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

by Hampton Sides

  They took his body across the Arkansas, across the Purgatory, and laid him beside Josefa, the dirt still disturbed from her burial. They were married twenty-five years, and died less than a month apart. At Fort Lyon, a bugler played taps and the flag was flown at half-mast.

  Four days later the Rocky Mountain News in Denver ran a notice of Carson’s death: “Over what an immense expanse of plains, of snow-clad sierras, of rivers, lakes, and seas, has he cut the first paths? His guiding instinct was an innate chivalry. He had in him a personal courage which came forth when wanted, like lightning from a cloud.”

  And Monster Slayer said, “Some things should be left as they are. Perhaps it is better for all of us in the long run that certain enemies endure.”

  —FROM DINÉ BAHANE, THE NAVAJO CREATION STORY

  Epilogue: IN BEAUTY WE WALK

  On a bright morning in late May, the same week that Kit Carson died, several thousand Diné gathered on the plains of Bosque Redondo, away from the Pecos, out on the hard, bright ground where they could all see one another. A chant rose up from their midst, a song that slowly built on itself as the collective energy took hold. Then, the Navajos began to clack stones together, and a clear pulse ran through the tribe.

  The sound of the clicking rocks puzzled the soldiers over at Fort Sumner. At first they feared it was the first stirrings of an insurrection, and they climbed to the rooftops of the Issue House to investigate. From there they watched a strange scene unfold.

  The Navajos had formed a circle several miles in diameter, so large that any person standing on the circumference could look across the plains and see only tiny human dots on the circle’s opposite side. Then, taking small, measured steps, they began to close the ring. As they stepped forward, the Navajos continued to chant and clack their rocks. Slowly, the circle began to shrink on the plain, tightening like a great noose.

  In the center, a young coyote stood up and began to run in fright. As the circle closed up, the coyote ran frantically this way and that, until it finally understood it had nowhere to go: It was trapped inside a human corral.

  Whether out of sheer terror or an instinct to feign death, the coyote lay down. Then Barboncito, the small, bearded medicine man from Canyon de Chelly, stepped inside the circle and approached the trembling animal. Several others helped him hold the coyote down. Barboncito opened his medicine bag and removed a bead of abalone shell. Carefully, he placed the white bead in the coyote’s mouth and began to pray over the animal.

  The chanting and the percussion of the rocks stopped, and in the silence, each person on the circumference slowly backpedaled: The great noose was opening up again.

  Barboncito was keen to see in which direction the coyote would run. That was the purpose of the ceremony, in fact. It was an ancient ritual, one that Navajo medicine men performed only in extreme circumstances, to look for signs that concerned the future of the tribe.

  Suddenly Barboncito and the others pulled away, and the coyote sprang up. It looked confused at first. And then it turned in the direction Barboncito had hoped. The coyote bolted across the thickets of cholla and mesquite, and escaped from the confines of the human circle.

  It was running headlong toward the west.

  A few days later, on May 28, 1868, Gen. William Sherman arrived at Bosque Redondo with his entourage from the Great Peace Commission. He stepped from his carriage and strode briskly about the reservation, taking mental note of everything he saw. Now forty-eight years old, Sherman was a ruddy, craggy, self-assured figure who moved with the brusque manner of a man who had seen nearly everything there was to see in the department of human misery and could not be easily impressed.

  He must have known that his friend Kit Carson had died five days earlier. Everyone in New Mexico had heard the news, and all over the territory, flags were flying at half-mast. Sherman understood that with Carson’s passing, an era had ended and a new one had begun. “Kit Carson was a good type of a class of men most useful in their day,” Sherman later wrote, “but now as antiquated as Jason of the Golden Fleece, Ulysses of Troy, the Chevalier La Salle of the Lakes, Daniel Boone of Kentucky, all belonging to a dead past.”

  Carson helped to put the Navajos here, and now Sherman had the authority to undo what his friend had done. He had been given an extraordinary power and was not timid about using it. Navajo women clutched at his coat as he moved about the reservation. Everywhere he went the Navajos struggled to get a glimpse of the great and powerful man.

  Sherman was no softhearted advocate for the Indians, but he could see that the reservation was an abject failure, that the Navajos were despondent and the farms fallow. “I found the Bosque a mere spot of grass in the midst of a wild desert,” he later wrote, “and that the Navajos had sunk into a condition of absolute poverty and despair.”

  General Sherman joined the other members of the commission in one of the buildings on the grounds of Bosque Redondo. There they met a small delegation of Navajo headmen, led by Barboncito and Manuelito. Two Spanish interpreters translated the proceedings, and army stenographers recorded everything.

  General Sherman rose and spoke first. “The Commissioners are here now for the purpose of learning all about your condition. General Carleton removed you here for the purpose of making you agriculturalists. But we find you have no farms, no herds, and are now as poor as you were four years ago. We want to know what you have done in the past and what you think about your reservation here.”

  Barboncito stood up to answer for the Navajos. The Diné had finally come to realize the importance the bilagaana placed on having a leader, a single representative of the whole tribe. They regarded Barboncito as their most eloquent spokesman. He had great poise, a calmness at the center of his being. But an unmistakable passion also rose from his words and gestures. As he talked, his long whiskers bristled and his tiny hands danced. He spoke for a long time, and Sherman let him go on without interruption.

  Barboncito said that he viewed General Sherman not as a man but as a divinity. “It appears to me,” he said, “that the General commands the whole thing as a god. I am speaking to you, General Sherman, as if I was speaking to a spirit.”

  The medicine man continued. “We have been living here five winters,” he said. “The first year we planted corn. It yielded a good crop, but a worm got in the corn and destroyed nearly all of it. The second year the same. The third year it grew about two feet high when a hailstorm completely destroyed all of it. For that reason none of us has attempted to put in seed this year. I think now it is true what my forefathers told me about crossing the line of my own country. We know this land does not like us. It seems that whatever we do here causes death.”

  Barboncito then explained to Sherman his aversion to the prospect of moving to a new reservation in Oklahoma, an idea that the government authorities had lately been floating among the Navajos. “Our grandfathers had no idea of living in any other country except our own, and I do not think it right for us to do so. Before I am sick or older I want to go and see the place where I was born. I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own. This hope goes in at my feet and out at my mouth as I am speaking to you.”

  Sherman was visibly touched by Barboncito’s words. “I have listened to what you have said of your people,” he told Barboncito, “and I believe you have told the truth. All people love the country where they were born and raised. We want to do what is right.”

  Then Sherman said something that gave Barboncito his first stab of hope. “We have got a map here which if Barboncito can understand, I would like to show him a few points on.” It was a map of Navajo country, showing the four sacred mountains and other landmarks Barboncito immediately recognized.

  Sherman continued, “If we agree, we will make a boundary line outside of which you must not go except for the purpose of trading.” Sherman carefully showed Barboncito the line he was considering and warned him of the dire consequences of straying beyond it. “You must know exactly whe
re you belong. And you must not fight anymore. The Army will do the fighting. You must live at peace.”

  Barboncito tried to contain his joy but could not. The tears spilled down over his mustache. “I am very well pleased with what you have said,” he told Sherman, “and we are willing to abide by whatever orders are issued to us.”

  He told Sherman that he had already sewn a new pair of moccasins for the walk home. “We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!”

  A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home.

  June 18 was set as the departure date. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp—they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves.

  The next morning the trek began. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins.

  When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.”

  They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. And as they marched, they chanted—

  Beauty before us

  Beauty behind us

  Beauty around us

  In beauty we walk

  It is finished in beauty

  A NOTE ON THE SOURCES

  When I began working on this book in early 2002, I had little notion of what a grand and exhausting adventure of research I’d signed on for. Keeping track of the extraordinary Christopher Carson and his movements over the American West is a far-flung enterprise—requiring transcontinental goose chases that are grueling even when you don’t have to do them on a mule. Over the past four years I’ve put something like 20,000 trip miles on my diesel Jetta and consulted approximately 500 sources—contemporary journals and diaries, collections of personal papers, official army reports, frontier post returns, manuscripts, monographs, and academic articles as well as published books—nearly all of which are cited in the Selected Bibliography.

  I’m especially indebted to the historical collections housed at the following institutions: the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Zimmerman Library’s Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; the Southwest Reading Room of the Santa Fe Library; and the Fray Angelico Chavez History Library and Photographic Archive in Santa Fe. Also of vital importance were the exhaustive Frank McNitt Papers, housed at the State Archives in Santa Fe.

  This book is based primarily on firsthand documents and contemporary accounts, but I would like to cite a few of the secondary sources that proved most influential in shaping my narrative. Foremost among these is Kit Carson and the Indians by Tom Dunlay, the most thoroughly researched and original work of scholarship on Carson to date. I would urge anyone who seeks to become a student of Carson to start with Dunlay—he’s the gold standard. Another eminence in the field, Marc Simmons, has been steadily teasing new details from the Carson story for decades. I especially relied on Simmons’s Kit Carson and His Three Wives, a study of Carson’s strained and sometimes tragic home life.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to Dwight Clarke for his groundbreaking biography of Stephen Watts Kearny, Soldier of the West. Kearny is one of the most pivotal, and yet least known, figures of the American West, and Clarke’s book has done much to put the general back on the map where he belongs.

  With respect to Navajo culture, three books proved especially illuminating: The Navajo by Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navajos by Ruth Underhill, and The Book of the Navajo by Raymond Friday Locke. One other Navajo book I must mention in a category all by itself: a strange and beautiful (and sexually frank!) gem of oral history called Son of Old Man Hat, which comes as close as anything I’ve read to painting a picture of what Navajo life must have been like before the coming of the Americans.

  Only one man has approached the grim subject of the Navajo wars with the sensibility and seriousness of a scholar, and that’s Frank McNitt, author of the comprehensive Navajo Wars, among other books. For anyone who wants to understand the root causes and cultural nuances of this ancient conflict, all roads lead to McNitt.

  On the subject of John C. Fremont: Apart from his memoirs and expedition reports, I leaned heavily on two works of recent vintage: Tom Chaffin’s Pathfinder, which manages through sound scholarship and clear writing to refract Fremont’s melodramas through a modern lens; and David Roberts’s A Newer World, a fascinating study of Fremont’s strange double-helix relationship with Carson.

  Finally, I want to cite four books that stand out in the necessarily morose and sometimes overly maudlin literature of the Long Walk experience: The Army and the Navajo by Gerald Thompson; Navajo Roundup by Lawrence Kelly; The Long Walk by Lynn Bailey; and Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period, an oral history compiled by Ruth Roessel. These books paint an unflinching portrait of a tragic experiment whose impact is lasting and profound—not just for the Navajos, but for the nation’s soul.

  NOTES

  Prologue: Hoofbeats

  They had heard from their priest… See Dwight Clarke, Stephen Watts Kearny: Soldier of the West, p. 144.

  Las Vegas was punctured by the sound of hoofbeats… Reports of the Las Vegas raid appear in several Army of the West diaries, including W. H. Emory’s Lieutenant Emory Reports, p. 49.

  The raiders came boiling out of the mountains… For descriptions of Navajo raid culture, weaponry, and martial dress, see Underhill, The Navajos, pp. 76–78; and Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navajo, pp. 34–41.

  Many of them wore strange, tight-fitting helmets… Edward Sapir, Navajo Texts, p. 413.

  they drove their herds on networks of tiny trails… See Lynn Bailey, The Long Walk, p. 3.

  BOOK ONE: THE NEW MEN

  Chapter 1 Jumping Off

  He was a man of odd habits and superstitions. See Vestal, Kit Carson: The Happy Warrior of the Old West, p. 119.

  “His saddle, which he always used as a pillow…” Brewerton, Overland with Kit Carson, pp. 64–65.

  “a beauty of the haughty, heart-breaking kind…” Garrard, Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail, p. 181.

  “So this is the distinguished Kit Carson…” Tom Dunlay, Kit Carson and the Indians, p. 21.

  “sharp little barks of laughter…” Ibid., p. 341.

  “the prettiest fight I ever saw…” Carson, Kit Carson’s Autobiography, p. 52.

  chasing down his enemies as “sport.” Ibid., p. 101.

  “a perfect butchery.” Ibid., p. 95.

  “When we would go to school…” Kansas City Star, September 13, 1952.

  “I jumped to my rifle…” Guild and Carter, Kit Carson: A Pattern for Heroes, p. 10.

  “anxious to see different countries.” Carson, Autobiography, p. 5.

  “The business did not suit me.” Ibid., p. 4.

  “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” Kansas City Star, September 13, 1952.

  “Notice is hereby given�
�” Sabin, Kit Carson Days, vol. 1, p. 12.

  Andrew Broadus was “perfectly well.” Carson, Autobiography, p. 5.

  the still-hot liver…seasoned with bile… See Lavender, Bent’s Fort, p. 98.

  “Meat’s meat.” Vestal, Kit Carson: The Happy Warrior of the Old West, p. 49.

  “shed rain like an otter…” Lavender, Bent’s Fort, p. 81.

  “The whole operation is full of exposures…” Ibid., p. 46.

  they competed in telling legendary whoppers… See Vestal, Kit Carson: The Happy Warrior of the Old West, p. 61.

  “It is a matter of vanity and ambition…” Washington Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville, p. 69.

  Run, and they follow; follow, and they run. Vestal, Kit Carson: The Happy Warrior, of the Old West, p. 70.

  “the hills were covered in Indians.” Carson, Autobiography, p. 10.

  “straight through the nipple…” Vestal, Kit Carson: The Happy Warrior of the Old West, p. 47.

  Chapter 2 The Glittering World

  “people of the great planted fields.” Locke, The Book of the Navajo, p. 164; Underhill, The Navajos, p. 4.

  “a very bellicose people who…occupy all frontiers…” Frank McNitt, Navajo Wars, p. 6.

  “heathens who kill Christians…” Ibid., p. 15.

  “their crimes, their audacity,…” Iverson, Diné: A History of the Navajos, p. 28.

  literally chaining them to church pews…indios barbaros. Locke, The Book of the Navajo, p. 182.

  “they have been raised like deer.” McNitt, Navajo Wars, p. 28.

  “one never reaches the end of it.” Ibid., p. 6.

  “The war with the Navajos is slowly consuming the Department…” Ibid., p. 90.