Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  It was early November. The skies were iron gray and touched with the cold breath of winter. The signs were almost impossible to read. Carson said it “was the most difficult trail that I ever followed.” Not only were the tracks several weeks old, but they had been further obscured by a light snowstorm. Carson discovered that the Jicarillas had obscured their trail by splitting into different parties after breaking down their camps each morning. These smaller parties, he found, would vector off across the prairie in multiple directions, only to reconvene at some appointed place that evening. Piecing together these byzantine lines was slow and painstaking work, and several times they came close to losing the trail and abandoning the chase. But one day they came upon the residue of a Jicarilla camp, and Carson took heart: Lying in the prairie grass was an article of woman’s clothing.

  Several days later they passed the next former Jicarilla encampment, and again Carson found a woman’s garment. He began to think that Ann White had deliberately left a trail of her belongings, like so many crumbs for her rescuers to follow. Seeing these articles encouraged Carson. As he recalled in a characteristic understatement, “It was the cause of renewed energy.”

  Major Grier and Carson followed the trail eastward for twelve days, pushing almost to the border of Texas. They passed into the first suggestions of the Staked Plains, a prickly expanse of mesquite, yucca, and cholla cactus. Then Carson spotted fires smoking on the horizon. It was the encampment of several hundred Jicarilla Apaches, under the leadership of a well-known chief named White Wolf, set along the banks of the Canadian River near Tucumcari Butte. As they approached the camp, Grier and his men were spread out over great distances, and a miscommunication occurred. Carson gave the signal to attack, and he started off in a canter toward the encampment. But Grier countermanded Carson’s signal and instead ordered his men to wait and confer. Grier thought it was best to approach the Jicarillas in a conciliatory posture and request a parley with White Wolf. Carson, realizing that he was the only one charging the Jicarilla camp, had to stop abruptly and wheel his horse around.

  He strongly disagreed with Grier’s decision to delay. If Ann White was alive and hidden somewhere in the encampment, the Jicarillas would not turn her over without a fight. Grier’s best chance of success, Carson felt, was to surprise the Jicarillas in a lightning assault that gave them no time to react. But now precious minutes were dripping away. The Jicarillas eventually spotted Grier and his men, and began to pack their belongings in haste. The element of surprise had been entirely lost. Several more minutes went by and still the dragoons waited. One of the Jicarillas picked up his rifle and shot Grier in the chest from a distance of several hundred yards. It was an extraordinary bit of marksmanship, but the Jicarilla rifleman was too far away to do much damage. The ball tore through Grier’s clothes and knocked the wind out of him but caused only a slight bruise.

  Recovering from the shock, Major Grier finally gave the order to charge. Yet, Carson argued, “The order was too late for the desired effect.” By the time dragoons reached the camp, the Jicarillas had dispersed, spreading out in all directions. “There was only one Indian in the camp,” Carson recalled. “He, swimming into the river hard by, was shot.” Some of the dragoons took off in pursuit of the fleeing Jicarillas, killing one and taking several prisoners.

  But then Carson spotted something. About two hundred yards from the campsite, a figure was sprawled on the hard-baked plain. The men rode over to inspect and found to their dismay that it was the corpse of an American woman. Ann White had been shot through the heart with a single arrow. “She was perfectly warm,” Carson said, “and had not been killed more than five minutes.” By the looks of things, she must have known that her rescuers were at hand. She had been running away from the Jicarillas. Carson wrote, “It was apparent that she was endeavoring to make her escape when she received the fatal shot.”

  Carson studied Ann White’s face. It was obvious to him that she had been horribly mistreated. “She was emaciated,” he later told a friend, “the victim of a foul disease, and bore the sorrows of a lifelong agony on her face.” Probably she had been passed among the warriors and repeatedly raped, Carson said, as “the prostitute of the tribe.” A soldier in the party later wrote that Mrs. White was “a frail, delicate, and very beautiful woman, but having undergone such usage as she suffered nothing but a wreck remained; it was literally covered with blows and scratches. Her countenance even after death indicated a hopeless creature. Over her corpse, we swore vengeance upon her persecutors.” Carson believed that Ann White had been fatally ill. “She could not possibly have lived long,” he said. “Her life, I think, should never be regretted by her friends. She is surely far more happy in heaven, with her God, than among friends of this earth.”

  Although he kept his opinions to himself, Carson was plainly furious with Major Grier. Carson felt “certain that if the Indians had been charged immediately on our arrival,” Ann White might have been saved. The men buried her in the prairie and then began to pick through the various belongings the Jicarillas had left in their camp. One of the soldiers discovered a book that the White family had evidently brought with them from Missouri, a paperback novel starring none other than Kit Carson. Almost certainly it was Charles Averill’s blood and thunder, Kit Carson: The Prince of the Gold Hunters. Carson could not read it, of course, but later, perhaps over the campfire, one of the soldiers regaled him with passages from the story. “Kit Carson! His lip, that proud, that determined lip, was compressed with the firmness of a rock between his clenched teeth as he held his devoted hand within the flame, scorching it to the very bone!”

  This was the first time that the real Kit Carson had come in contact with his own myth. “The book was the first of its kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundred,” Carson said. At first he was vaguely amused by this colorful novel, but then he began to think of Ann White. He imagined her reading it while enduring her miserable captivity. In Averill’s story, Kit Carson finds the kidnapped girl and saves the day, fulfilling his vow to her distraught parents back in Boston that he would scour the American West until she was found. But in this instance the real Kit Carson had failed to avert a disaster; he feared Averill’s fiction may have given Ann White a false hope. “Knowing that I lived near,” Carson said, “I have often thought that as Mrs. White read the book, she prayed for my appearance and that she would be saved.” Neither Ann White’s daughter nor her servant were ever found.

  The White murder would haunt Kit Carson—“I have much regretted the failure to save the life of so esteemed a lady,” he wrote a decade later—and he would continue to be troubled by the implications of his growing celebrity. He insisted that everything in Charles Averill’s book was a lie. Later, when a friend offered him a copy of his own, Carson threatened to “burn the damn thing.”

  The Santa Fe New Mexican reported the White case’s tragic end on November 28, 1849. “We learn,” the paper noted dolefully, “that the wife of the late Mr. J.M. White has at last been deprived of her sufferings, having been shot by the Indians.” The paper’s editors went on to insist that this murder, along with the “recent butchery of Mr. White,” called for “a terrible and immediate retribution. The tribes surrounding this Territory should be confined to certain fixed limits and there should be compelled to remain under penalty of utter annihilation. It is folly to think of securing peace by making treaties with these Indians. They must be forced to a complete submission.”

  Book Three: MONSTER SLAYER

  Chapter 36: THE FEARING TIME

  The two horses were ready, and so were their riders. The animals flared their nostrils in the desert air and stamped their feet in anticipation. All the bets had been placed. Some five hundred Navajo spectators had taken their spots on the sides of the dusty track outside the American fort. They were splayed out on their bright-patterned blankets, reveling in the carnival atmosphere, shouting out encouragements and the occasional tame invectiv
e.

  The excitement had been building all day. Since morning the Navajos had been streaming in from the rimrock country, women and children as well as warriors, on horseback and on foot, wearing their finest outfits and bearing serapes and jewelry to trade with the soldiers—whom the Navajos sometimes called “Something-Sticking-Out-From-The-Foreheads” because of the distinct visors protruding from their army-issue caps. There had been bartering and games and feasting through the midday, but in the afternoon the main event—the races—had begun. The Navajos were entranced by the spectacle of the track. Not only were they avid gamblers, they were a tribe with a proud history of horsemanship. Racing ran deep in their blood.

  This was to be the last race of the afternoon, the most important race, the one with the fastest horses and the biggest stakes. “Large bets, larger than on the other races, were made on both sides,” recalled one witness. “The Indians, some of them mounted on fine ponies, were richly dressed, and all appeared to be there to see the race, and not with any hostile intentions.”

  In lieu of money, the wagers were made in the form of hard goods: The Indians bet their fine blankets and silver wares, while the soldiers wagered U.S. government property taken from the fort commissary—barrels of bacon, hogsheads of molasses, and the like—an illegal practice that the fort commander, in the interest of entertainment, was willing to overlook. Most of the soldiers were watching from the gates of the fort, but others were mingling with the Indian throngs. Kegs of whiskey had been flowing freely through the day (some Navajos called the great casks “hollow-woods”), and now soldiers and Indians alike were good and drunk.

  It was a bright crisp day in Indian country, early fall of 1861. Hints of autumn played on the air. The chamisa had taken on a blazing yellow, and the aspens were just beginning to turn on Mount Taylor, whose broad shoulders rose impressively from the malpais in the distant east. The papery dry leaves of the cottonwoods clapped softly in the wind, like a thousand gloved hands at an opera.

  Fort Fauntleroy was one of several strongholds that the United States military had built in Navajo country, largely on the basis of information gleaned from the 1849 Washington Expedition and the resulting maps pieced together by army topographer James Simpson. The fort was set in a beautiful spot called Bear Springs—the same ancient gathering place tucked in the Zuni Mountains where Narbona had met with Alexander Doniphan in 1846 to sign the first treaty between the Navajos and the United States government.

  The regimental surgeon at the fort, an Irish doctor named F. E. Kavanaugh, owned a fleet thoroughbred that he insisted could not be beaten. Kavanaugh had been racing him all summer and the horse had never lost. In anticipation of today’s contest, the soldiers posted at the fort had pampered and trained the champion, making sure it was in top form. To jockey his prized animal, Kavanaugh selected a lithe and small-statured New Mexican lieutenant named Rafael Ortiz, a fierce competitor who was always at home in a saddle.

  But the Navajos had their own prized pony—a jittery little sorrel with a spirit for the track. Rumors circulated that Navajo medicine men had performed elaborate ceremonies to ensure victory for their animal, chanting over a fetish shaped in the image of a horse. A young Navajo boy, light and quick of reflex, would ride the sorrel that day, but stories differ about whose horse it was: According to one account the pony was owned by a large Navajo man the Americans called Pistol Bullet. Other accounts say the owner was none other than Manuelito, Narbona’s bold and truculent sonin-law, who had emerged as one of the great leaders of the tribe.

  Manuelito was an expert horseman, a man attentive to good breeding and rich enough to own the best. If he was indeed there at the fort that day, watching his horse compete, enjoying a moment of peace, it was a rare appearance—and most likely he would have kept himself incognito. For Manuelito was the sworn enemy of the Americans. Consistently, emphatically, categorically, he alone among his tribesmen had advocated war. Known by his countrymen as Hastiin Ch’ilhaajinii, or Black Weeds, Manuelito hated everything about the Americans. They had slaughtered his cattle herds. They had murdered his father-in-law. They had stuck forts in the craw of the Navajo nation. To their every demand, his response was the same uncut rage. The people, he roared, must drive the bilagaana from the country.

  Certainly he had tried. The last few years—1858, 1859, 1860—had been particularly violent ones, and always Manuelito had been at the center of the maelstrom, his steady, implacable voice urging his countrymen not to budge an inch. The Doniphan treaty, signed with so much optimism and goodwill, had proven scarcely worth the paper it was written on, as had the Washington treaty three years later. The old war was still very much alive. If the sheep-rustling Diné had not changed their ways, neither had the New Mexicans, who continued leading freelance raids into Navajo country to steal children and win spoils.

  But over the last few years, it seemed, the war had escalated into something else altogether, a conflict of a different order of magnitude. The Diné now had enemies on all sides. They suffered nearly constant attacks not just from New Mexicans, but also from Utes, Comanches, Apaches, and other ancient foes—as well as from their new foe, the American soldiers, who inflicted their punishments with increasing vigor. It seemed to the Navajo that they were surrounded by wolves. Even nature had turned against them—for several seasons the Navajo country had broiled under a terrible drought. People were starving to death, selling their children for food, fighting amongst themselves. Their society was stressed to the breaking point. The medicine men had lost their touch, the old ceremonies didn’t seem to work. The Diné had reached the nadir of their tribe’s existence, a decade of doubt and struggle that they still call, to this day, the nahondzod, “the fearing time.”

  The American military commanders in Santa Fe, even the more obtuse ones, recognized that the old war between the Navajos and the New Mexicans was a two-sided quarrel, with legitimate grievances flowing in both directions. But they almost always accepted the New Mexican version of the conflict—“chastising” the Navajos for their treaty infractions while looking the other way when Hispanic militias and ragtag vigilante groups marched west. As far as Manuelito was concerned, the Americans had become the bigger problem; if it weren’t for them, he thought, the Diné could hold their own in any war against the New Mexicans. Yet there stood the United States government, stubbornly insisting on playing the role of a one-eyed umpire.

  Part of the problem was a lack of consistency. From year to year the Navajos had little idea whom they were dealing with; from their point of view, the Great White Father in Washington was restless and fickle, for he kept sending new emissaries to the territory. Since the American occupation of New Mexico, a dizzying succession of commanders had come and gone: Kearny, Doniphan, Price, Washington, Beall, Munroe, Sumner, Garland, Bonneville, Fauntleroy, and now, the current military governor, Col. Edward Canby. Each of these men had attacked the “Navajo problem” in his own way, with lesser or greater degrees of insight and militancy. But the Navajo conflict was a rat’s nest, a Gordian knot of troubles, and largely because of it, the 9th Military Department, as New Mexico was known, was considered a hardship post, a shit-hole, a quagmire. The territory’s myriad adversities wore a soldier down. Within the army, no one much cared for the place, and few were inclined to stay long enough to really understand the Navajos and the true nature of the conflict—let alone solve it.

  If the cast of American leaders had been kaleidoscopic, the main themes were hammered out with an almost monotonous consistency: The Navajos must stop roaming and become sedentary, full-time farmers, working private plots of individually owned land. They must become town-dwellers, and preferably Christians, hewing to clear national boundaries. They must select a single chief to speak for all the Navajo people and answer for all their crimes. In short, the Diné must cease being what they were—an amorphous concatenation of seminomadic bands—and become a single political entity. Over time, the tone with which the American commanders issued their
demands became ever more shrill: The Navajos must do all these things, or face extinction.

  During the mid-1850s there was perhaps only one bright spot in the American-Navajo relationship. For a few brief years a truly competent man held the office of Indian agent to the Navajo people. His name was Henry Linn Dodge, a perceptive young man from Wisconsin who had lived for years in the territory. Dodge got his first exposure to the Diné in 1849, when he accompanied the Washington Expedition into the Navajo lands. Most Indian agents regarded their posts as mere sinecures, and many were extravagantly corrupt. But Dodge pursued his job with great zeal and a curiosity to match. Soon after his appointment in 1853, he moved his office deep into Diné country. He learned to speak Navajo. He traveled constantly without military escort and befriended all the headmen, attending nightchants and other ceremonials. He brought blacksmiths to teach Navajos metallurgy, bought them wagonloads of hoes and axes often with his own money, led numerous peace delegations to Santa Fe, and lobbied for the creation of schools and the building of mills on Navajo land. He fell in love with the Navajo people—he even married within the tribe (so it was widely said). The Navajos called him “Red Sleeves” and considered him a friend, perhaps the first bilagaana who ever bothered to understand them.

  His four-year tenure was a testament to the potential power of one-man diplomacy: While Dodge was agent, the Navajos remained substantially at peace, and reports of their raiding were scarce. For a brief time even the tenor of the talk about them changed. William Davis, a Harvard-trained lawyer and circuit court judge who was also a writer of some note and had made a trip with Dodge and other peace emissaries deep into Navajo country in 1855, theorized that the Diné may well be a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel (a fashionable anthropological topic of his day). “In many respects the Navajos are the most interesting tribe of Indians in our country,” Davis wrote in his perceptive study of New Mexico, El Gringo, published in 1856. “The modern doctrine of ‘Women’s Rights’ may be said to prevail among them to a very liberal extent. Women are admitted into their councils and sometimes control their deliberations. The Navajos are mild in disposition, and very seldom commit murder.” They were, Davis concluded, “a superior race of Indians.”