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

by Hampton Sides

  His lengthy army report, reprinted for the Congress and published in papers all over the country, was an unsparing diatribe against the Mormon Church. “They are an ulcer upon the body-politic,” he wrote, “an ulcer which needs more than cautery to cure. It must have excision, complete and thorough.” When he returned to duty in California, Carleton had a conversation with a friend in which he went even further: “We might as well look this devil right in the face at once,” he said. “Give the Mormons one year, no more; and if after that they still pollute our soil by their presence, then literally make Children of the Mist of them.”

  For two years Carleton’s memorial stood at the site, a raw and eloquent warning to wayfarers. But in 1861, Brigham Young brought an entourage to Mountain Meadows and ordered Carleton’s cross and cairn destroyed. As his subordinates took down the monument, rock by rock, the Mormon prophet said, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I have repaid.”

  Shocked by his experience at Mountain Meadows, Carleton returned to Fort Tejon and remained there another year, immersing himself in California’s peculiarly complicated—and bloody—Indian relations. Only a decade had passed since the Gold Rush began, and yet already many California tribes were vanishing, their numbers decimated by disease, displacement, and white militias bent on outright extermination. The massive influx of Anglo-American immigrants, gold-crazed and land-hungry, had accelerated everything in California, including the course of Indian affairs. And so, as would later prove a general truism, California found itself well ahead of the national curve; the rapid demise of the tribes there was only a harbinger of the demise Native Americans would soon suffer throughout the West. The Indians’ predicament in the Bear Flag State became so dire so quickly that a number of officials began to show the first signs of an unfamiliar attitude toward the beleaguered tribes—an attitude that might be described as Christian compassion.

  A new notion took hold: The tribes of California must be physically separated from white society as an alternative to their own extinction. They must be relocated on some clearly delineated parcel of arable land sufficiently watered by a river. There, they must be taught the rudiments of farming and animal husbandry. The government must not skimp—it must provide the Indians with modern tools, sound stock, and good seeds so that they might finally stop roving and settle down to earn an honest living as self-sufficient farmers, dwelling collectively on what amounted to a kibbutz. This communal farm must be closely guarded by an army fort, not only to prevent the Indians from straying into the white communities but also to keep ill-meaning white folks from venturing onto Indian land, bringing the scourge of alcohol and other vices with them.

  The new policy was tantamount to apartheid, to be sure. But if it was predicated on the prevailing racism of the time, it was also fueled by an emerging humanitarian concern that whole tribes were truly on the brink of expiration—becoming, in Carleton’s alarming phrase, Children of the Mist.

  Fort Tejon, where Major Carleton served, was the site of the first laboratory test of this new agricultural ideal—an experiment that in time would evolve into the United States reservation system. The farm created there was the brainchild of Edward Fitzgerald Beale, the colorful naval officer who had made a name for himself with Carson at the battle of Pasqual and who later accompanied Carson on his first transcontinental trip to Washington (the same man who piloted an ultimately unsuccessful program to introduce U.S. Army camels to the deserts of the American West). In the 1850s, Beale was appointed California’s first superintendent for Indian affairs. Progressive for his time, he was appalled by the slow genocide taking place before his eyes. He lamented that California’s Indians had been “driven from their fishing and hunting grounds, hunted themselves like wild beasts, lassoed, and torn from homes made miserable by want.”

  So Beale set aside fifty thousand acres of decent land along a river bottom near Fort Tejon and persuaded nearly three thousand Indians (from the Emigdiano tribe and various other displaced tribes of the southern San Joaquin Valley) to settle there. Beale said he loosely based his idea on the Spanish mission system, which had for centuries kept many thousands of California Indians employed (others would say enslaved) in agricultural pursuits. “Surely,” Beale urged, “that which was accomplished by a few poor priests is not too great a task for the mighty republic of the United States.”

  California newspapers lauded Beale’s visionary concept and advocated creating a network of similar reservation-communes up and down the Sierra Nevadas. “Either the whole Indian race in California must be exterminated,” argued an editorial in the California Alta, “or they must be brought together, organized into a community, made to support themselves by their own labor; and be elevated above the degraded position they now occupy.”

  By the spring of 1854, Beale had forty plows working the ground every day at Tejon Farm—plows driven by young Indian boys who, after a little training, “showed so much dexterity and skill” that it seemed to Beale as though “they had done nothing else their whole lives.” The Indians planted 500 acres in barley and nearly 200 acres in corn. They dug irrigation ditches, raised barns, built houses. Beale’s dream took off, and for several years Tejon Farm showed great promise.

  The experiment wasn’t cheap, however. Beale initially requested a federal appropriation of $500,000 and kept asking for more—sums that officials back in Washington considered outlandish. But the California papers, while recoiling at the staggering costs, continued to support Beale’s pilot project. The Alta argued that through Tejon Farm, and others like it, the Indians “could be transformed from a state of semi-barbarism, indolence, mental imbecility and moral debasement, to a condition of civilization, Christianity, industry, virtue, frugality, social and domestic happiness, and public usefulness.”

  Tejon Farm failed, in the end, partly because Superintendent Beale imprudently set the reservation on land whose title was legitimately disputed by Spanish-speaking claimants holding prior land grants, and partly because Beale himself was fired from his post (for reasons of partisan politics) just as his pet project was beginning to take off. Still, Beale had tried something ambitious, and he’d demonstrated, for a short time at least, that a sweeping project in agricultural self-sufficiency could work.

  James Carleton was influenced by the ideas being tested at Tejon. After he marched to New Mexico as a newly promoted brigadier general in the early fall of 1862, he almost immediately began to apply the Tejon model to the Navajo problem. Carleton saw a way to harness the anxieties that had been stirred up by the Confederate invasion and the still-hovering fear that the Texans might return. If the territory was already on a war footing, the whole society alert and inflamed, then why not direct all this ramped-up energy toward something useful? Carleton immediately declared a state of martial law, with curfews and mandatory passports for travel, and then brought all his newly streamlined authority to bear on cleaning up the Navajo mess. With a focus that bordered on obsession, he was determined finally to make good on Kearny’s old promise that the United States would “correct all this.”

  “When I came here this time,” Carleton wrote, “it not only became my professional business, but my duty to the residents and to the Government, to devise some plan which might, with God’s blessing, forever bring these troubles to an end. These Navajo Indians have long since passed that point when talking would be of any avail. They must be whipped and fear us before they will cease killing and robbing the people.” He cited William Arny’s estimate that in 1862 alone, Navajos had plundered more than thirty thousand sheep from Hispanic and Anglo ranches, with total losses amounting to nearly $250,000. “To cure this great evil from which the territory has been so long a prey,” he concluded, “some new remedy must be adopted.”

  General Carleton’s “new remedy” was to re-create the Tejon experiment on a much grander scale—and to do it at Bosque Redondo, the place that had so enchanted him when he surveyed the Pecos River in the early 1850s. The idea seemed to come to hi
m fully formed, like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus, as though he’d been pondering it all his life. Bosque Redondo, he said, would be his “grand work,” and he wasted no time getting started. On October 31, 1862, within weeks of arriving in Santa Fe, he ordered the establishment of a new military outpost at the bosque, which he would call Fort Sumner.

  A board of army officers sent ahead to study Bosque Redondo reported back to him that the remote site was unsuitable either for a fort or an Indian reservation. As pleasant as this green oasis might be, Bosque Redondo was too far removed “from the neighborhoods that supply forage,” they warned. “Building materials will have to be brought from a great distance. A large part of the surrounding valley is subject to inundations by spring floods.”

  Worst of all, the board said, the Pecos River was alkaline and bitter-tasting, with crackly efflorescences of whitish powder deposited along its banks. “The water of the Pecos,” the report emphatically stated, “contains much unhealthy mineral matter.”

  Carleton was livid when he read this naysaying report. He dismissed the numerous, and seemingly valid, concerns of his lieutenants and forged ahead. In November he ordered the building of Fort Sumner and then began to draw up war plans to conquer the Navajos and move them all to his beloved Round Forest.

  “The only peace that can ever be made with them,” Carleton wrote superiors at the War Department, “must rest on the basis that they move onto the lands at Bosque Redondo and, like the Pueblos, become an agricultural people and cease to be nomads. Entire subjugation or destruction…are the alternatives.” His ultimatums sounded eerily similar to his characterization of the Mormon situation in the Mountain Meadows report: An ulcer upon the body-politic which needs more than cautery to cure. It must have excision, complete and thorough.

  When he wrote about his plan for the Navajos, Carleton fairly effervesced. Bosque Redondo was, he said, “the best pastoral region between the two oceans.” The forced removal of twelve thousand people from their homeland might seem cruel at first, he acknowledged, but in the end “severity would be the most humane course.” Once the Diné were resettled on the Pecos, good things would happen. The idea, he said, was to gather the Navajos together “away from the hills and hiding places of their country, and there to be kind to them: to teach their children how to read and write: teach them the art of peace: teach them the truths of Christianity. Soon they will acquire new habits, new ideas, new modes of life; the old Indians will die off and carry with them all the latent longings for murdering and robbing: the young ones will take their places: and thus, little by little, they will become a happy and contented people, and the Navajo Wars will be remembered only as something that belongs entirely in the Past.” Within a decade, he predicted, the Navajos would be “the most delightfully located pueblo of Indians in New Mexico, perhaps in the United States.”

  Carleton’s optimism was as infectious as it was naïve; almost all of the territorial leaders rallied around his cause. Through all his bloviating, the general was in fact adding a new conceptual layer to the ancient conflict. Before Carleton’s arrival, the vocabulary of the Navajo wars was centered almost entirely on the principle of punishment—punishment in a raw Old Testament sense. The army was there to “chastise” and “overawe” them, to make them “feel the power and the sting of the government.” But now a certain noblesse oblige had crept into the dialogue, a sense of white man’s burden. Instead of punishing the Navajos, Carleton proposed to teach them, to administer a kind of tough love so that they might become “a happy and contented people.”

  His attempt to apply the Tejon model to the Navajo conflict was a forced endeavor from the start, the social equivalent of cramming square pegs into round holes. Carleton seemed not to perceive the glaring differences in the two situations—or if he did perceive them, to discount them. The Indians who came to Tejon had for the most part been unwarlike hunter-gatherers who had voluntarily agreed to take up a new agricultural existence there, at a place not far from their actual homelands. Having lived among the Spanish missions for generations, the methods of intensive cultivation, and the close living arrangements required to support a farm, were not alien to them. What’s more, they were a mishmash of small, weak tribes without a clear common past or a clear common future, their numbers dwindling fast. They had nothing to lose, and possibly much to gain, by embracing Beale’s experiment.

  The Navajos were another matter. Theirs was a sprawling nation, wealthy in stock, obdurate in its ways, open to change but only on its terms. The Navajos were already farmers, it was true, but as sheep-loving seminomads they would never favor the compact methods used at Tejon. Having seen what happened to the Anasazi at Chaco Canyon, they were keenly suspicious of social density.

  The main difference, though, was the sheer power of the Diné. Although politically amorphous, much like the tribes at Tejon, the Navajos had a stout and tenacious node of culture whose power radiated outward in all directions—a culture with a shared language and belief system and a sharp sense of identity steeped in myths. The proud Diné were not a people who could be easily coerced into doing anything, let alone starting an entirely new life.

  What’s more, Bosque Redondo was nearly four hundred miles from Navajo country, set on an enveloping prairie that seemed a world away from the fabulous red rock universe the Navajo knew and loved. Carleton’s plan would thus require a forced relocation on a scale not undertaken since the 1830s, when the Cherokee of the Southeastern United States were made to embark on their bitter Trail of Tears exodus to Oklahoma. If Carleton hoped to corral the Navajos and put them on a farm at Bosque Redondo, he would have to fight. The Diné would never leave their land willingly.

  History frowned on his project, certainly. Through the ages, battling the Navajos had consistently shown itself to be tricky and ultimately unsatisfying work, like trying to gather up beads of mercury. The Spanish, through all their efforts, had never been able to exact a lasting punishment on the Diné, and neither had the Mexicans. So far the Americans, during their nearly twenty years in power, had proved similarly ineffectual. What made the mutton-chopped schoolmaster general from Maine think he could do any better?

  Carleton had spent his life hounding Indians and honing his ideas on how to do the grim business better, more efficiently. He had a notion about how to bring the Navajos to their knees. It would require a different sort of warfare, a kind of persistent guerrilla activity combined with a ruthless scorched-earth policy—to chase and starve them into submission, to burn their crops, kill their animals, and bring the war to every man, woman, and child in every desolate fold and box canyon. The cumbersome, fussily costumed dragoons of Kearny’s day would never be effective against the Navajos, Carleton realized. “Those wolves of the mountains,” as he called the Diné, would detect a traditional cavalry force many days in advance.

  Instead, General Carleton’s men would have to move in the shadows. “An Indian,” he noted, “is a more watchful and wary animal than a deer. He must be hunted with skill; he cannot be blundered upon; nor will he allow his pursuers to come upon him when he knows it, unless he is the stronger.” Carleton had learned much from his study of the Russian Cossacks, and he strenuously argued that the modern U.S. Cavalry should adopt some of the methods of this elite unit in fighting Indians in the West. Like the Cossacks, Carleton insisted that his troops should always travel light and keep after their quarry day and night, moving “not in big bodies, with military noises and smokes, and the gleam of arms by day, and fires, and talks, and comfortable sleeps by night; but in small parties moving stealthily to their haunts and lying patiently in wait for them; or in following their tracks day after day with a fixedness of purpose.”

  In fighting the Navajos, the central strategy had to shift; no longer was the goal to exact a swift punishment and then leave; rather, it was to hector them constantly through all seasons of the year, to demoralize through relentless pressure. “The purpose now,” he wrote, “is never to relax the ap
plication of force with a people that can no more be trusted than you can trust the wolves that run through their mountains.”

  One more rationale, slightly hidden, propelled Carleton’s enthusiasm for flushing the Navajos from their country: He smelled gold.

  Perhaps he had spent too much time in California watching other men amass great riches. Perhaps he fancied himself competent enough as a geologist that he could, at a mere glimpse of terrain, infer the presence of precious metal. Perhaps he just let his imagination get away from him. Whatever the case, the general got it into his head, on the basis of no particular evidence, that the Navajo country held the next national mother lode.

  The fact was, James Carleton was embarrassed by New Mexico—embarrassed by its poverty, its lack of luster, its low standing in the halls of Washington, where no one seemed to favor elevating the territory to the status of a full-fledged state. According to the prevailing sentiment on Capitol Hill, New Mexico, with its Indian troubles and general squalor, was nothing but a drain on the national budget. For years lawmakers had floated serious proposals to return the territory to Mexico: Why squander any more blood and treasure on such a hopeless cause?

  If Carleton was ashamed by New Mexico’s backwardness, he also must have envied his Union colleagues in the East, who were making frequent appointments with glory on the great battlefields of the Civil War. To get ahead in military circles, Carleton realized he would need to do something fairly spectacular in New Mexico—something that would doubtless come with a high price tag. He would need to find a justification, something tantalizing to convince Washington skeptics, already overburdened by the Civil War, that his ambitious projects were well worth the cost.

  What if New Mexico held subterranean value? Colorado and California had both had their strikes, why not here? It wasn’t an altogether crazy idea. One had only to look at the territory’s severe geology, its dormant volcanoes and thrusted mountains and otherworldly cinder cones to suspect that something valuable might be down there. In truth, people had been mining New Mexico for centuries. The mythic Seven Cities that first attracted Coronado had never materialized, but there were great stores of silver along the Gila, seams of coal and turquoise in the Ortiz Mountains, and large amounts of copper tucked into innumerable wrinkles and drainages.