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

by Hampton Sides

  The captain of adventure: Cover of The Fighting Trapper, published in 1874, one of the scores of “blood and thunder” dime novels starring a largely fictionalized Kit Carson.

  Putting New Mexican recruits in American uniforms, furnishing them with good weapons, and stationing them at a volatile place like Fort Fauntleroy thus had shades of the fox guarding the henhouse: It was only a matter of time before something dramatic would happen, especially with a ferocious fighter like Manuel Chaves left in charge.

  The report of the rifle boomed across the grounds of Fort Fauntleroy and echoed off the distant canyon walls. Alarmed, soldiers seized their weapons and scurried about the grounds of the fort in great confusion. As one witness described it, “Every man ran to arm himself. Companies did not regularly form, but every man ran wherever he thought fit.” The word was, one of the drunk Navajos had tried to force his way past the sentinel guarding the entrance of the fort. The sentinel fired and killed the Indian on the spot.

  In the field outside the fort, hundreds of Navajos scrambled for cover. It is unclear who gave the order, or if it was simply a spontaneous thing, but the soldiers aimed their rifles and started firing into the crowd, drilling bullets into the backs of the fleeing Indians. In twos and threes, the Navajos dropped in their tracks. Other soldiers chased after their victims on foot and ran them down with bayonets—not only warriors, but women and children.

  An eyewitness, Capt. Nicholas Hodt, later described the sickening scene to an investigative committee set up by the U.S. Congress: “I saw a soldier murdering two little children and a woman. I hallooed immediately for him to stop. He looked up but did not obey my order. I ran as quick as I could, but could not get there soon enough to prevent him from killing the two innocent children and wounding severely the squaw.”

  Outraged, Hodt arrested the soldier and ordered him to hand over his cartridge belts.

  Out of the chaos, Col. Manuel Chaves asserted his authority: But instead of calling his troops to order, he only escalated the action. He ordered an artillery sergeant to bring out the mountain howitzers and open fire. Captain Hodt said the sergeant “pretended not to understand the order given, for he considered it unlawful. But being cursed by the officer of the day, and threatened, he had to execute the order or else get himself in trouble.”

  Howitzer shells arced and exploded over the field, sending shrapnel in all directions. Screaming Navajos ran in wild patterns across the valley below the post. It was a wholesale slaughter: More than 20 Indians, many of them women and children, lay dead in the field. Scores more were wounded, and 112 were taken prisoner.

  After the shelling subsided, Captain Hodt brought the man he’d seen murdering the Navajo children to Lieutenant Ortiz (presumably the same lieutenant who had raced Dr. Kavanaugh’s thoroughbred). He described to Ortiz the atrocity he had witnessed out in the field and explained why he had disarmed and arrested the man. Ortiz responded by pulling out his own pistol, cocking it, and aiming it at Hodt, shouting: “Give this soldier back his arms, or else I’ll shoot you, God damn you!”

  He reluctantly obeyed, but reported Ortiz’s actions to Colonel Chaves. Hodt received no satisfaction from the Little Lion, however. On the contrary, Chaves said that Lieutenant Ortiz “did perfectly right” and thought the soldier who killed the two children deserved “credit,” not censure. Case dismissed.

  Later realizing that things had perhaps gotten a bit out of hand, Chaves went to work on damage control. In his report to authorities in Santa Fe, he stated “with great regret” that the Navajos, without provocation, had “attacked the guard of the post,” and that his men were only acting in self-defense. He tried to cover up the incident, or at least control the rumors emanating from it, by not allowing any letters to leave the fort for weeks.

  But it was a massacre, pure and simple, and when authorities in Santa Fe found out about it, they suspended Chaves from command of Fort Fauntleroy. Briefly, Chaves was held under house arrest in Albuquerque in preparation for a court-martial hearing, and Kit Carson was sent there to conduct a preliminary investigation. The army, it seemed, was less concerned with the colonel’s possible role in the mass slaughter of fleeing Navajos than with the revelation that Chaves had permitted his soldiers to wager government property on horse races.

  The trial never came to pass. With the storm clouds of the Civil War looming on the horizon, and with the ranks of the U.S. Army in consequent disarray, the incident at Fort Fauntleroy was all but forgotten. Charges were dropped and, if anything, the Little Lion won public adulation for taking such a hard line against “attacking” Navajos.

  Never again would there be horse races at Fort Fauntleroy. The shaky truce was over. The massacre would have a profound influence on the Diné, moving them deeper into the “fearing time.” From that point on, the tribe would increasingly see the wisdom of Manuelito’s path, especially now that U.S. troops were abandoning the frontier forts to prepare for the invasion of a Confederate army that was rumored to be advancing from San Antonio. The Americans were clearly distracted. Something was pulling them away—Manuelito and the other warriors could sense a new opportunity. Now, they said, was the time to strike.

  Chapter 37: PEOPLE OF THE SINGLE STAR

  On a frigid Sunday morning in February, two armies stared at each other across the open plain. A stiff wind blew needles of sleet. Slush formed on the edges of the Rio Grande, and the ghostly cottonwoods rattled along the banks.

  The Confederate cavalry had drawn up less than two miles from Fort Craig—and stopped. Their commander, Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley, studied the bulwark through his field glasses. He saw the Stars and Stripes snapping in the wind, saw the fresh earthworks and ramparts set with loopholes, saw the smoky encampments of the New Mexico volunteers spread like tattered aprons on the brown grass all about the walls. Originally built to fend off Indian attacks and named after a U.S. Army officer killed while pursuing deserters, Fort Craig was a collection of several dozen adobe buildings set on the west bank of the Rio Grande some 150 miles south of Santa Fe. Nearly four thousand soldiers were dug in around this mud citadel. Ranged along the thick walls, formidable-looking cannons were trained south on the Rebels.

  Sibley put away his binoculars in disgust. The general was not feeling well and could barely sit a horse. He was suffering from some undisclosed medical condition—“colic,” some speculated—that was certainly being exacerbated by his well-known weakness for the bottle (his troops nicknamed him “the Walking Whiskey Keg”). A Confederate officer said that General Sibley “needs no information” before blundering into battle. “It is enough for him to know that there is to be a quantity of whiskey used in the enterprise.” One of his colleagues later wrote that Sibley’s “love of liquor exceeded that of home, country, or God.” For long stretches at a time he’d been confined to his ambulance, indisposed and apparently incapable of making decisions.

  Still, General Sibley could be a commanding presence. Romantic, ambitious, handsomely debonair when he wasn’t drunk, the curly-haired West Pointer was a career veteran of the U.S. Army, having served with distinction in both the Mexican War and on the Western frontier. He was also well-known as an inventor; he had patented a design for a conical tent—the Sibley field tent, loosely modeled after the tepee of the Plains Indians—widely used by Union and Confederate armies alike. Perhaps like many inventors, Sibley was a bit dreamy and not very adept at nitty-gritty logistical planning. With good reason, a subordinate declared that he was “too prone to let the morrow take care of itself.”

  Sibley was intimately familiar with New Mexico. His last post before joining the Confederacy had been in Taos, where he commanded dragoons and led a campaign against the Navajos. He knew Fort Craig well—or at least the old Fort Craig, before it had been reinforced with fresh troops and revetments. He concluded, however, that the new Fort Craig was now too strong to be taken in a frontal assault.

  But somehow he would have to take the fort, he realized, or else
his campaign in New Mexico was doomed. It was an all-or-nothing proposition. His overextended supply line from El Paso flowed in a mere trickle, his army being a thousand lonely miles from its home base and training grounds in San Antonio. The only way he could keep going was to forage off the land, stealing from the Union forces as he conquered them. And he knew that Fort Craig was stuffed with the food, ammunition, and medicine his starved army so desperately needed.

  To get it, he would first have to draw the Union troops away from the fort, luring them out by some distraction, and then fight them on the open field beyond the range of their superior artillery. Sibley could not compete with the Union arsenal, which included 12-pounder Napoleon guns and 24-pounder howitzers as well as those mysterious new cannons. But on exposed terrain, Sibley believed, his twenty-five hundred men, most of whom were mounted, would hold a distinct advantage over the Federal forces—which, though more numerous, were primarily infantry.

  It was February 16, 1862. As the sun rose like a cold stone over the bosque, Sibley sat for a while, creaking in his saddle, then turned and conferred with his officers about what to do next.

  Two miles to the north, the Union commander, Col. Edward Canby, was sitting on his favorite horse, Old Chas, and chomping an unlit cigar. Canby was a tall, clean-shaven Kentuckian, cool and cagey, with enormous fleshy ears. Hardened by decades of fighting Indians, he had cultivated a healthy hatred for this new enemy lately arrived in his midst. He called the Confederates “an arrogant and rapacious invader.”

  Canby knew his principal adversary all too well. He and Sibley had been classmates together at West Point, and Canby had been best man at Sibley’s wedding. They were even related by marriage: Their wives were cousins. In New Mexico the two men had fought Indians together and commiserated on the sorry state of the territory. After news of Fort Sumter reached New Mexico and Sibley quit the U.S. Army for El Paso, he told some of Canby’s loyalist colleagues, “Boys, if you only knew it, I am the worst enemy you have!”

  Now they were enemies, facing each other on this unlikely battlefield, so far from the armies of the East.

  Colonel Canby was so taciturn and cautious—“He counsels no one!” a subordinate groused—that his men had no idea of his larger strategy for defending New Mexico, or even if he had one. A Union soldier described him as “tall and straight, coarsely dressed, his countenance hard and weather beaten, a cigar in his mouth which he never lights. He certainly has an air of superiority, largely the gift of nature, though undoubtedly strengthened by long habits of command.” Descended from a family of Quakers, Canby had nonetheless pursued a military career with gusto—fighting fiercely against the Seminoles of Florida, winning accolades from Gen. Winfield Scott in the Mexican War, and serving with William Tecumseh Sherman in Monterey, California. Though not brilliant—at West Point he graduated thirtieth in his class of thirty-one—Canby’s intellect had a certain plodding, tortoiselike consistency that usually carried the day. All descriptions of Canby emphasize his careful, quiet, and sometimes saturnine disposition. One army general later judged Canby “too modest and reserved to win the popular recognition that he merited,” but noted that “wherever he went, order, good feeling, and tranquility followed in his footsteps.”

  With almost no resources to work with, Canby had accomplished near-miracles in preparing Fort Craig for the coming Confederate onslaught. He’d had little more than a month to get the fort supplied and reinforced. Only two days earlier a train of seventy wagons had come from Santa Fe with food, supplies, and ammunition, and now he was well dug in and ready for whatever his former friend the Walking Whiskey Keg had to offer.

  But in truth, the fort wasn’t nearly as strong as it appeared: Those big artillery pieces ranged along the ramparts were nothing more than decoys—props hewn from pine logs and painted black to look like cannon. “Quaker guns” the men called them, perhaps in deference to Canby’s own religious background.

  And Canby’s 4,000 men were not nearly so formidable as they may have looked. Only 1,200 of them were army regulars. The rest were volunteers or militiamen, mostly Hispanic men from the territory, local boys whose lack of fighting experience was matched only by their lack of a concrete rationale for fighting—understandably, they had little interest and seemingly no stake in the issues of this Americano war begun the previous year in some utterly foreign place called South Carolina.

  Canby took a dim view of these Spanish-speaking volunteers and considered them “worse than worthless.” As he put it, every New Mexican who deserted the ranks “only adds to rather than diminishes our strength.” He questioned their loyalty, believing, with good reason, that “the Mexican people have no affection for the institutions of the United States and have a strong, but hitherto restrained hatred for the Americans as a race.” Certainly his own racial prejudices entered into his assessment of their military competence—like many U.S. Army officers who fought in the Mexican War, Canby thought Hispanic soldiers were virtually incapable of organizing an orderly defense. But his concerns were also practical: These New Mexican paisanos, he knew, were not bred to firearms, had never been around artillery, and, of course, spoke almost no English. All of which, in the heat of battle, with American officers shouting commands this way and that, could make them highly ineffective and prone to confusion and flight. If possible, Canby intended to keep the volunteers inside, or at least close to the fort so they would not have to maneuver under direct fire.

  Now the two armies formed battle lines on the plain. They sent out skirmishers and reconnaissance parties, each army initiating gambits to test the resolve and disposition of its foe. Slowly, tentatively, the Rebels and Federals moved within a thousand yards of each other, close enough that, in the shifting winds, they could hear bugles blaring and the mingled shouts of the men.

  Then Sibley’s troops let out a Rebel yell, or at least their best approximation of one; since they had trained in Texas and had never fought in the East, few of these Confederates had actually heard the famous battle cry, though they had heard of it. Most of the Rebels were armed with little more than fowling pieces, squirrel guns, pistols, and other frontier weapons—one quixotic unit was composed entirely of lancers. But they were young and lustful for battle, and seemed supremely confident that it would all be over soon. One of their officers, a Major Lockbridge, saw the American flag flying over the fort and boasted: “I’ll make my wife a nightgown out of it!”

  The commander of the 1st New Mexico Volunteers was none other than Christopher Carson, now a colonel in the Union Army. Encamped near the fort, in the cool shadows of its earthen walls, Carson and his eight companies now prepared for battle. Like Canby, Carson was personally acquainted with his adversary. Before the war, he and Sibley had spent time together in Taos—Sibley’s post was only a few miles down the road from Carson’s house. A soldier acquaintance of both men said that although Sibley had tried to convert many men to the Confederate cause, he never attempted to convert Carson. “I don’t think Sibley tried any missionary work,” the soldier recalled, “for [Carson] had his opinion on both the North and the South.”

  Carson, who hated any sort of debate or quarrel, kept his feelings to himself. Said another pro-Union friend in New Mexico: “Kit was loyal, but he was like me and would not argue the point.”

  Carson reported for duty in Albuquerque, and it was there that he trained his volunteers. Serving in the regular army was a new and trying experience for him; at first he was rather awkward at it. The protocols, the nomenclature, the dress codes seemed to run contrary to his nature. A volunteer from Colorado named Edward Wynkoop recalled that Carson’s “uniform did not set well on him at all.” Carson’s illiteracy caused embarrassment. Once a group of his men asked him to sign a commissary requisition for several kegs of molasses. He happily signed the request, only later to find some of his men good and drunk: The commissary order had been for kegs of whiskey. Humiliated by this little prank, Carson from then on never signed a requisition without fi
rst having his adjutant read it out loud.

  We have no record of how he punished these particular malefactors, but in general Carson was not shy about disciplining his men. Wynkoop thought that he “had the utmost firmness and the best of common sense…and could punish a culprit with vigor. He had a beautiful mild blue eye which would become terrible under some circumstances and like the warning of the rattlesnake always sounded the alarm before the spring.”

  Wynkoop tells another story from Carson’s army duty in Albuquerque, an incident that occurred on a day the colonel was away from his post. It was a Sunday morning, and a boat full of “gaily dressed senoritas” was crossing the Rio Grande on the way to mass. From the launching point, “a rough looking Mexican ranchero” hopped aboard. The boatman politely asked the stranger to await his turn, for the boat was now overcrowded and dangerously tippy. The man refused. Wynkoop says that Carson “then approached and in a mild manner pointed out to him his wrong doings, but without avail.” Carson then adopted a “peremptory” tone, but the man “was still obstinate.” Suddenly Carson sprang into action. “Like a flash of lightning Kit raised his sheathed sabre which he carried in his hand; struck him a tremendous blow along side of the head, knocking him headlong into the turbid waters of the Rio Grande. The fellow sunk like lead.” The man would have drowned, but “quicker than thought, Kit plunged after and dragged him out.”

  It was classic Carson: In an instant he had performed an act of chivalry and then saved the man who gave the ladies offense.

  Carson had been chosen to lead the volunteers for his fluency in Spanish and his high standing among the old families of New Mexico. From the start, his greatest challenge had been overcoming the natural apathy of his men. He was able to recruit them and keep them interested in their training only by drawing on an old dread: New Mexicans had long held a fear of and a revulsion for Texans, and, except for Sibley (who was from Louisiana), that was what these attackers were, almost to a man—Texans, having marched from San Antonio with the single-minded intent of claiming New Mexico for the Confederacy. The word “Confederate” meant nearly nothing to Carson’s volunteers, but the prospect of an invasion from the south set up a visceral reaction among them and kept them at their guns.