Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

by Hampton Sides

Who was James K. Polk? A stranger, a telegram, a joyless, childless man fueled by an expansionist agenda. A political masochist who gritted his teeth and endured the national growing pains. The populace had picked him to do bold things in a short amount of time. He seemed to spring from nowhere, and there he returned.

You’d think at some point, author Sides would mention that Polk was a slaveholder, and a reputedly harsh one at that…

But Narbona did not understand what they wanted with this part of the world, or why they had bothered to come from such a long distance—from somewhere far to the east, beyond the buffalo plains—to leave their mark in a place so far from their ancestors. For Narbona, the United States of America was not even the vaguest of abstractions. He had no concept of Washington, D.C., or James K. Polk, or Manifest Destiny. He scarcely had a concept of white men at all and could not fathom that there existed on this earth a people who looked and behaved and spoke and worshiped their gods and organized themselves so differently—a

Polk had aged dramatically during his two years in office. The conflict with Mexico had proven to be a much more ambitious—and controversial—endeavor than he had bargained for. It was consuming the man, and people in Washington could see it in the haggard lines of his ghostly face. In fairness, he brought most of his hardships on himself. His fussy perfectionism made him impossible to please. He had no faith in his cabinet or his generals, and trusted no one. Consequently, he ended up running most of the war himself from the shadows of the Oval Office.

Oval Office not built until 1909.

America’s first war of foreign intervention was uniquely the focused enterprise of a single man; with good reason, it became known as “Mr. Polk’s War.”

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.