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

by Hampton Sides

  That night Carson ordered a moonlight march. For hours the men crept along in the blackness. Carson would permit no talking or smoking or unnecessary noise. Around midnight they dropped into the rugged gash of the Canadian River, where they found a deep-worn trail freshly left by the Comanche and Kiowa horses. There they waited in silence until the first streaks of dawn broke across the wintry sky. Rallying his men, Carson threw off his heavy overcoat and tossed it in the brush, to be retrieved later. Then he resumed the march, with his Utes now in the lead, decorated in feathers and painted for war.

  As they pushed ahead, the thick grass and driftwood clogging the banks slowed the gunners who pulled the mountain howitzers, and they fell behind the rest of the troops. Carson sent Maj. William McCleave ahead with a company of cavalry to attack a smaller Kiowa village of some 200 tepees, a kind of suburb of the larger Comanche camps farther downriver. As McCleave and his men charged the village, the Kiowa warriors, led by a chief named Little Mountain, held their ground only long enough to allow their women and children to scatter and hide along the river.

  Carson’s troops destroyed the village, whose tepees, Pettis said, were found to be “full of plunder, including many hundreds of finely finished buffalo robes.” The lodges weren’t entirely empty, it turned out. A chief named Ironshirt refused to leave and was shot at the door of his tepee. Elsewhere, the Utes found four elderly Kiowas cringing in their tepees; the Utes promptly split their heads open with axes.

  It was discovered that the Kiowas had been holding at least three American captives: a Colorado woman and her two children, whom the Indians had kidnapped during a recent attack on a wagon train passing through Kansas. The prisoners were nowhere to be found, but as Carson’s soldiers ransacked the village, they found the clothing of an American woman as well as children’s clothing and photographs of a Caucasian family. Carson’s men made a bonfire of all the belongings they did not seize, including a U.S. Army ambulance and a wagon that had been stolen from a government caravan. Soon the village was engulfed in flames.

  In the confusion, Kiowa riders had dashed downriver to the larger constellation of Comanche villages to gather reinforcements. Soon several hundred warriors were massing on the plain, their riders bolting this way and that. Periodically they made what McCleave described as “severe charges.” Pettis recalled how the warriors rode “with their bodies thrown over the sides, at a full run, and shooting occasionally under their horses.” Far outnumbered now, McCleave had clearly bitten off more than he could chew and realized he needed to find a defensive position.

  Not far away, only a few hundred yards from the river, stood an old abandoned fort known as Adobe Walls. The Bents had built it years earlier as a satellite outpost of their then extensive empire, using it as a safehouse from which to carry on trade with the Comanches (who, because of their mutual hostility with other Plains tribes like the Arapaho and Cheyenne, were not allowed to camp near Bent’s Fort). Now Adobe Walls was nothing but a tumbledown ruin, its ramparts warped and sagging. Still, it was a well-known landmark on the plains, one that helped wayfayers orient themselves as they rode across the featureless solitudes.

  Carson, who had joined McCleave’s company in the advance, decided to make the old bastion his base. It was a place he knew well from his years spent working for the Bents, a relic of his younger days as a buffalo hunter. Inside its high crumbling walls, he corralled the horses while his surgeon hastily set up a hospital. All around the ruins, he had his men sprawl in the high grass and fight as skirmishers.

  Then, training his field glasses on the horizon, he saw something terrifying. Behind the Kiowas, a much larger wave of Indians was assembling. Fourteen hundred warriors, perhaps more, most of them Comanche, had gathered on horseback and seemed poised to make a great charge.

  Luckily for Carson, the mountain howitzers had caught up to the company. He ordered the gunners to occupy a knobby hill outside Adobe Walls and unlimber the two artillery pieces. Then, with a sweeping gesture toward the mustering warriors, Carson told his artillerymen, “Throw a few shell into that crowd over thar.”

  “Number one—Fire! Number two—Fire!” The twin howitzers boomed, and the Comanches and Kiowas rose high in their stirrups in astonishment. They waited and listened intently as the first shots lobbed skyward, then exploded wide and short of their mark. The warriors wheeled their horses and galloped away. By the fourth firing, they had moved safely out of range of the shells.

  The howitzers had done their work, and the immediate danger had passed. “They won’t make another stand,” Carson reassured Pettis. In the welcome lull, Carson ordered his men to gather around Adobe Walls and then to rest and eat—something they hadn’t done in twenty straight hours.

  The soldiers had a meager haversack lunch of dried meat and hardtack—“starvation would be averted for a season at least,” one allowed. After lunch, Carson planned to push downriver and attack the Comanche villages, one by one. But then he noticed something alarming taking shape on the blond plains. He had been wrong: The Comanche and Kiowa allies were massing again, this time in far greater numbers. As he watched the situation develop from his remove at Adobe Walls, Carson became increasingly anxious. Three thousand mounted warriors had emerged from the Comanche villages.

  In a few short minutes Carson was facing one of the largest engagements of Native American fighters ever gathered in the West. Certainly Carson had never seen such a concentration of warriors. His men were outnumbered nearly ten to one.

  Painted for battle and riding what Carson judged to be “first-class horses,” most of the warriors were armed with bows and lances, though many had rifles. Wave after wave raced toward Adobe Walls, then circled back and mounted another assault, firing under the necks of their galloping horses as they constantly revised their angle of approach. For hours the battlefield was enveloped in a haunting chorus of ululations, the mingled war cries of Comanches, Kiowas, and Utes “yelling like demons,” as Pettis put it. With each sortie, Carson’s men fell farther back to the safety of the ruins, defending their position with a furious crack of carbines and a determined shelling from the howitzers.

  Still the Indians kept coming, Carson wrote, “repeatedly charging my command from different points, but invariably repulsed with great loss.” One howitzer shell passed cleanly through the body of a warrior’s mount (killing the horse, but not the man), and then resumed its trajectory, exploding another hundred yards deeper on the plains. Little Mountain, the Kiowa chief, also had his horse shot out from under him, in his case by rifle fire, yet he continued to exhort his men from the ground. Whenever the warriors drew within range of the mountain howitzers, the Indians were now careful to disperse and attack in smaller numbers so as not to present an easy target for shrapnel. Other warriors dismounted and fought lying down in the high grass, “making it hot for most of us by their excellent marksmanship,” Pettis writes.

  Watching the fighting, Carson was increasingly alarmed. The Comanches and Kiowas had been aroused to a hornetlike fervor. Carson later said that they “acted with more daring and bravery than I have ever before witnessed.”

  A young man of the New Mexico Volunteers was lying prone and firing in the grass outside the ruins when a rattlesnake bit him in the hand. He was taken to the hospital, where a doctor cleaned the wound and gave the soldier a drink of whiskey. The dazed New Mexican returned to the fight and later killed a Comanche who had sallied too close. Before the comrades of the deceased warrior could circle back and collect the body, the New Mexican scrambled out to the field and took his scalp. Remarkably, it was the only scalp taken that day.

  The battlefield was not without its comedy. Months earlier, one of the Kiowa warriors had somehow acquired an army bugle and learned to play it well. Whenever Carson’s own cavalry bugler sounded “advance,” the Kiowa, unseen in the dusty throngs of horsemen, would sound “retreat.” This caused great confusion until Carson’s men finally discerned the location of the mysterious second bugler.
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  The fighting raged into the afternoon, with many Indian casualties—it was, Carson judged, “a great slaughter.” The American wounded, however, numbered less than a dozen. This astonishing statistic was owed in part to Adobe Walls itself, which had proven to be a superior defensive position. But it also spoke of Carson’s coolness under fire. Throughout the day he urged his men to stay calm and steady, to ignore the warriors abroad on the field and focus on each wave as it came. If they had shown any weakness, if the lines had faltered just once, the Comanches would have overrun them with sheer numbers.

  But it was the mountain howitzers that made the crucial difference. If not for their presence on the battlefield, Carson said, “few would have been left to tell the tale.” Carson biographer Edwin Sabin surmised that “had it not been for the two cannon, this Thanksgiving time fight might have made Josefa a widow.”

  Through the afternoon the warriors kept pressing in on all sides. Although he enjoyed a temporary advantage in firepower, Carson knew that he could not hold out indefinitely—and that the Indians could.

  Then Carson did something singularly intelligent: He retreated. Some of his officers urged him to push forward and attack the Comanche villages as planned, but he now judged such a move to be foolhardy, if not suicidal. “It was impossible for me to chastise them further at present,” he euphemized in his official report.

  Speaking more frankly, though, he later admitted to a friend: “The Indians whipped me in this fight.”

  Executing a retreat would be tricky enough. The column would have to vacate Adobe Walls, slink down to the river, and head west like an ungainly centipede, somehow protecting itself as it slowly backpedaled. His troops assembled in a long column, with the horses held in the middle, skirmishers flanking all sides, and the howitzers poised for use and trundling along in the rear.

  The Kiowas and Comanches did not let up—on the contrary, Carson said, they “now commenced the most severe fighting of the day.” Through the late afternoon, as the column made its crawl along the Canadian, Carson thought the “Indians charged so repeatedly and with such desperation that for some time I had serious doubts for the safety of my rear.” The Comanches started a grass fire along the river and used the smoke as a screen to tear at Carson’s flanks without being seen. One of his men was shot and lanced, and many others were injured. The smoke and heat grew so intense that Carson and his men had to climb out of the river valley and march on the bluffs, where at least he could clearly see what he was up against.

  At dusk the howitzers were put to use again. The shells whistled in the twilit skies, and finally the warriors began to relent. Satisfied that they had taught this white army a lesson, they rode back along the Canadian toward their villages and their families.

  The battle of Adobe Walls was the last fight of Kit Carson’s life. By most measurements he had been defeated. The Comanche-Kiowa alliance had resoundingly driven him from the field. Had a few things gone differently, the battle could have ended in the total slaughter of his men, a debacle that would have dwarfed Custer’s last stand at Little Bighorn twelve years later.

  But luckily for his men, Carson was no dashing glory-hunter. Through his caution and good judgment, he shows us just how differently his martial mind worked from that of George Armstrong Custer. Carson understood that the first definition of victory is survival. He was outnumbered ten to one, on a battlefield that lay 250 miles from his base. These were not good odds.

  And yet his casualties were remarkably low: Only three of his men died that day, and 21 reported wounded. The Kiowas and Comanches, on the other hand, had lost more than 100 warriors, with perhaps as many as 200 wounded, and Little Mountain’s village had been utterly destroyed. One Carson biographer thought the battle was a classic “coup” for Carson in the traditional sense understood on the plains—a victory won “exactly in the style the Indians understood: entering enemy territory, inflicting damage, and retiring with little loss.”

  General Carleton, when he received word of the battle, went so far as to call Adobe Walls “a brilliant affair,” and complimented Carson for the “handsome manner in which you all met so formidable an enemy and defeated him.” The general said that Carson’s campaign added “another green leaf to the laurel wreath which you have so nobly won in the service of your country.”

  This was plainly an overoptimistic assessment. But if Adobe Walls was a defeat, Carson was at least able to view it as an acceptable one as he limped home to New Mexico during the last cold week of November. In the confusion of his withdrawal, he had completely forgotten about the greatcoat he had tossed on the ground by the Canadian River, so now he rode wrapped in a buffalo robe that had been taken from the destroyed Kiowa village. Fearing that the Comanches and Kiowas might return, he marched all through the night. The following day, when he finally decided the coast was clear, he gave in to his exhaustion and ordered his men to set up camp. He had been in the saddle for four days straight, and his mount was in sorry shape. When he removed the saddle, the horse’s skin came with it.

  Four days later, at another remote location on the southern prairie, another American army descended on a village of Plains Indians. A band of Cheyenne led by a chief named Black Kettle had made their winter camp along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado, not far from the ruins of Bent’s Fort. Because Black Kettle had shown peaceful intentions and a willingness to negotiate, U.S. Army officials had promised to afford him protection that winter and even gave him an American flag to fly over his camp.

  But on November 29, a force of Colorado Volunteers appeared on the winter plains. They were led by Col. John Chivington, the former minister who had made a name for himself in the battle of Glorieta. Without provocation, Chivington attacked Black Kettle’s village at dawn, ignoring both the American flag and the various swatches of white cloth the Indians held up in desperation. The slaughter was beyond horrendous. More than 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, were murdered in cold blood that day, in a massacre that is now widely regarded as the worst atrocity committed in all the Indian wars. When someone questioned Chivington’s policy of killing children, the “Fighting Parson” is said to have replied, “Nits breed lice.”

  Chivington returned to Denver in triumph. At a theater his men paraded their war trophies before the cheering crowds: Scalps, fingers, tobacco pouches made from scrotums, purses of stretched pudenda hacked from Cheyenne women. The Denver newspapers praised the Colorado Volunteers for their glorious victory. “Posterity will speak of me as the great Indian fighter,” Chivington gloated, adding, “I have eclipsed Kit Carson.”

  When Carson learned of the massacre upon his return from Adobe Walls, he was appalled. He knew the Cheyennes well and was personally acquainted with many of the victims. Later, he denounced the massacre during a conversation with Col. James Rusling, an army inspector who, though no sentimentalist on the subject of American Indians, faithfully documented Carson’s tirade, dialect and all. “Jis to think of that dog Chivington and his dirty hounds, up thar at Sand Creek,” Carson told Rusling.

  His men shot down squaws, and blew the brains out of little innocent children. You call sich soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages? What der yer ’spose our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things? I tell you what, I don’t like a hostile red skin any more than you do. And when they are hostile, I’ve fought ’em, hard as any man. But I never yet drew a bead on a squaw or papoose, and I despise the man who would. I’ve seen as much of ’em as any man livin’, and I can’t help but pity ’em, right or wrong. They once owned all this country yes, Plains and Mountains, buffalo and everything. But now they own next door to nuthin, and will soon be gone.

  Chapter 45: THE CONDITION OF THE TRIBES

  General Carleton was alarmed and even panicked by the crop failure of 1864, and he flew into a frenzy of activity to rush more food and supplies to the bosque. For all his character deficits, it cannot be said that the Christian general lacked a conscienc
e. He realized that if he did not do something drastic, he would be responsible for the deaths of thousands. “These Indians are upon my hands,” he wrote. “I cannot see them perish either from nakedness or hunger.” Through a relentless campaign of personal persuasion and correspondence, Carleton succeeded in shipping tons of emergency foodstuffs to the bosque. Realizing that the whole experiment was in jeopardy, he wrote Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas in Washington, pleading for more rations and materials. The Navajos, Carleton wrote, “will upbraid us for having taken their birthright and left them to perish. With other tribes we have acquired ever since the Pilgrims stepped on the shore at Plymouth, this has been done too often. For pity’s sake, if moved not by any other consideration, for once treat the Indian as he deserves to be treated.”

  He ordered four thousand sheep and gave specific instructions on how to economize on the meat. “The whole animal, including what the butchers call head and pluck, must be used,” he wrote the commanding officer of the camp. The mutton was to be incorporated into stews, soups, blood puddings, and even haggis. When informed that Navajos did not traditionally eat soup, he insisted that they learn: Soup would be their salvation, and it must become their daily ritual. Said Carleton: “It must be inculcated as a religion.”

  In the meantime, Carleton urged his officers at Bosque Redondo to try to buoy the spirits of the Navajos. “Tell them,” he wrote, “to be too proud to murmur at what cannot be helped. Tell them not to be discouraged but to work hard, every man and woman, to put in large crops next year, when if God smiles upon our efforts, they will, at one bound, be forever placed beyond want and be independent.”