Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  Navajo country has moved modern geologists, ordinarily a reserved lot, to adopt a vocabulary of doom: Paradox Basin, Defiance Uplift, the Great Unconformity. Geological maps of the Navajo lands are ominously annotated with “upwarps” and “cinder cones” and “structural disarrays.” Not far from Narbona’s home lay enormous forests of petrified wood, which the Navajo believed were the bones of Yeitso, a terrible beast slain by the war god Monster Slayer and left to rot on the plains, the creature’s blood congealing into lava flows. Throughout Navajo country could be found canyon walls embedded with the fossils of sea organisms—corals, bryozoa, trilobites—that had lived in the ocean more than 300 million years ago.

  To the north of Narbona’s camp, often visible over the Chuska plain, loomed Tse’ Bit’ A’i, or the Rock With Wings. This neck of an explosive volcanic vent had eroded over thousands of years into a breathtaking monolith that looked something like the spiny backbone of an enormous dinosaur. In the 1860s, American explorers, fancying that this strange formation resembled a clipper ship, coined the name by which it is more familiarly known today: Shiprock.

  But the most conspicuous landmark in Narbona’s part of Navajo country was a large dormant volcano that hung magisterially over the sagebrush high country to the south of his family’s land. The Navajos called this impressive stand-alone mountain Tsoodzil, or Blue Bead Mountain. Marking the southeastern corner of Navajo country, Blue Bead Mountain rose to eleven thousand feet and was cloaked in ponderosa pines and aspen. Its bald peak was packed with snow during the winter months and green with wild meadow grasses in summer, while the mountain’s lower shoulders of piñon and juniper tapered into enormous lava fields of black basalt.

  As he grew up, Narbona could look to the south and see this distinctive landmark hovering steadfastly there, a wispy blue mirage. Like all Navajo children, he learned from an early age that Blue Bead Mountain was one of the four sacred mountains that anchored the Navajo country. There was a mountain for each cardinal direction, each one inhabited by different gods, each one figuring prominently in the creation stories. From any place in Navajo country, a person could always see at least one of the four sacred landmarks. Except to make war or go on raids, Navajos were not supposed to venture beyond the borders formed by these great peaks or else they would face sickness or death. For good luck, many Navajos kept prayer bundles in their hogans, little sacks that contained soil taken from each of the four mountains.

  The world in which Narbona came of age was one of strict symmetry and balance. The number four held great power. There were four sacred colors, four sacred plants, four sacred gemstones. After a healing ceremony, a patient was not supposed to talk to anyone or engage in sexual relations for four days. Every Navajo was mindful of the four points of the compass. The hogan was always oriented with the doors facing east. Each direction had its own quality and hue—north, for example, was black, and it was considered the direction of death and the supernatural; a Navajo never slept with his head pointing north. Navajo sandpaintings and blankets, for all of their vivid color and originality, adhered to a tight symmetry, the designs usually divided into equal quadrants representing the four directions.

  Their ordered world was further divided and defined by gender. Objects, landmarks, even acts of nature could be either “male” or “female.” A female rain was a gentle, steady mist; a male rain was an angry black thunderstorm. There were male hogans and female hogans, each constructed of slightly different materials and used for different purposes. The lower Rio Grande, muddy and slow and quiet, was a female river, while the boulder-choked San Juan River, full of froth and rapids, was decidedly male.

  The San Juan River traditionally marked the border between Navajo country and the domain of the Utah Indians. The Utes, a fierce tribe of hunter-gatherers, roamed in the mountains north of this thunderous male river. Throughout Narbona’s boyhood, the Utes were probably the Navajo’s greatest enemy. The two tribes were constantly at war. The Spanish governors in Santa Fe had learned that it was much easier to set the territory’s hostile tribes against one another than to fight them outright. And so, with the Spaniards smiling on the situation from afar and promising to stay neutral, the Utes stepped up their long-simmering war with the Navajos. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s they stormed into Navajo camps, stealing children to sell to the Spanish at the slave market in Taos.

  For young Narbona and his family it was a time of bloodshed and nearly constant worry. To the Navajos the word “enemy” really meant only one thing: Ute. Narbona grew up with countless stories of Ute outrages, and he longed to go on retaliatory strikes led by his father and other Navajo warriors. By the time he was a teenager he had grown to a formidable height—he was said to stand nearly a head taller than most of his comrades—and he was singled out as a promising warrior. When he was sixteen he went on his first raid, and he found that he was good at it. Returning home from his first fight, Narbona no doubt participated, as most raiders did, in a Nda, the Enemy Way ceremony, an elaborate rite designed to purge any bad spirits or foreign influences a warrior may have unwittingly absorbed while venturing off Navajo lands.

  Narbona then began to ride farther afield, striking not only at the Ute camps across the San Juan but also at vulnerable Pueblo settlements and finally, the ultimate prize of all, the Spanish ranches along the Rio Grande. So successful were young Navajo warriors like Narbona in their raids during the late 1770s and early 1780s that the Hispanic villagers finally had to import new horses from Chihuahua—breeding alone could not keep pace with Indian thefts.

  When he was in his early twenties, Narbona’s parents arranged for him to marry a girl from the Tzith-ah-ni clan named Bikay-djohl. As was the custom, Narbona went to live with his new bride among her people, who lived on the slopes of the Tunicha Mountains, to the north of his own family’s outfit. He and Bikay-djohl constructed a hogan close to that of her parents. Most likely, the wedding ceremony was held there in the new hogan. Huddled inside with the family, the medicine man said his prayers and bestowed his blessings, and, upon leaving, advised the young couple, with a bodily frankness that would certainly embarrass most Anglo-American newlyweds back east, to attend immediately to the important community business of procreation—and to that end, instructed them not to leave the hogan for four nights and four days.

  Then the couple set up housekeeping, probably surrounded by the hogans of Narbona’s mother-in-law and her extended family. Narbona had no choice but to try to get along with his new outfit and acclimate himself to all its disputes and quirks of personality; he was not free to return with his wife to live with his own family’s outfit. The Navajos had come up with a system that minimized the possibility of incest—they could marry neither within their own clan nor their own outfit—but the close and complicated living arrangements required of these small seminomadic groups could seem quite incestuous indeed. (Years later an anthropologist would describe the cohesive and geographically isolated Navajo outfits as tending toward “emotional inbreeding.”)

  Observing an old and curious Navajo taboo, Narbona was not allowed to look at his mother-in-law, nor she at him. It was a custom designed to keep the peace and, apparently, to avoid sexual tension. In fact, many mothers-in-law in Navajo country went so far as to wear little warning bells on their clothing so that a son-in-law would not round a corner and inadvertently find himself staring at her. This was no small thing, especially if he happened to look her in the eye: Even an accidental violation of the mother-in-law taboo might require that the family hire a healer to perform an elaborate—and expensive—nightchant to undo all the harm that had been done.

  Sometime in the late 1780s, Narbona took a second wife. His raids of Spanish settlements intensified, and he became known as a great war chief. During one raid Narbona captured a young Zuni woman, and she became one of his wives, by all accounts as loyal and happy a member of his outfit as his two Navajo wives.

  He proved to have keen political and diplomatic skills and
impressed people as someone who, as the Navajo liked to say, “talks easy.” Many young warriors from all over the Chuska Mountains and as far away as Blue Bead Mountain had volunteered to ride and apprentice under him. Over time, the imposing Narbona raised what amounted to a standing army.

  The focal point of the fighting was a small fortified village that the Spanish had founded in 1800. The Navajos considered the village, called Cebolleta, an outrageous affront, for it was built on the very flanks of their sacred Blue Bead Mountain, on land the Navajos had controlled for centuries. A group of Spanish settlers fancied the area because of the fine grazing along the mountain’s slopes and had won a land grant from the royal governor in Santa Fe to start a new outpost. The Navajos attacked the new village relentlessly. In the escalating conflict, Narbona emerged as the most prominent war leader.

  On one occasion in 1804, he organized a force of a thousand warriors and surrounded the tiny settlement. The siege raged for weeks and was marked by desperate hand-to-hand fighting. Spanish accounts of the battle are vivid and brutal. The Cebolletans passed down one story about an elderly grandmother, Antonia Romero, who managed to kill a Navajo attacker by crushing his head with a metate—an anvil-sized stone used for grinding corn. Another Cebolletan account tells the story of an intrepid defender named Domingo Baca, who was disemboweled by a Navajo lancer. Undaunted by his injury, Baca strapped a pillow around his belly to hold in his guts, then seized his musket and rejoined the fight. When he removed the pillow that night, writes historian Marc Simmons, Baca’s friends “were aghast, and quickly made the sign of the cross as for one already dead. But Baca returned the dangling entrails to their proper place, called for needle and sinew, and sewed up the wound himself. These crude ministrations proved effective, for he recovered and lived to fight again.”

  Narbona and his thousand warriors might have succeeded in finally dislodging the hated settlers had the Spanish governor not brought in seasoned troops from Sonora. The Spaniards, too, led many counterraids into Navajo country, but few of them made much of an impression on the elusive Diné.

  Chapter 6: WHO IS JAMES K. POLK?

  The mission on which Kearny led the Army of the West had no precedent in American history. For the first time the U.S. Army was setting out to invade, and permanently occupy, vast portions of a sovereign nation. It was a bald landgrab of gargantuan proportions. President James K. Polk expected Kearny to march nearly one thousand miles and promptly conquer a territory nearly half as large as the existing United States. After reaching Santa Fe and taking New Mexico, he was then to keep moving west, taking all of what is now Arizona and parts of present-day Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and finally, the greatest prize, California, until the American flag smiled over the blue Pacific. All of the lands in this vast, tattered kingdom were to fall in a single dash.

  The war with Mexico was a complex affair with many tentacles of grievance, real and imagined, reaching back many years. Most immediately, the war had to do with Texas. Late the previous year, 1845, the United States had officially annexed the Lone Star Republic, which, a decade earlier, had declared its independence from Mexico after the bloody battles at the Alamo and San Jacinto. But Mexico had never recognized Texas’s claim of independence and certainly was not prepared to see it pass into United States possession. President Polk had sent an emissary named John Slidell to Mexico City to negotiate the purchase of Texas, with borders set to the Rio Grande, for some $10 million. While he was at it, Polk instructed Slidell to offer to purchase California and New Mexico, for another $20 million, but this bold overture came to nothing. Realizing that neither diplomacy nor outright bartering would achieve his expansionist ends, Polk was determined to provoke a war. He dispatched Gen. Zachary Taylor to disputed territory, between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, in southern Texas. It was an unsubtle attempt to create the first sparks. In April 1846, Taylor’s soldiers were fired upon, and Polk was thus given the pretext he needed to declare war.

  “American blood has been spilled on American soil,” Polk spluttered with righteous indignation, neglecting to mention that Taylor had done everything within his power to invite attack, and that anyway, it wasn’t really American soil—at least not yet. Mexico had “insulted the nation,” the president charged, and now must be punished for its treachery, beaten back, relieved of vast tracts of real estate it was not fit to govern.

  The simple truth was, Polk wanted more territory. No president in American history had ever been so frank in his aims for seizing real estate; it was a curious time in the history of the settlement of North America, a time when the European powers, though fast losing their purchase on the New World, still held dreams of securing the last great unmapped chunks of a wild continent. Britain had designs on the Oregon Territory, and the Russian trappers and sea otter barons, from their bases in Alaska, still maintained a feeble influence along the Northern California coast. Even waning France and Spain nursed various intrigues.

  In this competitive environment, President Polk took the position that the United States should aggressively pursue its territorial interests now or else risk forfeiting them forever. Polk especially had his eyes on the ports of California, but he found it hard to resist any of the lands that lay between the existing United States and the Pacific. Nearly from the moment he took office in 1845, Polk had seemed perfectly willing to fight two simultaneous wars—one with Mexico over Texas and California, and another with Great Britain over Oregon—in order to gain the lands he so brazenly coveted.

  The eleventh president of the United States was a sly, misanthropic man with long gray hair swept back from his blocky forehead. His jaw was clenched, his countenance grimly determined. He wore a long black coat that was frumpish and out of style, its pockets stuffed with letters. It was impossible to know what the president was thinking. He kept his prim mouth shut, and his gray eyes, hard and jewel-like, gave up nothing.

  Perhaps Polk’s dour nature had something to do with the excruciating medical condition that he long suffered from as a teenager growing up in Columbia, Tennessee. At seventeen, after years of anguish that seemed to imprint a permanent grimace on his adolescent face, Polk was diagnosed with urinary stones. He was taken by horse-drawn ambulance to a famous Kentucky physician, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, and there underwent what was then a state-of-the-art surgery. With nothing more than brandy for an anesthetic, the future president was strapped naked to the operating table with his legs hoisted high in the air. Dr. McDowell bored through the prostate and into the bladder with a medieval-looking tool called a “gorget.” The stones were successfully removed, but the operation is thought to have left Polk sterile and impotent. Polk biographer John Seigenthaler thought that Polk “became a man on Dr. McDowell’s operating table. Here, for the first time, were evidences of the courage, grit, and unyielding iron will that Whigs, the British Crown, and the Mexican Army would encounter once he became president.”

  Polk had been elected in one of the closest contests in American history, one from which many claims of election fraud arose. After the dust of the 1844 campaign settled, no one seemed entirely sure how this small, stern political operative had risen from obscurity to defeat the great Whig candidate Henry Clay. As a speaker Polk was plodding and colorless, a master of the single-entendre. John Quincy Adams said that Polk “has no wit, no literature, no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus.” Considered the first “dark horse” candidate in presidential history, Polk was nominated on the ninth ballot at the Democratic Party convention in Baltimore. The news of his nomination was shot to Washington by brand-new telegraph lines, the first occasion Samuel Morse’s startling invention had been used for a public purpose.

  The debonair Clay, sure of his national stature, had underestimated Polk’s determination and dismissed the upstart with the mocking campaign slogan “Who is James K. Polk?” But in the end, Polk was elected by a margin of forty thousand votes and became, at age forty-nine, what
was then the youngest president in the country’s history.

  There was about Polk’s presidency an acute sense of deadline: As a candidate he vowed that he would seek only one term of office and he would keep his campaign promise. He had four years to accomplish everything and that was it—he would exit the stage. And so everything in Polk’s administration was compressed, intensified, accelerated. Extraordinarily, Polk succeeded in achieving nearly all of his goals. Despite his insufferable personality, he was possibly the most effective president in American history—and likely the least corrupt. He outmaneuvered his critics. He established an independent treasury. He confronted the British and conquered Mexico. He seized the western third of the North American continent. By the time he left office, the American land mass would increase by 522 million acres.

  Four years was all he needed. Polk would limp home to Tennessee exhausted and seriously ill, suffering from what he called a “derangement of the bowels.” In three months he would be dead.