Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  Aubry’s example made it look too easy, however. People seemed to forget how dangerous the journey still was, particularly in the westernmost stretches, the broiled solitudes where water was scarce and the possibility of Indian attacks high. Every year settlers were murdered by Indians—or kidnapped and mercilessly tortured. The Santa Fe Trail was rife with tales of Indian cruelty. Many of these stories were exaggerated bits of folklore fueled no doubt by racial ignorance if not outright animus, but the mutilation of captives—even corpses—was a documented part of the warrior rituals of many Plains tribes. One authority on the Plains Indians wrote that “as a rule mutilation was inspired by spite after losses, or animated by a superstitious fear that a great fighter—one ‘hard to kill’—might come alive again.” The hostiles of the Great Plains rarely seemed to hold a special hatred toward white pioneers; in fact, they tended to reserve their most lavish abuses for ancient enemies from other tribes.

  Nevertheless, even the most intelligent commentators on the subject tended to assume that the Plains Indians were expressly out to get white folks. William Davis, an astute lawyer and judge who lived in New Mexico for years traveling the circuit court, compared the Plains Indians to the biblical Ishmaelites, “whose hands are turned against every white man, woman, and child.” Davis noted that “there are hundreds of captives among the Indians of the Plains, principally women and children. The great majority spend a lifetime with them, and drag out a most miserable existence.”

  The Comanches were reputed to be the most diabolical in their cruelties to captives. Historian Bernard DeVoto wrote that the Comanches were “practising sadists” who had “great skill in pain” and for whom “cruelty was their catharsis.” The authenticated accounts, DeVoto said, “fill thousands of pages, and some are altogether unreadable for men with normal nerves.” It was widely reported, for example, that the Comanches liked to take their victims to a remote stretch of the plains and stake their bodies to the ground. Then the Comanches would slit open their bellies and poke their organs with spears, making a slow study of it, delighting in the bloodcurdling screams, sometimes slicing a bit of a victim’s liver and eating it right in front of him. Or the Comanches might pry open their captive’s eyelids with twigs and leave him, helpless and exposed, to be cornea-scorched by the sun, then eaten alive by wolves.

  It was the Comanches who in 1841 killed and scalped twenty-five-year-old Robert Bent, the youngest of the Bent brothers (his scalped body, discovered near the Arkansas River, was buried just outside the walls of Bent’s Fort). It was also thought to be the Comanches who killed Jedediah Smith, probably the greatest explorer of the West, by shooting him in the back and riddling his body with lance wounds. Smith’s murder in 1831 occurred on the Cimarron River, not far from the stretch of the Santa Fe Trail where the White party was now riding.

  These were the kinds of horrors that were told along the trail, stories that James White had doubtless already heard and discounted when he pulled away from the Aubry caravan and made good time with his family toward Santa Fe.

  At that moment, Kit Carson was hard at work in the fields of his new ranch on Rayado Creek, some fifty miles east of Taos and not far from the Santa Fe Trail. By October the corn had all been harvested, but the last patches of squash and beans and peppers were still growing, moistened by the acequia that siphoned cold mountain water from the creek rippling from the Sangre de Cristos. The north-facing crags of the mountains were dusted with snow. Out in the distant fields, clusters of cattle, sheep, horses, and mules cropped the blue grama grass. Elsewhere on the property, laid out in erratic jumbles, were various sheds and lean-tos, a blacksmith shop, a slaughterhouse, and a number of pens made of cedar staves wired together to keep the wolves from attacking the stock at night. In the center of it all stood the ranch house, a cabin made of rough-hewn ponderosa logs, reminiscent of the Missouri homesteads of Carson’s youth. Surrounding the compound was a high adobe wall, to keep the Indians at bay.

  At thirty-nine, Christopher Carson had decided, of all things, to become a farmer. He had grown too old for the trail, too weary of the nervous hardship of guiding the U.S. Army. He loved the discipline of working a ranch and took to it immediately. He would head out for the fields at dawn and keep at it until dusk—clearing land, plowing and planting, lambing and shearing, making constant additions and repairs, building his new domain from scratch. There was hay to cut and bundle and sell to government agents as fodder. There were pine logs to whipsaw into lumber and adobe bricks to be molded and baked in the sun. There were vegetables to put up, animals to butcher, hides to tan, mules to shoe, meats to cure. The work was endless.

  Yet, as much as he loved it, this sedentary life was against his nature; he had always been a wanderer. As an adolescent runaway, a teamster, a trapper, a hunter, a scout and guide, a soldier, a transcontinental courier—every turn of his career had been characterized by nearly ceaseless movement over the West. In all those years since he left Missouri, he had never stopped.

  Taos had been his home, theoretically, a home he kept failing to get back to. It was and would continue to be one of the recurring themes of his life—his desire to settle down to honest labor, to be with his wife and start a family, only to be pulled away again by larger events. He and Josefa had been married six years, but in all that time he had been at home without interruption only a few months. Carson had made several earlier attempts to start a farm near Taos, but something had always come along to disrupt his plans, some unforeseen mission of national import laid at his feet.

  After leaving Washington in the summer of 1847 with messages for General Kearny, Carson had sped to California, only to receive further orders to do it all over again—that is, to make another trip to Washington bearing another round of important dispatches. Like a good soldier, he accepted the assignment, but all that travel took a toll on him and his family life. Since the start of the Mexican War he had covered nearly sixteen thousand miles—a good percentage of it riding on a mule.

  Josefa hated his absences. She missed him, surely, but that was only part of it. Josefa perhaps only dimly knew what Carson was doing all those years and, as a native Mexican, she had no particular reason to share his patriotism for the United States. His fame meant next to nothing to her. Stories passed down through the Jaramillo family in Taos have it that she understandably resented her husband for always being on the go, earning no great sums of money in the service of an army whose primary relation to her people was one of subjugation.

  So once again Carson was trying to settle down, only this time he knew he had to make it stick: He was a father. That spring, Josefa, now twenty-two, had given birth to their first child, a son. They had named him Charles after Gov. Charles Bent, her sister’s late husband, murdered in his home that horrible night two years earlier. Born prematurely, Little Charles was so sick and fragile that Josefa decided to stay home with him in Taos that first summer while Kit cleared ground and established the new ranch.

  In this farming operation, Carson had partnered with another famous Taos trapper, named Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell. A native of Illinois, Maxwell was a stout, swarthy bull of a figure with a vaudevillian mustache. He had been on the first three Fremont expeditions and knew Carson well. By the happy twist of marriage, Maxwell now managed, and would soon own, a land grant in northeastern New Mexico even larger than the state of Delaware. This stupendous piece of real estate—more than 1.7 million acres—would make Maxwell the largest private landowner in the United States. It was a kingdom unto itself, completely undeveloped. From the rugged high country, promising creeks and rivers dropped into broad, lush valleys. Maps of the grant showed immense tracts of empty tableland between the Cimarron and Purgatoire rivers that were marked simply “fine grazing.” Maxwell ruled it all, and he had invited Carson and just a few other acquaintances to develop select parcels of his virgin domain.

  Ambitious, dry-humored, lavishly generous to his guests, but prone to whipping the peons who worked for him, Ma
xwell “was king of that whole country,” a contemporary said. “He had perfect control…and had Indians and Mexicans just to do what he bid them to.” A soldier who knew him well remembered his “hospitality and firmness of will.” Ranching came naturally to him, for he was already a discerning stockman, ever interested in buying better breeds and improving bloodlines. A contemporary writer said that Maxwell’s horses, his cattle, his poultry, even his dogs “were always of the same style—the best that can be had.”

  Maxwell and Carson had been talking for some time about making a fresh start of it somewhere in this vast land grant. That spring, in 1849, Carson took a thousand dollars saved from his trapping and guiding days and invested in Maxwell’s growing operation. It has been written that this was the first large-scale cattle operation ever undertaken by Anglo-Americans in the West—that Maxwell and Carson were, in effect, the first American cowboys. (Hispanic vaqueros, of course, had been running cattle for generations throughout the Southwest.) The claim is probably dubious and anyway unprovable, but it is nevertheless true that Carson was again living a step ahead of his time, as he did so often through his protean career in the West.

  “We had been leading a roving life long enough,” Carson later said in his memoirs, “and now was the time, if ever, to make a home for ourselves. We were getting old. We commenced building and making improvements, and were in a way of becoming prosperous.”

  The Rayado Valley was a stunning sweep of land on which to settle, an open country of high meadows and brilliant skies where the Sangre de Cristos gave way to the endless plains. Elk and deer and the occasional silvertip grizzly roamed this grassy piedmont, and trout darted in the cold streams. The name Rayado—Spanish for “streaked”—was said to derive from the colorful markings often tattooed on the faces of certain Plains tribes that wandered the area; Rayado was also the name of a prominent Comanche chief from the early 1800s.

  Carson’s ranch was not far from the Santa Fe Trail, the same road that had brought him here in his youth. His father had been a farmer at the other end of that trail, a thousand miles to the east, in newly cleared forestland that was then the frontier. Now the son was repeating the pattern, one that had been followed by countless other pioneering families in the steady westward crawl of America.

  Indians, of course, were part of the old pattern, too. Carson’s first memory of life in Missouri was of the men working the fields as sentries patrolled the perimeter with muskets to guard against Indian attack. A constant low-grade fear was imprinted on Carson’s psyche from an early age. In that sense the Rayado Valley differed little from Missouri. It was dangerous country. A number of hostile Indian tribes lived and hunted in these high grasslands. Utes and Apaches regularly passed through, as did Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes. The previous summer a band of Ute raiders had shot Maxwell in the neck. Maxwell probably would have died had he not been taken to Santa Fe, where a physician removed the ball in “an extremely difficult and painful operation.”

  Attacks of this sort were a regular occurrence, and Carson had to remain wary. On the Rayado he kept a guard watching over his cattle by day and by night.

  A few days after he pulled away from Aubry’s caravan, James White and his party encountered hostile Indians while camped near the Santa Fe Trail at a spot between Rock Creek and Whetstone Branch. The Indians demanded gifts. White was a proud and stubborn man, and considering his party to be well armed, he refused to pay a toll to these highway thieves. In addition to his wife, their daughter, and their servant, White was accompanied by three men—a German named Lawberger, an unknown American, and a Mexican hand. A little later the party was visited by the same Indians, only this time the warriors appeared in much larger numbers, perhaps as many as a hundred. Still, White was adamant—he would offer them nothing. With rifles loaded, he attempted to drive the Indians from his camp. But they descended in a storm of arrows, promptly killing White’s Mexican escort, who fell into the burning campfire. The travelers attempted to flee but did not get far. Soon the bodies of White and his two other guides bristled with shafts. The Indians scooped up Ann White, her daughter, and the servant, and stole across the prairie.

  Some of the murderers, however, stayed behind with White’s carriages. Practicing an old ruse, they hid in the scrub along the road, waiting to ambush the next travelers who might happen along. Soon a party of Mexicans came down the trail. Seeing the dead bodies and the upturned carriages, they began to rummage through White’s belongings, taking whatever looked promising. Then the Indians pounced. After a struggle the Mexicans somehow got away, but not before one of their party, a small boy, was pierced with an arrow. Thinking the boy was dead, the marauders quickly gathered up their loot and scattered.

  After the horses’ hoofbeats had faded, the Mexican boy rose up, frightened and disoriented, and staggered down the trail. The arrow was lodged deeply between the bones of his arm, but he could walk. Later that day he was picked up by a caravan of Americans and taken to Santa Fe, where he was able to communicate the details of his ordeal to the authorities.

  Soldiers were dispatched to investigate, and the bodies from White’s party were soon found and identified. The abandoned carriages were broken to pieces. Trunks had been pried open and belongings strewn about. It was not altogether clear which tribe of Indians was responsible. The dead had not been scalped or mutilated, which was unusual for a Plains Indian attack. The soldiers buried the bodies by the side of the trail and covered them with rocks to keep the wolves from digging them up. When Francis Aubry learned of the massacre, he immediately put out the word to friends throughout the region, offering a one-thousand-dollar reward for the return of Ann White.

  For some time, Kit Carson had sensed a change in the air. He recognized that the once inexhaustible West was shrinking before his eyes. In the mountains above Taos, the population of silvertip grizzlies had dwindled in just a few short years. The great migratory herds of buffalo roaming the plains were fast succumbing to the new tide of immigrants, many of whom slaughtered the beasts for the sheer sick pleasure of it and left the carcasses to rot on the prairie. Indians across the West were finding that their old hunting grounds were being steadily grabbed up by new settlers. Many tribes had been wiped out by smallpox and other European diseases from which they had no immunity. Homesteads were popping up everywhere, it seemed, and there was an unfamiliar traffic in the narrow mud streets of Taos and Santa Fe. Carson saw the tendrils of civilization creeping in; the America he had left behind was finally catching up with him.

  In a literal and even legal sense, it had caught up with him. All the West he had known since leaving Missouri as a boy had become, at last, American soil. With the signing of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty in February 1848, the Mexican War officially ended, and the United States officially absorbed 1.2 million square miles of new real estate—increasing the national domain by more than 66 percent. Agreeing to pay the paltry sum of $15 million, Polk had won precisely what he wanted at the outset, a vast, unbroken continental nation with Pacific harbors. Washington’s first war of foreign intervention had cost the lives of more than 13,000 Americans—the highest death rate per fighting soldier in U.S. military history—with the Mexican toll soaring far higher, perhaps as high as 25,000 dead. The victory did not come without stout reservations and pangs of somber introspection among many American leaders who could not ignore the war’s darker imperial shadings. Ulysses S. Grant, to name one prominent doubter who actually fought in the conflict, would call the Mexican War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Even Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had at first so staunchly supported the war (as a way to extend slavery), began to have his doubts. He told the Senate: “A deed has been done from which the country will not be able to recover for a long time, if ever; it has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable.”

  Nicholas Trist, the American envoy sent to Mexico City to negotiate the treaty, later
recalled sitting down with the Mexican officials and trying to hide his guilt about concluding a treaty that sheared from Mexico nearly half of its territory: “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was strong…. For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.”

  And yet already, it seemed, the great landgrab had paid off: Scarcely before the ink had dried on the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, gold was discovered in California, and now the rush was on. It’s remotely possible that Kit Carson played a role in disseminating news of the strike; some accounts have suggested that on his second transcontinental journey to Washington, in 1848, Carson carried in his saddlebags one of the first notices of the placer discoveries in the Sierra Nevada. Almost instantly a dusty exodus of people and goods was set in motion. The Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, and their tributaries were now virtually choked with determined men—“Forty-Niners,” they were called—who had chucked everything for a stake in the California argosy.

  From Carson’s point of view, the West was filling up fast with what he took to be untrustworthy characters—outlaws, charlatans, religious zealots, opportunists, schemers, boosters, empire-builders. Yet he seemed scarcely to recognize that by guiding Fremont all over the West, he had been an important catalyst in bringing about these changes; in a sense, Carson had unwittingly fouled his own nest, luring to the West the very sorts of people he loathed.

  Everything he touched, it seemed, had withered. The beaver he had trapped were on the verge of extinction. The Indians he had lived among had been decimated by disease. Virgin solitudes he once loved had been captured by the disenchanting tools of the togographers. The annual rendezvous of the mountain men was a thing of the past. Even the seemingly indestructible Bent’s Fort was no more. One day in August 1849, Charles’s brother William decided it was time to start over. Not wanting to sell the great fort to the government, not wanting it to be vandalized and overrun by Indians, he came up with a more dramatic solution: He filled the labyrinthine chambers with kegs of powder and blew parts of his weird, splendid castle to smithereens. If there had been any doubt before, the immolation of Bent’s Fort loudly proclaimed the death of an era.