Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  But it was gold that most interested Carleton, and he was sure New Mexico would provide it. He wrote to Gen. Henry Halleck, “A country as rich if not richer in mineral wealth than California extends from the Rio Grande, northwestwardly, all the way across to Nevada.” In other words, Navajo country. It was, Carleton said, “a princely realm…a magnificent mineral country. Providence has indeed blessed us, for the gold lies here at our feet to be had by the mere picking of it up.”

  Where Carleton obtained his evidence for these claims was not clear—he seems to have simply wished it into being. The more salient point was this: There might be gold in Navajo country. To ensure the safety of geological exploration, and the inevitable onrush of miners once a strike was made, the Diné would have to be removed. He wrote one of his superiors that among his endeavors since arriving in New Mexico was an effort “to brush back the Indians, so that the people could not only possess themselves of the arable lands…of the territory, but, if the country contained veins and deposits of precious metals, they might be found.”

  In another letter to General Halleck, Carleton went further. On the Gila River, he claimed, there had been found “one of the richest gold countries in the world.” The discovery’s potential value was so great, Carleton argued, that it would forever redeem the forlorn territory in the eyes of the nation—and might provide the hard bullion needed to help win the Civil War back east. “Do not despise New Mexico, as a drain upon the government,” he wrote. “The money will all come back.”

  In his high position, Carleton understood that it would be unseemly for him to hunt for gold himself, but he encouraged friends and subordinates to head out for Navajo country on their own, to scoop up the riches before news of a big strike would spread to the nation and attract the mining hordes. Carleton wrote a captain named J. G. Walker: “If I can help others to a fortune, it will afford me not quite as much happiness as finding one myself, it is true—but nearly as much. My luck has always been not to be at the right place at the right time for fortunes.”

  If Carleton thought it inappropriate for an august general to pan for nuggets, neither did he think it right or necessary for him personally to engage the Navajos in the field. Carleton was odd in this way: A finicky micromanager, a man whose mind swam in details, he had invested heart and soul in his Navajo Plan—and indeed was gambling his whole army career on its success. Yet he showed no interest in directing the details on the ground or witnessing firsthand the historic events he hoped to set in motion. He would be an absentee conqueror, running the war from the safe remove of his Santa Fe headquarters, leaving the drudgeries of battle to his field commander.

  And there never was any doubt who his field commander would be: Kit Carson. The two men were friends, of course, and had shared colorful campaigns together. But the truth was, Carleton genuinely needed Carson, just as General Kearny had needed him sixteen years earlier and Fremont had needed him before that. Carleton needed Carson’s tracking expertise, his popularity among the territory’s inhabitants, his knowledge of the Navajo and their riddled lands, and his good reputation among other tribes of the region. Carson’s success at Valverde had proven that he wasn’t merely a phenomenal scout; he could actually command troops in the field. Even Carson’s fame could be of use, lending an aura of national legitimacy, and a certain storybook sheen, to Carleton’s homegrown project.

  Carleton regarded Carson as uniquely qualified for the campaign—as a godsend, almost—and he was content to leave the conquest of the Navajos in Carson’s able hands. Although Carleton could never be the writer he had aspired to be as a young man, he had ventured west just as Dickens had advised, and now in his lofty position he could write history by making it, with the real-life Kit Carson as his central hero. “The world-wide reputation of Colonel Carson,” Carleton gushed in one letter, “gives a good guaranty that anything that may be required of him, which brings into practical operation the peculiar skill and high courage for which he is justly celebrated, will be well done.”

  As a sort of warm-up to the coming Navajo war, the general ordered Carson to lead five companies of the 1st New Mexico Volunteers on a focused campaign to round up a tiny but nettlesome band of Apaches called the Mescaleros. A tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers centered in the Sacramento and Sierra Blanco mountains of southern New Mexico, the Mescaleros numbered little more than five hundred people. Their name derived from the pulpy, fibrous mescal plant at the core of their diet. But far from being sedate root-diggers, the Mescalero Apaches had a well-deserved reputation for ferocious fighting and expert raiding. Along the principal roadways of southern New Mexico, they had taken advantage of the disarray caused by the Texan invasion, attacking wagon trains and ranches with unprecedented viciousness, committing outrages disproportionate to their numbers. The problem with the Mescaleros bore the hallmarks of the Navajo conflict, on a miniaturized scale.

  General Carleton decided that the Mescaleros would be the first captives he would send to the freshly consecrated Bosque Redondo—the guinea pigs, in effect, the first experimental participants in his “grand work.” He ordered Colonel Carson to pursue the Mescaleros and give them no quarter until they completely surrendered. They would all have to move to the bosque before winter set in. For the Mescaleros, at least, Bosque Redondo was not an entirely alien place; it was not so very far from the heart of their homeland—less than a hundred miles—and Mescaleros had favored its shady banks for centuries as a summer gathering place.

  Carleton made it clear that this precursor to the Navajo campaign was to be an all-or-nothing proposition, and he insisted that Colonel Carson wage it with ruthless efficiency. The Mescaleros, he said, “must be brought to their brutal senses.” He gave Carson a chilling order: “All Indian men of that tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them. The women and children will not be harmed, but you will take them prisoners. If the Indians send in a flag and desire to treat for peace, say that now our hands are untied, and you have been sent to punish them for their treachery and their crimes; that you have no power to make peace; that you are there to kill them wherever you find them.”

  Carson was appalled by Carleton’s shoot-on-sight policy and refused to obey it. In fact, he accepted the surrender of more than a hundred Mescalero warriors who sought refuge with him. Nonetheless he made quick work of the Mescalero Apaches—the campaign was effectively over in a month. In November 1862, Carson sent five of their defeated leaders to Santa Fe to negotiate with General Carleton. One of them, a headman named Cadete, spoke for the delegation in offering an unconditional surrender: “You are stronger than we,” Cadete said in a passionate mingling of Spanish and his own tongue. “Your weapons are better than ours. We are worn out. We have no provisions, no means to live. Your troops are everywhere. Our springs and waterholes are occupied by your young men. You have driven us from our last and best stronghold, and we have no more heart. Do with us as may seem good to you, but do not forget we are men and braves.”

  Carleton promptly ordered the whole tribe to Bosque Redondo—which, in truth, was not entirely a banishment, the bosque being one of their favorite spots on earth. For them, the bitter pill was not the place of their exile, but rather the manner in which they would have to spend it: Carleton informed them that their existence as roving hunters and root-gatherers was over. They were to become farmers now, a fate unimaginably odious to them. Unlike the Navajos, the Mescalero Apaches considered agriculture contemptible work, a form of slavery in itself, a close niggling activity far beneath the dignity of a free mountain people.

  But General Carleton gave them no alternative. By late November the vanquished Mescalero Apaches began to spill from the mountains with their few belongings strapped to their backs and marched to their new life on the Pecos. Delighted with how quickly his plans were taking shape, Carleton dashed off an almost jaunty note to his superior in Washington, Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas: “You will feel pleased to learn that this long dreaded tribe of murder
ers and robbers has been brought to so promising a condition.”

  Carson returned from the Mescalero campaign only to learn that Carleton intended for him to pursue the Navajos without delay. But now that he had seen up close what such a merciless campaign would be like, Carson shied from the assignment. If the Mescalero roundup had been an unqualified success, Carson had taken no pleasure in it. He had joined the Union Army to repulse the Confederates, not to fight Indians. He wanted to be back home in Taos with Josefa and their kids. He wasn’t feeling well—his horse accident in the San Juans had taken a toll. He was feeling odd pains in his chest, and found it difficult to sit a horse. He knew that fighting the Navajos would be hard, cold, bitter work, more ambitious by many orders of magnitude than the Mescalero roundup, and he wanted no part of it.

  Carson wrote Carleton a letter of resignation dated February 3, 1863. By serving in the army and fighting the Texans at Valverde, Carson said, he had proved his “devotion to that Government which was established by my ancestors.” Carson vowed that if the Texans ever returned to New Mexico, it would be his “pride and pleasure” to fight under General Carleton. But, Carson said, “At present I feel that my duty as well as happiness, directs me to my home & family and trust that the General will accept my resignation…. I am sorry that I am obliged to dissolve our Official conexion, butit shall ever be my proudest thought that I have had the honor and happiness of serving under Brigadier Genl Carleton.”

  It was not that Carson disagreed with the basic outlines of Carleton’s Indian policy. On the contrary, during his tenure as an agent for the Utes, Carson had increasingly come to see the wisdom of establishing reservations for Native American tribes—physical separation, he felt, was necessary for the Indians’ own good.

  Carson believed that most of the Indian troubles in the West were caused, as he once flatly put it, “by aggressions on the part of whites.” Most of the raids, by Utes and other tribes, were visited upon the settlements only out of desperation—“committed,” he argued, “from absolute necessity when in a starving condition.” White settlers were increasingly encroaching on Indian hunting grounds. Describing the situation among the Utes and Jicarilla Apache, Carson wrote in a dictated report that “their game is becoming scarce, much of it having been killed by the settlers, and a great deal of it driven from the country…they are unable to support themselves by the chase and the hunt.”

  At the same time, Carson believed there was no stopping the tide of Anglo-American immigration. As historian Tom Dunlay has pointed out, not even in moments of introspection did Carson question the legitimacy of American expansion into the West, a process that he, along with Fremont and a few others, had done more to set in motion than any American alive. Whites were here now—it was simply an irreversible fact. And their presence put the traditional life of all the Western Indians in jeopardy. Native Americans would have to change, he believed, or they would all die out. Predicted Carson, “If permitted to remain as they are, before many years they will be utterly extinct.”

  And so, more or less in keeping with the Tejon model, Carson had throughout the 1850s advocated with growing vehemence the creation of reservations for the Utes and other tribes, at places located far away from all Anglo or Hispanic settlement, where they might learn the arts of cultivation and husbandry while holding on to their own traditions. As he put it, the Indians must be “set apart to themselves.” He truly believed that mingling with whites was ruining their culture. “They should not be allowed to come into the towns,” Carson insisted, “for every visit an Indian makes is more or less an injury to him.” In their encounters with whites, he said, “Indians generally learn the vices and not the virtues” of settled living. Perhaps the biggest problem was liquor—Carson had seen alcohol rip the soul from whole bands of once-proud Indians. “They become accustomed to the use of ardent spirits,” he said, and soon become “a degraded tribe.”

  If at all possible, though, Carson preferred creating reservations within, or at least in the vicinity of, a given tribe’s ancestral lands. “In all cases of locating reservations,” he once said, “it would be best to show some deference to the expressed wishes of the tribe.” Euro-Americans, particularly in the boom-and-bust West, were relentlessly mobile. They blew about in the wind—deracinated, it seemed, always in search of better fortune. Miners, traders, trappers, merchants, missionaries, they thought nothing of moving great distances and starting all over when new opportunity struck. The hunger to push on, particularly in a westward direction, was an attribute of the (white) American. But Carson knew enough about Indian culture to recognize that even among nomadic tribes, the familiar landmarks of one’s homeland were profoundly significant—in fact, they were sacred—and one strayed from them with great trepidation. Homeland was crucial in practical terms, but also in terms of ceremony and ritual, central to a tribe’s collective identity and its conception of the universe.

  Certainly this was true of the Navajo. They constantly moved about, it was true, but it was a localized nomadism; they seldom traveled far from their outfit. There were taboos against leaving the confines of the four sacred mountains. Carson understood that to uproot the Navajo from their ancient ground and move them hundreds of miles ran the risk of demoralizing the tribe so completely that it could smother all chances of a reservation’s success.

  Yet, by experience and association, Carson had plenty of other reasons to want the Diné far removed to a reservation. As an Anglo who had happily married into a Hispanic society, he had doubtless adopted some of the biases and perspectives of his in-laws; living as he did in a Spanish-speaking household with many extended relatives under his roof, it would have been difficult for him not to become, in a sense, Hispanicized in his outlook. During all his years in New Mexico the Hispanic population had regarded the Navajos, often with good reason, as Public Enemy Number One. The Navajo conflict was, Carson said, “an hereditary warfare” that had “always existed.”

  As an Indian agent, Carson had become a friend and advocate of the Utes, and the Utes had always considered the Navajo their archenemy. Over the years Carson had also befriended many people from Taos Pueblo, who likewise viewed the Navajo as an age-old nemesis. So in the simplest terms, Carson’s tribal fidelities prejudiced him against the Diné. Throughout his life Carson had always been a loyalist, unwavering in his allegiance to any person or group with whom he had, for better or worse, thrown in his lot. One can imagine that the loyalist in him must have welcomed the opportunity that Carleton now laid at his feet: to remove the scourge of his people, to vanquish the foe of his friends.

  Still, Carson begged off. He was just plain tired. He didn’t have much fight left in him. He wanted some taste of a normal home life.

  But James Henry Carleton was not an easy man to turn down, any more than Stephen Watts Kearny had been. Carleton refused Carson’s resignation and went to work on him, pulling out all the stops on his peculiarly forceful personality. As a patriot, as a soldier, as a friend, Carson must see this through. It would be the crowning achievement of his career. The people of New Mexico were counting on him.

  Chapter 41: GENERAL ORDERS NO. 15

  The campaign began innocuously enough, with groups of soldiers steadily massing in Santa Fe and in Los Pinos, on the Rio Grande, and then filing slowly westward toward Navajo country. They did not seem in a hurry, nor were they fired with the familiar excitements, the war-whoops and revenge-lust, that ordinarily animated the seasonal slave expeditions into the land of the Diné. These soldiers moved with a solemn and methodical sense of purpose, as though they were conserving their energy. This time they knew they were not making the usual punitive sortie and then returning in shallow triumph with souvenirs and a few slaves. This time they knew they were going away for a long time, and that they were not coming back until they had broken the spirit of an entire nation, forcing twelve thousand people to give up nearly everything they’d ever known.

  It was early July 1863. Day after day the sun
shone with an impaling brightness, and all along the river the crops were taking shape in the wilting heat. Silty water trickled through the ditches and races to feed the thirsty stalks of beans and corn. It was siesta weather, the middays baking in a torpor that made the inhabitants along the Rio Grande live in the way of lizards, burrowing into the shade of their portales, snoozing under brush arbors with their flocks of sheep gathered about them in the shade of the flickering cottonwoods. Now the people roused from their naps and shouted out encouragement, some tipping their sweat-warped sombreros in salute as the soldiers threaded West.

  Col. Kit Carson rode at the head of the column, of course. It’s not clear what Carleton said to induce him to stay on board, but it worked. Apprehensively, and with some reluctance, Carson was now embarked on the most ambitious assignment of his career.

  All told, he would command nearly a thousand men, including U.S. Army officers, New Mexican volunteers, auxiliaries from a number of Pueblo tribes, and scouts recruited from among the Utes. Carson was especially proud of his Ute warriors, many of whom he knew personally from his days as an Indian agent. Hiring them had been his idea. He correctly surmised that the profound hatred the Utes held for the Diné would give them a heightened motivation, while their presence in the field as official allies of the bilagaana troops would disturb and demoralize the Navajos. “The Utes,” Carson wrote Carleton, “are very brave, and fine shots, fine trailers, and uncommonly energetic in the field. The Navajos have entertained a very great dread of them for many years. I believe one hundred Ute Indians would render more service in this way than double their number of troops.” In finally approving Carson’s idea, Carleton stipulated that he hire only the cream of the Ute warriors. “We will have none but the best,” Carleton insisted. “Our work is to be thorough, and we must have the men to do it.”