the Canyon de Chelly complex.

  “I have nothing to lose but my life”: Navajo headman Manuelito, son-in-law o
f Narbona, was one of the last to surrender to the American army.

  “Severity will be the most humane course”: A soldier counts Navajo prisoners at the Bosque Redondo reservation.

  “We know this land does not like us”: Navajo headman Barboncito, whose passionate eloquence may have swayed Sherman to abandon the Bosque Redondo experiment.

  “I believe you have told the truth”: General William Tecumseh Sherman decided the fate of the Navajo people.

  “Compadre, adios”: Kit Carson photographed during an 1868 trip to the East, a few months before his death.

  “A class of men as antiquated as Ulysses belonging to a dead past”: Kit and Josefa Carson grave site in Taos.