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

by Hampton Sides

  In any case, the humiliated Indian and his band were now on a quest for revenge: Any whites would do, preferably the first ones they saw, and Carson’s party fit the bill. It didn’t matter that Carson was ignorant of the original offense. This was a tribal ethic Carson knew all too well and had practiced himself, as a trapper and as a guide with Fremont. Now Carson uncomfortably found himself on the opposite side of the same retributive code by which he had lived for years.

  Sensing from the start that something was seriously wrong, Carson kept his cool and invited the Indians into his camp for a smoke. There, the Cheyenne began talking among themselves, not realizing that Carson understood their language. Carson says in his autobiography that the Cheyenne were plotting to kill him then and there (along with those members of his party they did not choose to kidnap). “I understood them to say that while I was smoking and not on my guard they could easily kill me with a knife,” he writes. “As for the Mexicans with me, they could kill them as easily as buffalo.”

  Carson instantly intervened, glaring at his guests. “I do not know the cause of your wishing my scalp,” he says he told them in Cheyenne. “I’ve done you no injury, and welcomed you as friends. Now you must leave!”

  The Indians looked at each other awkwardly, not knowing what to do. According to Jesse Nelson there were a few tense moments, with arrows drawn and guns pointed and one Cheyenne warrior threatening Carson with a tomahawk. Then the Cheyenne rose from the smoke and slinked away toward their horses.

  Carson shouted after them, “If you come back, you’ll be shot.”

  He struck his camp and proceeded west on the trail until dusk. Under cover of darkness he dispatched a messenger to ride ahead on his fastest horse to seek assistance from a small garrison of U.S. soldiers stationed near his ranch on the Rayado. The rider took off into the night. The following morning Carson discovered to his dismay that now hundreds of Cheyenne, their faces fairly seething with bad intent, were closely trailing his party.

  Carson engaged the Cheyenne in another blunt conversation. “I have sent a rider ahead,” he said, confident that his swift messenger had now ridden too far for the Cheyenne to overtake him. “I have many friends among the soldiers. If you kill us, they will know it was you and they will find you. Our deaths will be avenged.”

  The admonition seems to have worked. The Cheyenne dispersed, though they still followed Carson at a distance.

  A few days later a small detachment of well-armed dragoons, led by Maj. James Henry Carleton, came galloping up the trail, rushing to Carson’s aid after having ridden more than a hundred lathered miles. And so the two men met for the first time—the crisp, arrogant dragoon and the celebrity hayseed, now vastly relieved, standing perhaps a little bashfully on the plains with his frightened half-breed daughter at his side.

  It is possible that in this first encounter, Carleton had saved Carson’s life—and the lives of Adaline and the rest of the party. It was the sort of personal indebtedness that Carson, in his very soul, could never forget.

  They were an unlikely pair: the odd couple of the West, perhaps even odder than Carson and Fremont had been. But now it was sealed: The two men would be friends for life.

  A few months later, Major Carleton had an occasion to venture to the southern part of the territory to survey the Pecos River. Though it seemed a prosaic assignment, it was, for Carleton, a fateful trip—and so it would become for the Navajo.

  At the time, the course of New Mexico’s second longest and second most important river (after the Rio Grande) was something of a mystery. The Pecos, a crystalline trout stream in its mountainous upper reaches, spilled from the Sangre de Cristo wilderness behind Santa Fe and swirled east past the Pecos ruins and several Mexican villages that drew sustenance from it. Then the river turned south and ran in a straight shot, becoming progressively warmer, slower, and more alkaline as it dropped through red rock mesas and willow-choked sand flats.

  The Pecos was known to flow at least as far as the town of Anton Chico. After that, it vanished into oblivion—at least it did on maps. Some called it a “lost river,” though it never really went anywhere but south, into precincts of thorny desolation.

  In February 1852, Carleton was sent with a contingent of dragoons to follow with precision where the Pecos led, and to learn whether there might be a place, somewhere downriver, to build an army fort.

  Carleton and his men traced the river for nearly a hundred unappealing miles, through stingy country of mesquite and cholla cactus, occasionally glimpsing buffalo in the grasslands to the east. They moved across a hard yellow plate of dirt that lay beneath a pitiless sky prone to weird weather, abrupt storms, leveling gusts. He was not far from the border of Texas and the swallowing hopelessness of the Staked Plains, a place so featureless and vast that early Spanish explorers, Theseus-like, were said to hammer stakes into the ground every league they crept along to mark a sure path for their safe return.

  Then Carleton began to grow encouraged. The river opened up into a broad valley. Miles of hoary cottonwoods lined the banks. Deer and antelope and wild turkey flitted in the thick timber. One place in the valley especially caught his eye, an abrupt elbow in the river where the soil was chocolate brown. There were duck and beaver and deep pools that promised fine fish. Compared to the blistered country all around, it was an oasis.

  The place was an old meeting ground for Indians of the southern plains. Comanches, Kiowas, Mescalero Apaches, and sometimes Spanish buffalo hunters would gather here seasonally to trade and smoke and drink in the cool shade of the big trees. Hemmed by the river’s sinuous curve, the cottonwood grove here grew in a thick circular clump, and it was because of this that the Spanish had long called the place Bosque Redondo: The Round Forest.

  Carleton was smitten. In his mind’s eye, he saw irrigated farms, houses, a meeting hall, a steepled church perhaps—the marks of civilization as he’d known it back east. He studied the soil and pronounced it excellent, comparable if not preferable to the black loam of the Missouri Valley. He noted that the dried stalks of sunflowers, now brittle and clicking in the wind, reached higher than the head of a man mounted on a horse. The surrounding grama grass was rank and luxuriant, and the supply of wood seemingly inexhaustible. One of his men shot a plump turkey, which Carleton found “flavorful.”

  Carleton reported that Bosque Redondo was “a most excellent point for the establishment of a strong cavalry post,” but he seemed to harbor even greater notions about its purpose. In his enthusiasm, he was moved to hack a thick pole out of a cottonwood trunk and drive it into the ground to mark the spot where he thought the fort should go.

  The Round Forest—he would never turn loose of the place, or the idea. For years he talked about it when no one would listen. Even though Bosque Redondo lay far from everything, marooned in the meanest Comanche country, he urged his superiors to make something of this Edenic spot. It was his own private vision, the seed of a solution taking root in his mind to problems yet unforeseen, a shimmering place he marked for something grand.

  James Carleton’s friendship with Kit Carson deepened throughout the major’s five-year military tour in New Mexico. Both married, with growing families, the two men didn’t have vices to share; they weren’t drinking buddies or gamblers, though they did meet every so often as fellow Masons in the new Santa Fe hall. Carson seems to have genuinely liked Carleton and found him a dazzling font of energy. As with Fremont, Kit was impressed by Carleton’s erudition, by his high standing in the regular army, and by his connections to the world back east.

  Carleton, on the other hand, found Carson a bit rough around the edges for his tastes—at least at first. He suspected that the newspaper accounts of Carson’s talents were greatly overblown. But then the major changed his mind. In the spring of 1854 he happened to witness the scout pulling off one of the most storied feats of his career—this one entirely true—and his esteem for Kit Carson was cemented.

  In late May of that year, Carleton hired Car
son to guide him on a hastily arranged campaign to recover stolen horses from the Jicarilla Apaches, who had been especially restive that spring. The two men left Taos with several companies of dragoons and pushed north into Colorado, crossing the jagged Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When they reached the brink of the prairie, Carson discerned a faint trail—about as faint as the trail he had followed in 1849 while pursuing the kidnapped Ann White and her baby.

  Carson was not overly optimistic this time, for the trail was cold and he considered the Jicarillas the hardest of all Southwestern tribes to track. But a few items he found jettisoned on the trail convinced him these were indeed Jicarillas, and after several days of patiently reading sign, the trail grew warm.

  One morning over breakfast, Carson confidently told Major Carleton that they would intercept the Jicarillas that very day. Then he went further, saying it would be precisely at two that afternoon. Carleton was highly doubtful of Carson’s specificity—and told him so—but the scout clung to his prediction.

  So Carleton proposed a little wager: If the tribe they were following proved to be Jicarillas after all, and if the dragoon party overtook them without incident at two o’clock, he would buy Carson the finest beaver felt hat that could be purchased in New York City. For Carson this was quite a proposition, for not only were beaver hats extremely dear, but in all his years as a beaver trapper, he had apparently never owned the finished product of his cold, wet labors.

  The two men shook on it.

  That afternoon they spotted the Jicarillas encamped in a natural grass amphitheater in the Raton Mountains, not far from the Santa Fe Trail. Carleton glanced at his watch and cursed under his breath. It was seven minutes past two.

  The astounded major later wrote without hesitation that “Kit Carson is justly celebrated as the best tracker among white men in the world.” The dragoons attacked, and though most of the Jicarillas escaped, Carleton succeeded in recapturing forty rustled horses and loads of stolen loot.

  Carson insisted he had lost the bet by seven minutes, but Carleton said it was close enough. Through the mail he ordered a beaver felt hat from a prestigious haberdasher in New York, and when it arrived in Taos a few months later, Carson could not stifle his grin.

  On the inside band, a gilt-lettered inscription read: AT 2 o’CLOCK, KIT CARSON, FROM MAJOR CARLETON.

  Chapter 40: CHILDREN OF THE MIST

  James Carleton’s personality could not have contrasted more starkly with that of Carson. Yet in one respect they were oddly similar: Like his friend in Taos, Carleton had a curious knack for intersecting with history, for popping up in improbable, far-flung places where important things were happening.

  In 1859, for example, Carleton happened to play a pivotal investigative role in one of the darkest and most controversial chapters in the settlement of the West. If his life’s work as a dragoon had been devoted to fighting and studying the Indian tribes of the frontier, this episode brought him face-to-face with the other great tribe of the West—the burgeoning Mormons of Utah.

  It was spring of that year, and Carleton was stationed in Southern California, at a place north of Los Angeles called Fort Tejon, when he received orders to proceed with a contingent of dragoons to southwestern Utah to investigate an incident that had happened a little over a year earlier. A large caravan of Arkansas emigrants en route to California had passed through Utah when they mysteriously disappeared at a remote and beautiful stopping point, well known to many travelers, called Mountain Meadows. The caravan—the Fancher Party, as it was known, after one of its Arkansas leaders—numbered more than 120 men, women, and children. It was widely assumed that they had been massacred—by Paiute Indians, Mormon pioneers, or both—but the true facts were not known. No official investigation had been conducted, and no one had been punished for what was surely the most heinous crime, at least in terms of numbers, ever perpetrated on an American immigrant train.

  Mountain Meadows was such an isolated spot that it took Carleton and his dragoons weeks of hard riding to reach it, crossing the southern Sierra Nevada and the Mojave Desert, among other obstacles, as he followed the Old Spanish Trail eastward. When he arrived at the site in Utah late that May and began investigating, it was soon obvious to him that all the worst reports were true. Carleton had his men scour the terrain in quadrants, sifting the dirt, painstakingly working inch by inch. The picture that emerged was terrifying: Although most of the very young children had apparently been spared—seventeen juvenile survivors had been placed in foster homes among Mormons living in the area—all of the men, women, and teenage children had been shot, typically in the head, at point-blank range.

  Carleton’s chilling report to his army superiors was the first reliable source on the tragedy that became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre—and remains a seminal document in the lingering controversy. By that point in his career, James Carleton was certainly inured to carnage, but he could not hide his shock at the crime scene. It was, he wrote, “horrible to look upon: Women’s hair, in detached locks and in masses, hung to the sage bushes and was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s dresses and of female costume dangled from the shrubbery or lay scattered about; and among these, here and there, on every hand, for at least a mile…there gleamed the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered.”

  Major Carleton began to interview pioneers in the area. Detective work suited him, and he was good at it. The Mormons who lived not far from Mountain Meadows insisted that the massacre had been committed entirely by hostile Paiutes. But Carleton, like the rest of the newspaper-reading nation, was deeply suspicious. The Fancher Party had been extremely well armed and led by experienced Indian-fighters, and the Paiutes were not known to be particularly fearsome warriors. Not only that, but the children survivors of the massacre reported that among the attackers, they saw white men dressed up and painted like Indians.

  By cross-examining witnesses and closely studying the site, Carleton was able to determine, at least to his own satisfaction, that the Paiute role was minimal, that in fact the local Mormons had conceived and carried out the whole affair, apparently with the blessing of high-ranking church officials in Salt Lake—possibly Brigham Young himself. Utah had been seething with tension during the months leading up to the massacre; Mormons had good reason to fear that the U.S. Army was on its way from Fort Laramie to occupy Salt Lake City. All-out war seemed imminent. The polygamous Latter-Day Saints, recalling their history of persecution in upstate New York, Illinois, and Missouri, were in a state of high dudgeon, armed and ready to resist any encroaching Gentiles.

  And then, along came the Fancher caravan. To the Mormons, these immigrants were not just any Gentiles: They were from Arkansas, and as it happened, a popular prophet within the church, Parley Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas only a year earlier. Within the Mormon faith there was a doctrine known as “blood atonement”—which sanctioned the killing of Gentiles in situations when the church was threatened. However, Mormon law forbade the murder of “innocents”—which they defined as children up to eight years of age.

  Perhaps, Carleton reasoned, this helped explain why the only survivors of the massacre were little children. On the day of the slaughter, the sobbing youngsters, their clothes spattered with the still-wet blood of their murdered parents, were sent temporarily to live among local Mormons—the very people, Carleton believed, who had made them orphans in the first place. These “foster parents” then had the temerity to charge the U.S. government nearly two thousand dollars to recover the costs they claimed to have laid out in “ransoming” the poor children from the Paiute Indians.

  Carleton’s realization of this latest twist in the crime finally set him off: “Murderers of the parents and despoilers of their property; these relentless, incarnate fiends, dared even to come forward and claim payment for having kept…these helpless children. Has there ever been an act which equaled this in devilish hardihood or effrontery?”

  The longer he sta
yed at Mountain Meadows, the more sickened Carleton became. The murderers did not even have the decency to bury their victims. “The remains,” he said, “were dismembered by the wolves and the flesh stripped from the bones.”

  Carleton’s men buried the remains of nearly forty members of the Fancher caravan—which was all he was able to find. To mark the site, they cut down several red cedar trees and fashioned a large cross. On the transverse beam, Carleton had his men carve: VENGEANCE IS MINE, SAITH THE LORD: I WILL REPAY.

  Then Carleton erected a rock cairn and placed a solid slab of granite in the ground, on which he engraved a brusque inscription: HERE 120 MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN WERE MASSACRED IN COLD BLOOD EARLY IN SEPT. 1857. THEY WERE FROM ARKANSAS.

  Carleton’s assignment to Mountain Meadows haunted him for the rest of his life. A new fury entered into his writings, his voice now often infused with an apocalyptic tone. The West was a more intractably violent place than he’d ever imagined, with more turmoil and strife, more intricate tribal clashing than his tidy sensibilities could stand.