Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  Colonel Washington naturally assumed that the man had come to petition the Americans to take him back home, that he was relieved now to be free of his Indian captors. Several Mexican volunteers on the expedition had apparently recognized the young man, and they wanted to bring him home to his family. But to their disbelief, and then to their frustration and fury, this son of Mexico wanted to remain a savage here in a heathen land. This was his home now, the man insisted. Bright and energetic, he spoke and carried himself and dressed like a native-born Navajo. His Spanish had grown thick and faltering.

  “He did not wish to be restored to his people again,” Simpson records in mild consternation. “Indeed, he did not as much as ask about his friends living at Santa Fe.”

  All this time, Lieutenant Simpson seems to have been looking over his shoulder, peering distractedly down the canyon reaches, desperate to explore. Washington’s dreary negotiations did not hold his attention. Simpson was not much interested in people anyway—especially not when he had a puzzle of geology spread before him. So on September 8, having a couple of days to kill before the treaty talks were supposed to commence, Lieutenant Simpson pushed east to make the first American reconnaissance of Canyon de Chelly. He brought the Kern brothers with him and, for protection, an escort of about sixty men.

  Within a few miles the canyon walls began to “assume a stupendous appearance,” Simpson said. “Almost perfectly vertical, they look as if they had been chiselled by the hand of art…. They are laid with as much handsome precision as can be seen in the custom-house of the city of New York.” He was dazzled by the facets of “red amorphous sandstone” ranged tightly about him and towering over his head, each block cracked and riddled with “imperfect seams of stratification.” The immense stone slabs held the day’s heat, so that hours after the sun dropped behind the rim, the peach orchards and cornfields on the canyon floor basked in the long-lingering hothouse effect. In many places the golden-pink sandstone was streaked with a brown patina that curled like a witch’s fingers down the massive alcoved walls.

  Richard Kern immediately set himself to work sketching and would produce the first known illustration of Canyon de Chelly, a work that, if not exactly lovely, comes close to capturing the enveloping grandeur of this natural labyrinth. Kern seemed stunned by the canyon’s magnificent intrigues, its whispers of an epochal wrath, with so many twisted monoliths and crumbled heaps of talus testifying to the steady violence of erosion. The “fabulous rocks,” as Kern put it, “became wilder at every turn.” Simpson, equally amazed, wrote that he was “highly delighted” by “this wonderful exhibition of nature that will always command the admiration of its votaries, as it will the attention of geologists.”

  The expeditioners pushed nine miles into the canyon, taking rock samples and measurements and making sketches as they went, but then Simpson realized they could go no farther, for Colonel Washington expected them back by the following day. Already the lieutenant was beginning to suspect that the “much-talked about Navajo presidio” was a myth. Although he was premature in saying so—the expedition had explored only a fraction of the one-hundred-mile canyon complex—his suspicions were correct. “The mystery of the Canon of Chelly is now, in all probability, solved,” he confidently asserted. “The notion that the canon contains a high fort is exploded.”

  And yet Simpson kept seeing stone structures everywhere—not fortresses, but formidable-looking cliff dwellings stashed in odd places high along the walls. The structures all appeared to be uninhabited (and indeed the local Navajos never ventured into them, out of respect for the spirits of those who had once lived in them, and out of fear of the corpses that were often buried nearby, in rock fissures and secret caves). The lieutenant correctly surmised that these ruins were built by the same Indians who constructed the marvelous pueblo complexes he and Richard Kern had studied two weeks earlier at Chaco Canyon. He wrote: “I observed upon a shelf fifty feet above the bottom of the canyon a small pueblo ruin of a style and structure similar to that found in the ruins on the Chaco.”

  But Simpson wrongly assumed that the present Navajos were direct descendants of the builders of these pueblo-like cliff dwellings, which led the lieutenant, perhaps inevitably, to make disparaging comparisons to the crude simplicity of the Navajo lodges seen all about the canyon. Simpson did not think much of hogans. “How is it that they have retrograded in respect to their habitations when they have preserved it in their manufactures?” Simpson wondered. “It seems anomalous to me that a nation living in such miserably constructed mud lodges should, at the same time, be capable of making, probably, the best blankets in the world!”

  The “ancient ones” had left other signs of their presence. Scotched into the canyon walls, following faint cracks and meandering fissures, were numerous hand-and toe-hold routes that the Anasazi had cut into the rock many hundreds of years earlier. When the Navajos moved here sometime in the early 1600s, they had made use of these vertiginous routes, too, and had expanded on them, so that now all the various canyon branches were dimpled with improbable paths dotting up the sheer rock hundreds of feet to the rim. At one point Simpson spotted a couple of Navajos standing on a high shelf, and then was astounded to see them “tripping down the almost vertical wall as nimbly and dexterously as minuet dancers.” Simpson thought the spectacle of these human crabs scuttling over the rock faces was “one of the most wonderful feats I’d ever witnessed.” In general, the Navajos hid from the expeditioners, but on one occasion a woman presented herself and laid out several blankets on the ground for the soldiers. When she unfurled them, they were delighted to find generous piles of ripe peaches from the Navajo’s prized orchards.

  The canyon walls were scrawled and chipped with untold thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs, often in the unlikeliest of places. For a millennium the canyon had been a canvas for graffiti artists: Basketmaker, Anasazi, Hopi, Navajo. The designs came in a dazzling confusion. Serpents, lightning bolts, elaborate fret patterns, whorls. Star constellations painstakingly inscribed on cave ceilings. Menageries of bizarre creatures—headless birds in flight, humpbacked creatures playing flutes, human figures with insectlike antennae, antelope with crab pincers instead of hooves, bird-headed men, frog-men, turtle-men. Men impaled with arrows, men with enormous dangling penises, alien-humanoid figures with strange protuberances emerging from their left ears. Squatting women with swollen genitalia, giving birth. And everywhere there were palm prints, ancient choruses of hands, hailing from the walls. In places the designs were so densely painted that there seemed to be a kind of frenetic dialogue going on—one such location would later be called Newspaper Rock, for it seemed to archaeologist interpreters to be a gathering place where the ancients came to read the news. Although some of the images had been pecked or chiseled, most had been painted directly onto the rock using mineral dyes mixed with binders made of blood, urine, or the whites of turkey eggs.

  If the expeditioners had ventured into another branch of the canyon—an equally spectacular prong known as Canyon del Muerto (“Canyon of Death”), they would have seen a curious tableau scrawled across the walls. Still visible today, it is a quite realistic rendering of a long train of Spanish cavalrymen, wearing flat-brimmed hats, carrying lances and muskets, and riding pinto horses into battle. The ominous-looking figures look like horsemen of the apocalypse, their capes clearly emblazoned with crosses.

  The Diné had scratched these haunting images onto the walls some forty years earlier to memorialize a painful event—the only occasion in which the Spanish successfully invaded this Navajo refuge. In January 1805 a force of nearly five hundred soldiers marched all the way from Santa Fe, killing Navajo warriors by the score and collecting prisoners as they rampaged through the canyon’s meandering course. In Canyon del Muerto, not far from where these images were painted, the Spanish troops were surprised to hear the shrill voice of a Navajo woman shouting strange invectives at them. “There go the men without eyes!” the voice screamed. “You must be bli
nd!”

  Puzzled, one of the soldiers climbed up the talus and spotted a group of more than a hundred women and children crouched in a high recess of the canyon wall (the warriors, including Narbona, were off fighting elsewhere). These Navajo had climbed up to their hiding place by using an ancient trail of toeholds. The hectoring voice, it turned out, was that of an old woman who had once been enslaved by the Spanish. Hidden with the others, and thinking herself safe, she had lost her presence of mind and hurled abuse down on her hated enemies.

  The Spanish scout called down to his comrades and reported that the Navajos were hopelessly trapped. Another soldier began to crawl his way up the steep wall with the notion of rounding up prisoners. When he crossed the threshold of the cave, a Navajo woman wrapped her arms around him and dashed for the precipice; the two figures, locked in a desperate grip, plunged several hundred feet to their deaths.

  From the canyon floor, the soldiers, who could not see the huddled Navajo forms above but now knew exactly where they were, began to ricochet bullets off the roof of the cave. For hours they kept firing their old muskets and harquebuses into the high recess, expending thousands of rounds of ammunition. Eventually everyone in the cave was killed but an old man, who would repeat the story to other Navajos. More than 150 years later, the victims’ bones still lie on the cave floor, layered with bits of Navajo clothing and spent bullets.

  Today the spot is widely known as Massacre Cave. But the Navajos have long had their own name for it: The Place Where Two Fell Off.

  Although he didn’t seem to know it, the treaty that Colonel Washington sought to make with the Navajos was a farce. The man known as Martinez was not the principal chief of the Diné. Only Narbona could have answered to the title, but even that would have been a stretch. What the Navajos wanted was for the Americans to leave as soon as possible, and if putting a mark on a piece of paper would do the trick, they were happy to oblige.

  What was paper? Most of the Navajos had never seen it, nor ink pens, nor written words. They had no concept of individual land ownership or constitutions or the rule of law or the delegation of political authority. Their traditions were so radically different that they had no idea what the Americans were really talking about. Nothing would change in their world. The bilagaana would leave and go back to wherever they came from, and the raids against the New Mexicans would resume as usual.

  So on the appointed day, Martinez and another Navajo “chief” going by the name of Chapitone showed up as promised and sat down with Colonel Washington to hear his treaty. In the distance more than a hundred Navajo warriors waited vigilantly, their metal-tipped lances and thick buckskin shields at the ready. The headmen brought with them four young captives and a herd of 104 sheep, which they conceded they’d stolen from the New Mexicans—and promised to deliver more later.

  Washington’s treaty had been written down ahead of time, a dense document full of lofty ideals and sprinkled with a few firm demands that sounded fair enough for a conquering army to impose on its subjects. Among the treaty’s declarations: “Hostilities between the contracting parties shall cease and perpetual peace and friendship shall exist…. The Government of the said States [has] the sole and exclusive right of regulating the trade and intercourse with the said Navahos…. Should any citizen of the United States murder, rob, or otherwise maltreat any Navaho Indians, he or they shall be arrested and tried…. All American and Mexican captives and stolen property shall be delivered by the Navajo Indians on or before the 9th day of October.”

  Although it generally tended to take the side of the Mexicans in their age-old conflict with the Navajos, it was, all in all, a reasonable document—and even, in places, a noble one, attesting to the Americans’ rockbed faith in republican virtues and the primacy of law.

  But, like the Doniphan treaty of three years earlier, it was worthless. As they raced through Washington’s various sticking points, one can only imagine how difficult it must have been for either of the two parties to communicate meaningfully with one another—with so many voids in cultural understanding, with the negotiations shifting erratically from English to Spanish to Navajo. From the Americans’ perspective, everything about Martinez and Chapitone must have seemed frustratingly vague and indirect—their roundabout style of conversation, their unwillingness to pronounce anyone’s name out loud, and their odd refusal to point at anyone except by thrusting out the lips. These strange Indians would not even shake hands. (Washington would never have guessed the reason: The Navajos were afraid these foreigners were witches, and that if the Americans drew too close, they might blow corpse powder into their faces. Even today, many Navajos avoid shaking hands unless they know the person, and the tepid greeting is liable to be of the “limp-fish” variety that most Anglos find unsatisfactory.)

  The Navajos, on the other hand, must have found Colonel Washington exceedingly strange with all his high-toned talk about undoing the relationships of their known world. The Navajos did not take much stock in abstractions; they were a determinedly practical people who preferred to deal with matters close at hand. It was a tendency embedded in their own language. Navajo is an extremely precise language in conveying certain things like movement and changing spatial relationships between physical objects, but it can be extremely vague in describing concepts of time. In the same sentence, a Navajo might speak of something that happened today and then effortlessly segue into a story that happened thousands of years ago, in the mists of tribal lore. Given this, Colonel Washington’s assumptions about deadlines and jurisdictions, and of legal authority binding from this day forward—all of it must have seemed entirely foreign to the Diné.

  Still, they consented. What else were they to do? Washington left them no room for quibbling. Beneath the glowing ochre rocks of Canyon de Chelly, Martinez and Chapitone scrawled their awkward “X”s at the end of the document, alongside J. M. WASHINGTON.

  James Simpson, who watched the proceedings unfold, seemed satisfied that a “full and complete treaty had been made by which they have put themselves under the jurisdiction of the government of the United States.” The lieutenant seemed optimistic that the Navajos understood what they had agreed to, and that they would comply. But if they didn’t, the treaty carried another important strategic value in his mind, a rather cynical one.

  As Simpson put it in a convoluted but familiar-sounding bit of legalese, the existence of a signed document would help “satisfy the public mind and testify to the whole world that should any future coercion become necessary against the Navahos, it would be but a just retribution and, in a manner of speaking, their own act.”

  Chapter 35: BLOOD AND THUNDER

  In October 1849, a few weeks after the Washington Expedition returned home to its barracks at Fort Marcy, a trader named James M. White was traveling west with his family on the Santa Fe Trail. The Whites had come from Missouri in the company of a well-known merchant named Francis Xavier Aubry, who was leading a large caravan of wagons packed with goods. With only 150 miles left to reach Santa Fe, White decided to break from the slow convoy and push ahead in a faster carriage with his young wife Ann and their infant daughter. Believing that they had passed out of the most threatening Indian territory, they bid Aubry and the others in the long train good-bye near a popular stop called Point of Rocks, expecting to reunite with them in Santa Fe in a week’s time.

  Francis Aubry was a celebrated figure on the trail. A compact French Canadian with intense black eyes and a thick beard, Aubry had made a fortune in the Santa Fe trade. He knew every rutted inch of the road and did not see any problems with his friend James White leapfrogging ahead. White was a veteran of the trail himself, with interests in Santa Fe and El Paso. An unseasonable cold snap had made the going miserable for Mrs. White and her baby girl, and they wanted to get to a warm hotel. White was driving with his family and a black female servant. For protection, Aubry detached three armed men to accompany the Whites in a second carriage.

  Francis X. Aubry had won natio
nal celebrity a year earlier, when he broke the record for the fastest crossing of the Santa Fe Trail. In September 1848 he had ridden nonstop nearly eight hundred miles from Santa Fe to Independence, Missouri, in five days and sixteen hours—killing several horses in the process, but winning a thousand-dollar bet that he could beat his old record of eight days. Aubry accomplished this feat by stashing fresh horses at relay points every few hundred miles along the route. Many times he dozed off as his mounts galloped eastward, but he took the precaution of cinching himself to his saddle to keep from tumbling. At ten o’clock on the night of September 17, 1848, Aubry and his last horse staggered into Independence, where patrons at a hotel immediately recognized him and lifted him out of his saddle, which was blood-soaked from the more than five days of constant chafing of human against horse. Nearly catatonic from exhaustion, able to speak only in a whisper, Aubry ordered ham and eggs and then was taken upstairs to bed.

  His eight-hundred-mile dash made national news and heralded a new age of transport in the last innocent years before construction of the transcontinental railroad, which was then being planned and routed. As his example showed, the physical crossing of the Great Plains was getting to be old hat. The big caravans were still enormous logistical undertakings, and they would always be tediously slow, for there was no way to speed up a train pulled by oxen. But Aubry’s record gallop punctured some of the Trail’s aura and served to inspire more timid souls who had long been nursing vague ambitions of traveling west. Only a few years after Kearny’s conquest of the Southwest, the mother road seemed well-trod, its supply points better stocked, the names of its stops and stages burned into the public memory—Switzlow’s Creek, Council Grove, Diamond Springs, Pawnee Rock, Cottonwood Fork. New Mexico was still a long way from Missouri, but if a single man could traverse the country in under six days, then the trek was clearly not the impossible adventure it once had been.