Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  Dick Kern was having the time of his life, frantically painting watercolors and dashing off wash drawings until the last lumen of light had faded in the sky. He loved being away from the hubbub of the army and having this desolate place to himself, camping among the sagging ramparts. He did a watercolor rendering that offered his best guess of what one of these apartment complexes must have looked like in its day. “The wolfe and lizard and hare are the only inhabitants,” Kern wrote in his diary, “and the bright wild flowers fill the open court and halls. Who built them no one knows…. But there can be no doubt of their having been built by a race living here in long past ages—Its style is so different from any thing Spanish.” He and Lieutenant Simpson could not have been happier—they were boys romping through an enchanted world. They mapped the floor plans of nearly every major structure in the canyon and chiseled their names into the plaster wall of one of the chambers at Pueblo Bonito.

  But Simpson realized that they could not do justice to this maze of monuments. Fearing a Navajo ambush, Simpson finally gave the order to pack up the instruments and field books and hastily return to the army. “Had time permitted,” he wrote, “we would gladly have remained longer to dig among the rubbish of the past; but the troops having already got some miles in advance of us, we were reluctantly obliged to quit.” Circumstances, he concluded, would “not permit us to satisfy our minds.”

  Next to nothing was known about the Anasazi at the time of the Washington expedition, and Lieutenant Simpson had almost no information to draw on as he puzzled over these fabulous ruins. Hosta, the Jemez chief, said that the Chaco cities had been built by his ancestor, the Aztec emperor Montezuma, repeating a widely held myth that Simpson seems to have found credible. But in fact, the Chacoans were not directly related to the Aztec civilization, although they almost certainly traded with their predecessors in MesoAmerica. The Chacoans began their rise to prominence around A.D. 950, well before the Aztec ascendancy in central Mexico. Much of their power and affluence was apparently based upon their proficiency with working fine turquoise, a stone highly prized throughout the region for ceremonial purposes. Their superlative skill in milling, shaping, and finishing this fragile stone, mined from the Cerrillos Hills near Santa Fe, seems to have generated a great trade that led, in turn, to a massive concentration of wealth.

  For a brief period—little more than a century—the people of Chaco Canyon underwent a sudden explosion in the sophistication of their civilization, a cultural boom that has no parallel in North American prehistory. Archaeologists have come to call it the Chaco Phenomenon. Rapidly, the Chaco Anasazi began to centralize their government, intensify their agriculture, and concentrate their population in these so-called “great houses” strung along the canyon. They fashioned elaborate irrigation systems and dams. They built razor-straight highways radiating outward from their capital. On the tops of far-flung mesas they erected “lighthouses” in which they burned signal fires that broadcast messages over hundreds of miles to outlying Anasazi settlements. Their artifacts and rituals grew in beauty and complexity. They cut down thousands of ponderosa pine trees from mountain stands forty miles distant and dragged them here to build their enormous structures. Soon a powerful priesthood developed, and observatories were designed that allowed these Native American druids, with astonishing precision, to follow the movements of the stars and planets.

  North America had never seen such a florescence of culture. But then around A.D. 1150, just as quickly as they had burst upon the scene, the Chacoan culture ebbed. The agent of their demise seems to have been an environmental collapse brought on, in part, by two devastating droughts in 1085 and 1095, and in part by the impact of a dense population living on a marginal desert landscape. Their expansion had been predicated on a kind of meteorological accident; they had been living in a hundred-year cycle of aberrant wetness, and during that brief window the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon had overfarmed, overhunted, and overlogged. In only a few generations their deforested land became eroded, the topsoil depleted, the drainages choked with salt and silt. The river on which they depended for corn and beans dried up. A third major drought, beginning around 1129, delivered the final blow.

  This environmental upheaval led, predictably enough, to a social upheaval. In its death agonies, Chaco Canyon was not a pleasant place. People began to starve. They turned their great houses into fortresses, erecting walls, barricading the first-floor windows, retreating to higher stories at night, pulling up their ladders at the slightest hint of danger. Archaeologists have found evidence of widespread civil unrest, witchcraft, and even ritual cannibalism. Finally, the Chaco Anasazi began to leave in large numbers. In many cases they simply walked away from their great apartment complexes, leaving behind beautiful ornamental pottery, sandals and clothing, and large quantities of dried food neatly stored in granaries.

  But the Chacoans did not really “vanish.” They wandered all over the Southwest, resettling wherever they could find water and safety. The Pueblo Indians were their direct descendants. Hosta and his Jemez people had Chaco blood, not Aztec blood, coursing in their veins, and so did the dozens of other Pueblo tribes whose settlements formed a loose constellation across the New Mexico Territory—the Zuni, the Hopi, the Acoma, the Taos Indians. The architecture of the modern Pueblos, though not as technically sophisticated, was strikingly similar to that of the Chaco great houses, with their multistoried apartments, retreating terraces, and underground kivas. From Puebloan rock art to their religious ceremonies to the styles of their pottery, the cultural echoes were clear. The Chaco Anasazi remained alive and well; they had simply undergone a diaspora of sorts. In spreading out and regerminating in smaller hunkered settlements, the descendants of the Anasazi learned the final cautionary lesson of Chaco Canyon: the peril of density in the face of the desert. In a meager landscape, civilization must scatter.

  Interestingly, about the same time that the Chaco Phenomenon was imploding, the Navajo began to move into the region. For centuries they had been slowly pushing southward from Alaska and northwestern Canada, working their way down the spine of the Rockies. These nomadic warriors were the epitome of a scattered civilization. Supple, adaptive, refusing to tie themselves down to any one place or way of life, they moved freely with the seasons, following the game or their own whimsy.

  When the first Navajo saw the ruins at Chaco Canyon, they must have been stunned. Everything about Chaco represented the antithesis of their own life. The Navajo must have instantly recognized that Chaco culture had been advanced beyond anything they had ever seen. But they also intuitively understood that something terrible had happened here, that this ghost city contained the seeds of destruction. They refused to go into the great houses, believing they were places of evil and death. They would never live this way—in cities, clustered in permanent buildings, trapped in a close environment. They would always leave themselves an out.

  The timeline is murky, but it is possible that there was some overlap in the two cultures—that is, that the Navajos flooded in just as the Anasazi were leaving, and that for a brief time they had direct dealings with one another. It’s also possible that the Navajo’s arrival hastened the unraveling of Chaco culture—either through direct warfare or competition for resources. The word anasazi, in fact, is a Navajo word, meaning “ancestors of our enemies,” and it’s a term modern-day Pueblo Indians understandably detest (they prefer the designation “ancestral Puebloans”). Whatever the nature of their relationship, the Navajo clearly filled the void left by the Anasazi departure. They would remain masters of this region, living their roving kind of life in the midst of these crumbling rock cities, incorporating stories about the ruins into their own mythology, but always leaving them alone.

  By the time Simpson and Dick Kern wandered through, the Navajo had been the de facto custodians of Chaco Canyon for at least five hundred years. Much of our early understanding of Chaco would be refracted through a Navajo point of view. The word chaco is a Spanish approximation
of the Navajo tsekho—meaning “canyon,” or literally, “an opening in the rock.” And even as Simpson had been examining the ruins with his men, Navajo scouts had been watching him from afar, puzzling over his intentions, and possibly wondering whether this bewhiskered little man was a witch.

  Chapter 32: THE FINEST HEAD I EVER SAW

  Colonel Washington’s troops were camped in a bleak, windy dustbowl near a spot called Badger Springs. The views were sweeping—to the north, the mighty Shiprock could be seen clawing at the sky—but this place was not much of a campsite. They found no wood to burn other than the trunks of a few prickly shrubs. The engineers discovered that they could obtain a little water by digging deep pits in the ground, but it was highly alkaline and had, according to Dick Kern, “very much the taste of a ‘bad egg.’” Because Colonel Washington could find no grass or any other suitable forage for his horses and mules, he had earlier in the day ordered his men to cut the green stunted corn from a nearby Navajo field.

  Understandably, the Navajos who lived in the vicinity interpreted the theft and trampling of their cornfields as a hostile action. Soon a group of them entered the camp to lodge a complaint with Washington. With them, they brought fifteen horses and mules and a number of sheep to deliver up to the army, as Colonel Washington had gotten the word out that his troops were here to demand the return of stolen property. These Navajos were emissaries of Narbona, and much of the livestock had come directly from Narbona’s own flocks and herds. Washington accepted the animals, but the Navajos’ protest about their cornfields came to nothing. Among the natives streaming into camp were a number of women, who, Simpson noted, “wore blankets, leggings, and moccasins—the blankets being confined about the waist by a girdle.” Simpson seemed mildly shocked that these women “bestrode their horses a la mode des hommes.” One of them, he observed, “had a child at her breast confined on its back to a board, the upper portion canopied by a frame of willow-work to protect its head from the weather.”

  The next morning, August 30, Washington’s army broke camp and made another westward march, this one of about fifteen miles. Kern noted that as they traveled, there were “multitudes of Indians around us,” and it was clear they were growing angry and restless. Most were warriors armed with lances and spears and sinew-backed bows. Simpson thought they were “quite a formidable group,” noting that their “helmet-shaped caps were set off with bunches of eagle feathers.” Some of the warriors, he observed, “were almost naked—one of them entirely so, excepting his breechcloth, his whole person at the same time looking ghastly on account of a kind of whitewash with which he was covered.”

  By the middle of the day the Navajo numbers had swelled to several hundred, and they were stirring up huge contrails of dust as they rode in the vanguard. Colonel Washington was growing antsy with all these warriors whooping in his midst, and at one point he ordered his artillerymen to remove two mountain howitzers from the backs of the mules and prepare them for firing in the event of an attack. Lieutenant Simpson had a bad feeling about the day, noting that a “dark, portentous cloud” was hovering over one of the peaks in the distant Chuska Range, with “forked lightning darting vividly athwart it.” The thunderclouds continued to mount, and it began to pour. Washington finally had to halt the march and hunker down for a violent hailstorm.

  Washington made camp that afternoon on the north fork of Tunicha Creek, on a piece of land littered with Anasazi potsherds. The valley of the nearby Chuska River was rippling with healthy corn, “extensive and luxuriant fields,” as Simpson described them, “finer than any I have seen in this country.” Although these fields were not irrigated, they took advantage of water that seeped and trickled under the soft soil. The stalks were planted deeply, not in furrows but in dense clumps—a water-conserving method the Navajos had practiced for centuries.

  Feasting his eyes on this bountiful crop, Colonel Washington again ordered his foragers to go out and seize corn from the Navajo fields. When it became apparent that the Navajos intended to resist the troops, Washington sent extra soldiers to “enforce the order.” He justified stealing the corn by arguing that the Navajos would eventually have to reimburse the U.S. government for the considerable costs of the expedition now mounted against them, a twist of reasoning that only further infuriated the Navajos, who could only stand by and watch as their winter foodstuffs were ravaged.

  Tension was building around the camp. Hundreds of angry Navajos, possibly as many as a thousand, now surrounded the bivouac site, galloping their horses this way and that, thronging in agitation. Washington allowed a few representatives to come into camp for a talk. Once assembled, the colonel told them, through his Spanish interpreter, to go out into the countryside and gather as many chiefs as they could find to represent the Chuska region. He said that his army had entered their territory to chastise them for their constant raids and thefts. But he held out that the United States of America would be their friend as long as they were willing to come back tomorrow and sign a peace treaty. The headmen agreed to meet at noon the next day, noting that the aged Narbona would be present. Before they left, Richard Kern overheard one of the thoroughly miffed and confused Navajo headmen asking Colonel Washington—“If we are friends, why did you take our corn? It is hard, but all we can do is submit.”

  At midday the next day, several hundred Navajos rode over to Washington’s camp. As a whole they were, Simpson thought, “gorgeously decked in red, blue, and white, with rifles erect in hand,” presenting a “spectacle that was very imposing.” From the milling crowd, three elders emerged and introduced themselves by their Spanish names. They were Archuleta, Jose Largo, and, finally, Narbona.

  All eyes fell on Narbona, the most famous of the Navajos. Although he was past eighty, Narbona was still a formidable presence. Simpson described him as “quite old and of a very large frame, having a grave and contemplative countenance not unlike, as many of the officers remarked (I hope the comparison will be pardoned), that of President Washington.” That day he wore a handsome chieftain’s wool blanket, dyed in the bold geometric patterns of the Navajo. Dick and Ned Kern collaborated on a wash drawing of Narbona, giving him an air of solemn dignity.

  Narbona was so decrepit with arthritis that he had to be helped down from his horse and carried to the council place. As a sign of goodwill, he told Washington, he was handing over another herd of animals—several hundred in all. He said that he believed in making peace with the New Men, that his own people, the Chuska Navajos, had never made war on the Americans—although it was true that a state of war had long existed with the New Mexicans, and many wrongs had been committed by both sides. He said that as much as he advocated peace, there were young hotheads and thieves (ladrones, he said) in his tribe whose actions could not always be stopped. Narbona also made it clear that he was not a spokesman for the entire Navajo nation, that no man had such authority, that the Navajo people were comprised of many different bands, and that each had its own autonomy and its own territory.

  One of the Navajos present was a young man who could safely be called a hothead and, perhaps, a thief. He was Narbona’s son-in-law—proud, strapping, dark-complected, known by the Spanish name of Manuelito. A fierce warrior fast ascending to prominence among the Navajos, Manuelito loved and respected his father-in-law, but he was suspicious of Narbona’s calls for peace. A youthful rage boiled within him. Manuelito was tall, with a surly face and smoldering dark eyes. He thought Narbona was going too far in appeasing the white man, and he refused to believe that these new conquerors were any match for the Navajo. Astride his horse, Manuelito watched closely and listened as James Calhoun, the Indian Affairs agent, led the discussion, with Colonel Washington at his side.

  CALHOUN: Tell them they are lawfully in the jurisdiction of the United States now, and they must respect that jurisdiction.

  INTERPRETER: They say they understand it.

  CALHOUN: Tell them that after the treaty is made, their friends will be the friends of the United States
, and their enemies the enemies of the United States. Are they willing to be at peace with all the friends of the United States?

  INTERPRETER: They say they are willing.

  Narbona and his two fellow headmen said they could agree to every point proposed by Calhoun and Colonel Washington, except one. Washington insisted that Narbona come with him to the Navajo stronghold of Canyon de Chelly, where he intended to hold an even bigger council, with representatives from the entire Navajo nation. But Narbona refused, disavowing all connection to the Navajos “over the mountain” while also making it clear that he could not undertake such a long journey in his fragile state of health. After Washington pressed the matter, Narbona finally agreed to appoint two younger chiefs to go to Canyon de Chelly in his stead.

  The council broke up to everyone’s apparent satisfaction, and for a moment matters between the Navajos and the United States of America seemed hopeful. But then one of the New Mexican militiamen spotted a horse among the Navajo warriors that, he insisted, was his. The militiaman was sure of it, he said. The natives had stolen his horse a few months ago, and now he demanded it back. The Navajos did not dispute that the horse had been stolen, but they indicated that it had passed through so many different hands that it was impossible to ascertain the true owner now—and that, in any case, something like a statute of limitations had taken effect. There was a brief scuffle, and charges were shouted back and forth.