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

by Hampton Sides

however, believed that the main value of this tract was its contiguity to other, more valuable places: For how could America meaningfully own California without all the country

it and the existing United States? What was the point of having Pacific ports, and the hoped-for trade with China and the rest of the Orient, without also having the intervening lands? Manifest Destiny did not countenance geographical gaps and untidy voids—it was an all-or-nothing concept tied to the free flow of an envisioned commerce.

mourning and

their hardships. Captain Turner complained in his journal: “How little do those who sit in their easy chairs in Washington know of the privations we are daily subjected to. Even

anxious friends at home can form no idea of the trials we undergo—wading streams, clambering over rocks, laboring through the valleys [where] the sand causes our animals to sink up to their knees. Then our frugal meals, hard bed, and perhaps wet blankets…I have no taste for this mode of life—it contains not a single charm for me. It is labor, labor from morning till night. I’m tired of this business. I wish it was over…This is a soldier’s fare, but I am sick of it.”

desiccated landscapes of present-day Arizona, Lieutenant Emory put an end to such speculation: “No one who has ever visited this country would ever think of bringing his own slaves here with any view to profit. Their labor would never repay the cost of transportation.” The only

really the country is so forbidding that no one would scarcely be willing to secure a long life at the cost of living in it.” Another issue that Emory’s

the well-watered land of the peaceful Pimas, and a related tribe called the Maricopas. The Pimas were advanced farmers who had long ago mastered a complex system of dikes and irrigation canals that allowed them to grow abundant corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and cotton, among other crops. Lieutenant Emory’s engineering mind was impressed by the “beauty, order, and disposition” of the

were “frank, confident, peaceful, and industrious,” Emory thought, and “in possession of a beautiful and fertile basin.” Kearny’s men, famished as they were, approached the Pimas and offered money and barter for food, but the Indians refused any sort of payment. “Bread is to eat, not to sell, take what you want,” they insisted in Spanish—and promptly invited Kearny’s men to a feast.

what is often termed ‘wild Indians,’ who surpass many of the Christian nations in agriculture, are little behind them in the useful arts, and are immeasurably before them in honesty and virtue.”

On November 23 they reached the confluence of the Gila and the mighty Colorado. It was on that day that Lieutenant Emory made a disturbing discovery. He was out surveying the confluence with his staff, tinkering with his equipment as he always did, when he happened to encounter a lone Mexican riding on a horse.

“Never has there been a man like Kit Carson. All that has been said about him, and more, is true. He is as fearless as the lion, as stealthy as the panther, as strong as the oxen. I believe that Carson would attack a fort filled with Mexicans single-handed and drive them off.”

also have to resign himself. The day he was appointed governor, Bent wrote a long letter to Secretary

Roaring

By then the Taos Indians had broken

A few minutes later he returned

then

name. General

Chaco Phenomenon. Rapidly, the Chaco Anasazi began to centralize their government, intensify their agriculture, and concentrate their population

aberrant wetness, and during that brief window the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon had overfarmed, overhunted, and overlogged. In only a few generations their deforested land became eroded, the

drainages choked with salt and silt. The river on which they depended for corn and beans dried up. A third major drought, beginning around 1129, delivered the final blow.

The word anasazi, in fact, is a Navajo word, meaning “ancestors of our enemies,” and it’s a term modern-day Pueblo Indians understandably detest (they prefer the designation “ancestral Puebloans”). Whatever the nature of their relationship, the Navajo clearly filled the void

laconic homeliness on the one hand, and his legendary status on the other. Ruxton wrote, “Small in stature, and slenderly limbed, but with muscles of wire, with a fair complexion and quiet, intelligent features, to look at Kit none would suppose that the mild being before him was an incarnate devil in an Indian fight.”

cannot express my surprise at beholding a small, stoop-shouldered man, with freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring. He spoke but little, and answered questions in monosyllables.” But, Sherman went on, “Carson’s integrity was simply perfect. The Indians knew it and would trust him any day before they would us [soldiers], or the president, either!”

Averill’s twenty-five-cent novel was a “blood and thunder,” as the genre was known, a precursor to the modern western, briskly paced and packed with cliffhangers and hair-raising scrapes. Although he claimed

did not make the slightest attempt to learn anything about the real Kit Carson or seek permission to use his name. As one of his actual facts, Averill fabulously asserts that Carson single-handedly “discovered” the goldfields of California. Yet Prince of the Gold Hunters became wildly successful, a best-seller as measured by the standards of its day. More important, many other writers would soon copy Averill’s formula. His was only the first in what would be a long

Possibly the most memorable action of the day concerned the widely hated Colonel Slough: At one point in the heat of battle,

own men became so disgusted

with him for keeping so far to the rear of the action that they turned a howitzer on him and opened fire, raking the hillside with shrapnel in an attempt to f...

death list is not made up of a few lives lost. Its number will extend to nearly three hundred for the past eighteen months.” Something had to be done—the people of the territory cried out for retribution as never before. The Santa Fe Gazette clamored

Carson did not need to be reminded that the only thing worse than being killed by Comanches was being caught by them: Their tortures were too grotesque to contemplate.