Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  In Santa Fe, the people were left in shock at the realization that their leaders had truly deserted them. The American infidels were coming, and not a thing could be done about it. Women wept in the streets. Valuables were hidden, children sent away. The people battened down their houses as though preparing for a storm. One citizen, mortified by his pusillanimous governor, wrote in disgust, “Mr. Armijo did absolutely nothing. All is lost, including honor.”

  While camped along the Pecos River near the great ruins, Kearny’s men suddenly heard approaching hoofbeats. They turned from their fires to behold a rider galloping at them, gesticulating wildly, aiming straight for General Kearny. “A large fellow, mounted on a mule, came towards us at full speed, and extending his hand to the general, congratulated him on the arrival of his army,” wrote Lt. William Emory. It was the alcalde of the nearby Hispanic village of Pecos, and he came bearing important news. “He said, with a roar of laughter, ‘Armijo and his troops have gone to hell! The canyon is all clear!’”

  Kearny did not necessarily believe the man. He treated the alcalde’s news as a rumor, like all the others. The Army of the West rose before dawn on the morning of August 18 and pushed toward Apache Canyon. The news that filtered back from his runners and scouts was encouraging—the alcalde apparently spoke the truth. But Kearny cautiously refused to accept his good fortune until he could see it with his own eyes.

  When the American forces approached the canyon around noon that day, they were heartened to find that the place was indeed completely deserted. Mexican campfires were still smoldering, the earthworks were half-completed, and trees had been felled this way and that in a manner that suggested both confusion and incompetence. The defenders had quit the canyon in such a hurry that they left their cannons in place, only to be reclaimed by the Americans. Kearny did not waste time studying the nuances of this formidable defile, but it was obvious to him that the New Mexicans could have made the passage murderously difficult for his army. Lieutenant Emory thought that although Armijo’s arrangements for defense were “very stupid,” Apache Canyon was “a gateway which, in the hands of a skillful engineer and one hundred resolute men, would have been perfectly impregnable.” Had Armijo “possessed the slightest qualifications for a general,” Emory went on, “he might have given us infinite trouble.” Similarly, volunteer George Gibson, a Missouri lawyer who kept a thorough journal, deemed Apache Canyon a place of such “great natural strength [that] a few men could have held off a whole army, for cannon at the mouth could sweep the whole road as it is almost impossible even for infantry to ascend the precipitous sides.” A historian would later go further, suggesting, somewhat melodramatically, that had it been defended by an able general, the battle of Apache Canyon “would have proved a second Thermopylae.”

  Nothing now stood in the way of General Kearny’s path to Santa Fe, and he made double time, hoping to have the capital before sundown. It was thirty miles from their morning’s campsite to Santa Fe, but the Missourians were excited to get a glimpse of the mythic city. “We marched rapidly on,” volunteer George Gibson wrote, “for we were all anxious to see the place about which we had heard so much.” The trail made a final bend to the right, skirting the green ridges, climbing over hills covered in chamisa sagebrush and cholla cactus and sprinkled with purple aster. It was monsoon season and the rutted road had recently been doused by a summer shower. Though it left a few wallows, the rain was a welcome thing. It cooled and sharpened the air and dampened the dust. Even now, thunderheads were piled overhead, dropping gray nails of rain that evaporated into vapor as the storms grumbled eastward.

  In every direction rose mountains, an embarrassment of them, erupting in incremental shades of blue from the burnt yellow plains—mountains of every description and geological origin, some volcanic, some forged by faults and violent uplifts, some stand-alone monadnocks, others tied to the Rocky Mountain chain. They all had Spanish names and had had them since before the pilgrims sailed to Plymouth Rock: The Sandias. Manzanos. Ortiz. Jemez. Los Cerrillos. Sangre de Cristos. San Mateos. Atalaya. Some seemed so close they could be plucked as effortlessly as pendulous fruit, others were more than a hundred miles off, thin blue phantoms rising from the Navajo country in the hazy west.

  Hoping to enter Santa Fe “in an imposing form,” Kearny called for frequent halts so that his artillery could catch up. The strain of this final dash sapped the artillery’s overworked animals. “Their horses almost gave out,” Emory noted, “and during the day mule after mule was placed before the guns, until scarcely one of them was spared.”

  As Kearny rode the final miles into Santa Fe, the late afternoon sun slanted beneath the clouds, tinting their gauzy undersides in oranges and reds. The high elevation made the atmosphere strangely clarified. Since they had been out on the prairie, the men had been steadily climbing. They were now at seven thousand feet, an altitude that made many of these Missouri flatlanders wheeze and gasp, and gave others nosebleeds and headaches or an anxious tingling at the top of their lungs. Nearly twenty miles to the west lay the muddy Rio Grande, its presence felt by the marching men though they could not see it behind the intervening buttes and ridges. It was the central river toward which all land tilted, the one clear trend in this magnificent jumble of landscapes.

  The sagebrush gave way to cornfields and sheep pastures and then scattered houses, and finally the men dropped down into the somber capital—the Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi. Although it had a fabled name with a venerable history—it was founded in 1609—Santa Fe was not a town that sought to impress anyone, numbering at most seven thousand inhabitants. “Our first view of this place was very discouraging—dirt, pigs, and naked children,” wrote Frank Edwards. George Gibson dismissed the town as “shabby” and “without taste,” offering “nothing to pay us for our long march.” Garbage was heaped on the mostly deserted streets, with goats picking among the sour edges. The low mud dwellings, flat-roofed and seemingly random in their cluttered placement, gave Santa Fe the appearance of “an extensive brickyard,” one soldier thought. Kearny’s men unfurled their pennants and banners and carried them on poles as they filed through the narrow mud streets amid the incessant barking of dogs. They crossed the Santa Fe River, shallow but swollen gray-brown from the rainstorms. The soldiers were still not sure whether they would encounter any resistance, so they struck an exaggeratedly martial pose, with “drawn sabres and daggers in every look,” as one lieutenant described it. Behind the courtyard gates and tiny windows pulled taut with oiled rawhide in lieu of glass, the Santa Feans grieved. A few brave young men leaned against a wall, smoking cornhusk cigarettes. Thunder growled in the distant skies.

  In sixty days of marching, Kearny’s Army of the West had come to the end of the line, for that is what Santa Fe had always been—a geographical and cultural terminus. It was the end of the Santa Fe Trail, the end of the Camino Real, the northern end of the desert, the western end of the prairie, the southern end of the Rockies. It was where Spain stopped and existential wilderness began. The impoverished citizens of this hard outpost, whose families had lived here longer than any Bostonian or Virginian could claim lineage in North America, blinked in disbelief at what was now happening to their ancient city. Lieutenant Elliott of the Missouri volunteers kept noticing “surly countenances and downcast looks of watchfulness if not terror.” Elliott went further than most in sympathizing with their predicament. “Strange must have been their feelings,” he wrote, “when an invading army was entering their home—all the future vague and uncertain, their new rulers strangers to their manners, language, and habits, and as they had been taught to believe, enemies of the only religion they have ever known.”

  Around five o’clock General Kearny led his army into the plaza. Behind him came his dragoons, smartly dressed and arrogant without apology, each of his three troop divisions set on mounts of a distinct color: The first rode black, the second white, and the third sorrel horses. (Organizing the horses by color,
though completely unnecessary, was just the sort of flourish that warmed Kearny’s fastidious heart.) Then came the infantry, that is, whatever foot soldiers had reached Santa Fe—hundreds of others were still trickling into the outskirts of the city. Kearny made one circle around the plaza and then stopped in front of the Palace of the Governors, an ancient adobe building with a long, sagging porch. The provisional governor, a contrite and conciliatory man named Juan Bautista y Vigil Alarid, emerged with a host of New Mexican dignitaries. Over a doorway of the palace was an inscription that might have been Manuel Armijo’s personal motto. It read VITA FUGIT SICUT UMBRA: Life flees like a shadow.

  The American general dismounted and raised his hand, calling for silence. “I, Stephen W. Kearny, General of the Army of the United States, have taken possession of the province of New Mexico,” he declared. “In the name of the government of the United States I hereby instruct the inhabitants to deliver their arms and surrender absolutely. Armijo’s power is departed. I am your governor—look to me for protection.”

  Then the provisional governor essentially offered a reply of no contest. “I swear obedience to the Northern Republic and tender my respect to its laws and authority,” he said. “No one in this world can successfully resist the power of him who is stronger. The power of the Mexican republic is dead.” Still, he said, “No matter what her condition, the republic was our mother. What child will not shed abundant tears at the tomb of his parents?”

  Later an elderly man emerged from the crowd, his hair white, his eyes watery and perhaps clouded with cataracts. The old-timer threw himself on General Kearny and for a long, awkward moment he shuddered with quiet emotion. The governor admonished the old man to move on. “No, let him remain,” Kearny assured him. “Heaven knows the oppressions this man has had to bear.”

  The governor offered glasses of brandy to Kearny and his staff, and, stiffly, they toasted the bloodless conquest. The brandy was from El Paso and it tasted a bit sharp and resinous, but it went down smoothly enough. “We were too thirsty to judge of its merits,” Lieutenant Emory noted. “Anything liquid and cool was palatable.”

  The buglemen blasted out their notes of triumph as the Stars and Stripes were run up a temporary flagpole fixed to the palace roof. From a distant hill the artillery fired a thirteen-gun salute, and then, as though punctuating the booms, the young men of the Army of the West let out a raucous war-whoop. For the first time in its history, the United States had captured a foreign capital.

  In the silence that hung in the air after the rumbling of the guns had subsided, the women of Santa Fe answered the American soldiers with unstifled screams of sorrow and anguish. It was an upwelling both surprising and haunting to the men of Missouri. “Their pent-up emotions could be suppressed no longer,” Lieutenant Elliott wrote, “and a wail of grief rose from the depths of the gloomy buildings on every hand.”

  Chapter 20: MEN WITH EARS DOWN TO THEIR ANKLES

  Narbona was worried about the Americans. Throughout the late summer and early fall of 1846, the Navajo leader kept hearing stories about these new conquerors, troubling accounts circulated by messengers from other tribes. Their armies fired lightning bolts, he’d heard. They had magical little boxes that caught the light and allowed them to see things far away. They had overwhelmed the Mexicans without needing to fight them, and now they were building a mighty new fortress on a hill overlooking Santa Fe. They had strong medicine, these people. But Narbona did not understand what they wanted with this part of the world, or why they had bothered to come from such a long distance—from somewhere far to the east, beyond the buffalo plains—to leave their mark in a place so far from their ancestors.

  For Narbona, the United States of America was not even the vaguest of abstractions. He had no concept of Washington, D.C., or James K. Polk, or Manifest Destiny. He scarcely had a concept of white men at all and could not fathom that there existed on this earth a people who looked and behaved and spoke and worshiped their gods and organized themselves so differently—a people not quite like the Spanish, or even the Mexicans, indeed not like any other race he had ever encountered. The Navajos came to call the Americans bilagaana, a word that apparently derived from their own mispronunciation of the Spanish “Americano.”

  Along creeks and rivers, Navajo warriors had glimpsed a few strange-looking men with white skin and bushy whiskers—trappers, usually Frenchmen, who had blundered to the edges of Navajo country. Tribes of the Southwest had long held legends and prophesies that told of a new conquering race coming from the east. A few glancing encounters with white men had begun to inspire incredible stories among the Navajos—stories like the one about the giants who had floppy ears that reached down to their ankles.

  “A certain people are going to come to us,” went the story (later recorded in a classic work of anthropology titled Navajo Texts). “From below where the sun rises, they are going to come to us. Their ears are enormous. They extend all the way to their ankles. At night, these people build fires on their knees and cover themselves with those ears of theirs and lie down to sleep.”

  Other wild variations of these stories abounded. Some Navajos believed white men lacked anuses, and that because of this they could not eat normally—that instead they could only inhale the steam rising off boiling food. Still others believed that white men had a strange growth protuding from their foreheads, almost like a horn, and that they could strike a slender stick on their asses and make fire. “Our country,” frets one man in Navajo Texts, “is about to be taken away from us by men such as these.”

  Although Narbona was perhaps the most eminent figure among the Navajos, he was not, in fact, a chief. The Navajos did not have leaders in any official sense. Their style of social order was too fluid, too haphazard, and too relentlessly democratic to allow for a single man to rise to any such vaunted position of authority. The Navajos discussed everything at great and often frustrating lengths, rarely confronting an issue but rather dancing elliptically around its edges until the true topic at hand was struck and some sort of consensus reached.

  In the end, everyone had a say. In theory and in practice, Navajo women enjoyed a degree of power unusual among Native Americans. Some of the most important deities in the Navajo pantheon were female—including the benevolent matriarch, Changing Woman, and the wise old hermit Spider Woman, who, among other things, taught the people how to weave. The Navajos were both matrilineal and matrilocal; descent was traced through the mother, and when a girl got married, her husband came to live with her people. Women owned property and usually ran the intimate affairs of home life. Children owned things as well (they even had their own livestock) and often were consulted about the minute decisions of daily life. Even the slaves—women and children stolen in raids—could become full citizens, with all the rights of full-blooded Navajos.

  In a society this stubbornly egalitarian, it was impossible to designate a single person as the chief of even a single clan, let alone of an entire tribe of twelve thousand people that extended over millions of acres of remote land. But if one man held a status that approximated that of “chief,” it was Narbona. A tall, slender man with sharp chiseled features and a mane of long white hair, Narbona always presented a fine and formidable appearance, dressed in his beaded buckskins, jeweled in his best silver and turquoise. The great warrior was now the headman of a widely known and extremely prosperous “outfit”—an extended family of relatives working together and living within shouting distance of one another that formed the basic unit of organization in Navajo society. Narbona and his outfit ranged over large stretches of land along the eastern slopes of the Tunicha Mountains.

  As a tribe that generously deferred to elders, the Navajos would have revered Narbona for his longevity alone. He had survived many moons, had lived through wars and famines and times of great bounty, had seen with his own eyes the Spanish period, and the Mexican period—and now the coming of the Americans.

  Narbona was one of the richest men in all the Navaj
o country, probably the richest. He had thousands of sheep, it was said. He had scores of horses and herds of cattle. He had three wives and many slaves. He was blessed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren and in-laws too numerous to count. His fields in the Chuska Valley rippled with fine corn, and pumpkins and muskmelons swelled on their vines. Stones taken from the wet heat of the sweathouse had been ceremonially set among the plants to prevent them from dying of an early frost. Narbona had many songs, it was said, and he observed all the rites and rituals, taking care to respect the jhozho, the sacred balance of life, and that was why he was wealthy and had so many properties.

  Narbona was generous with his wealth, too, and was known for taking in children orphaned from the ongoing wars with the Utes and the Mexicans.

  His outfit was a loud and lively place, stirring with prayers and songs and horse races, a loose string of hogans spread out on the grassy slopes, smoke tendriling from the central chimney holes, every doorway facing east to greet the day. Instead of doors, mats woven from yucca twine billowed in the wind. Thin strips of drying mutton and venison hung from the surrounding sagebrush bushes and trees. Women worked at their looms, the bright designs of their blankets growing in the sun as they tamped down each new thread of dyed and carded wool and clacked their shuttles smoothly back and forth. They were a resourceful people, making use of nearly everything they found within their reach; they fashioned thread from the fibers of the agave. They snared birds in nooses made from their own hair. They bathed themselves with the suds that could be coaxed from the soapy stalk and root of the yucca. In the foothills, the medicine men gathered willow wands or sprigs of sumac, mint, and sage to use in healing ceremonies.