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

by Hampton Sides

He had a scar along his left ear, another one on his right shoulder—both left by bullets.

Carson had learned to speak Spanish and French fluently, and he knew healthy smatterings of Navajo, Ute, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfoot, Shoshone, and Paiute, among other native tongues. He also knew Indian sign language and, one way or another, could communicate with most any tribe in the West. And yet for all his facility with language, Kit Carson was illiterate.

But the most expeditious way for farmers to remove dense thickets of timber was to set them afire. One day in 1818, Lindsey Carson was burning the woods nearby when a large limb broke off from a burning tree, killing him instantly.

How Kit's dad died.

Venturing on his first bison hunt, he learned how to jerk the meat and turn it into a fine pemmican, and how to enjoy the Plains Indian delicacy of the still-hot liver, sliced fresh from the pulsing animal and seasoned with bile squirted from its gallbladder.

The Spanish had tried for a time to Christianize the Navajos—literally chaining them to church pews, according to one account—but they would not tolerate Spanish missionaries. In 1672 a group of Navajos hauled a priest out the doors of his church, ripped off his clothes, then killed him at the base of an outdoor cross by smashing his head in with a bell.

Although Navajo parents followed few hard rules about how to name their children, it was generally agreed that the watershed moment when a baby could definitively be said to have passed from infanthood into something more fully human was the child’s “first spontaneous laugh.” First laughter was an occasion for much celebration, and it was the time when many Navajos held naming ceremonies for their young; it is likely that this is when Narbona received his original “war name,” whatever it might have been.

Another Cebolletan account tells the story of an intrepid defender named Domingo Baca, who was disemboweled by a Navajo lancer. Undaunted by his injury, Baca strapped a pillow around his belly to hold in his guts, then seized his musket and rejoined the fight. When he removed the pillow that night, writes historian Marc Simmons, Baca’s friends “were aghast, and quickly made the sign of the cross as for one already dead. But Baca returned the dangling entrails to their proper place, called for needle and sinew, and sewed up the wound himself. These crude ministrations proved effective, for he recovered and lived to fight again.”

Realizing that neither diplomacy nor outright bartering would achieve his expansionist ends, Polk was determined to provoke a war. He dispatched Gen. Zachary Taylor to disputed territory, between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, in southern Texas. It was an unsubtle attempt to create the first sparks. In April 1846, Taylor’s soldiers were fired upon, and Polk was thus given the pretext he needed to declare war. “American blood has been spilled on American soil,” Polk spluttered

At seventeen, after years of anguish that seemed to imprint a permanent grimace on his adolescent face, Polk was diagnosed with urinary stones. He was taken by horse-drawn ambulance to a famous Kentucky physician, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, and there underwent what was then a state-of-the-art surgery. With nothing more than brandy for an anesthetic, the future president was strapped naked to the operating table with his legs hoisted high in the air. Dr. McDowell bored through the prostate and into the bladder with a medieval-looking tool called a “gorget.” The stones were successfully removed, but the operation is thought to have left Polk sterile and impotent. Polk biographer John Seigenthaler thought that Polk “became a man on Dr. McDowell’s operating table. Here, for the first time, were evidences of the courage, grit, and unyielding iron will that Whigs, the British Crown, and the Mexican Army would encounter once he became president.”

The news of his nomination was shot to Washington by brand-new telegraph lines, the first occasion Samuel Morse’s startling invention had been used for a public purpose.

Still others brooded over an even more nettlesome question—namely, would the new lands that would likely be gained by the war ultimately become slaveholding or free? Much of the early dissent came out of Massachusetts from a group of abolitionists who called themselves the Conscience Whigs. Led by Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, these critics bemoaned not only “the iniquity of aggression but the iniquity of its purpose—the spread of slavery.” Perhaps the most eloquent among the war’s opponents was the great Transcendentalist essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” he predicted, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”

At some point during the excursion, Stockton had ordered his naval gunners to fire a few exhibition rounds from a new cannon that had been placed on board. But something went wrong and the cannon fired directly into the assembled crowd of politicians and military officers. A number of dignitaries were killed by shrapnel, including Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Navy Secretary Thomas Gilmer. Benton survived only by sheer luck—moments before the blast, he had moved a few feet away in search of a better vantage point from which to study the gunner’s marksmanship.

In a crisis he knew little tricks for staving off thirst—such as opening the fruit of a cactus or clipping a mule’s ears and drinking its blood.

unchristianized tribe of Pueblo Indian farmers little influenced by the Spanish, the normally peaceful Hopis were ancient foes of the Diné—they called the Navajos the tasavuh, or “the head pounders,” for their brutal habit of bashing in skulls with stone axes.

In truth, no one had liked Santa Fe very much. The soldiers filled their diaries with disparaging descriptions of the place. It was a greasy, smelly, drunken, superstitious little town, they thought, loud with the fulminations of fat friars who scratched their itches and wore the same robe every evening. Santa Fe was a place of goats and chickens, of twisted offshoots of Catholic doctrine, of spiritual and medical guesswork.

At the Beale house, Carson’s bedroom was so stuffy and his mattress so soft that he begged to sleep on the veranda in the open air. He was shocked at the high cost of everything in Washington, and thought it outrageous that carriage operators around the city charged a fee for something so basic as transportation. He fussed about this so much that eventually Jessie secured him a horse so he could trot around the city on his own.

Bill Williams, a sixty-two-year-old mountain man who was recovering from a recent Indian fight that had left him with a gunshot wound in the arm. Williams was a likeable crank with vast experience in the Rockies. A former itinerant Methodist preacher legendary for his gambling and drinking binges and his strange and sometimes gruesome eating habits (he especially liked to dine on the raw leg of a fetal calf),

As November slid into December, the snows kept coming. For weeks the party could not budge. “We all looked like Old Winter,” Dick wrote. “Icicles an inch long were pendant from our moustache and beard.” One night Ned’s socks froze so completely that they had to be shaved off his legs.

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”).

The Spanish scout called down to his comrades and reported that the Navajos were hopelessly trapped. Another soldier began to crawl his way up the steep wall with the notion of rounding up prisoners. When he crossed the threshold of the cave, a Navajo woman wrapped her arms around him and dashed for the precipice; the two figures, locked in a desperate grip, plunged several hundred feet to their deaths.

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.

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.

After that, they hoped to march through Utah to the Pacific, take over the California mining operations, and open up the Golden State to the Peculiar Institution—Cotton plantations on the Sacramento! Slave markets in Los Angeles!—so that Confederate railroads would connect the Confederate ports of Charleston, New Orleans, and Houston to the Confederate port of San Diego.

The enslavement of captured Indians was an old convention in New Mexico—as was peonage, another form of servitude in which poor, usually Hispanic workers became indebted to wealthy estate owners. Peonage was a kind of feudal arrangement that kept the landed class rich while the majority of the citizens, illiterate and powerless to improve themselves, stayed mired in a financial misery from which they could rarely escape.

On an 1853 trip to Northern California, Carson took a new measure of his growing fame. He traveled there on an odd but, as it turned out, extremely lucrative venture: He’d bought more than six thousand sheep in New Mexico and, fighting off wolves and Indians along the route, drove his vast herd all the way to California to sell to the gold miners there. To our cattle-tuned sensibilities it now seems like a wimpy sort of Western idyll—a sheep drive?—but in the bargain, Carson made what was to him a fair fortune, netting about seven thousand dollars.

For the past several months, Graydon, as the head of a self-styled reconnaissance unit called Graydon’s Independent Spy Company, had been gathering intelligence for the Union forces. Known for employing various ruses and disguises, he had once ventured into a Confederate camp as an apple peddler.

Born in 1814, the son of a shipmaster who died young, James Henry grew up on Maine’s Penobscot Bay in the misty coastal village of Castine. His family was poor, but rich in Yankee blue blood—his mother was a Phelps, a venerable Puritan name, and Carletons had been living in New England since the 1660s. Both lines of his family had mottoes and coats-of-arms and sterling genealogies they were proud to recite.

For two years Carleton’s memorial stood at the site, a raw and eloquent warning to wayfarers. But in 1861, Brigham Young brought an entourage to Mountain Meadows and ordered Carleton’s cross and cairn destroyed. As his subordinates took down the monument, rock by rock, the Mormon prophet said, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I have repaid.”

A new notion took hold: The tribes of California must be physically separated from white society as an alternative to their own extinction. They must be relocated on some clearly delineated parcel of arable land sufficiently watered by a river. There, they must be taught the rudiments of farming and animal husbandry. The government must not skimp—it must provide the Indians with modern tools, sound stock, and good seeds so that they might finally stop roving and settle down to earn an honest living as self-sufficient farmers, dwelling collectively on what amounted to a kibbutz. This communal farm must be closely guarded by an army fort, not only to prevent the Indians from straying into the white communities but also to keep ill-meaning white folks from venturing onto Indian land, bringing the scourge of alcohol and other vices with them. The new policy was tantamount to apartheid, to be sure. But if it was predicated on the prevailing racism of the time, it was also fueled by an emerging humanitarian concern that whole tribes were truly on the brink of expiration—becoming, in Carleton’s alarming phrase, Children of the Mist.

The fact was, James Carleton was embarrassed by New Mexico—embarrassed by its poverty, its lack of luster, its low standing in the halls of Washington, where no one seemed to favor elevating the territory to the status of a full-fledged state. According to the prevailing sentiment on Capitol Hill, New Mexico, with its Indian troubles and general squalor, was nothing but a drain on the national budget. For years lawmakers had floated serious proposals to return the territory to Mexico: Why squander any more blood and treasure on such a hopeless cause?

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.”

“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.

Cadete told Cremony, who recorded the conversation in an 1868 article published in the magazine Overland Monthly: Let me tell you what we think. You begin when you are little to work hard. After you get to be men, you build big houses, big towns, and everything else in proportion. Then, after you have got them all, you die and leave them behind. Now, we call that slavery. You are slaves from the time you begin to talk until you die; but we are free as air. The Mexicans and others work for us. Our wants are few and easily supplied. The river, the wood and plain yield all that we require. We will not be slaves; nor will we send our children to your schools, where they only learn to become like yourselves.

On the afternoon of May 23, Carson rallied. He told Dr. Tilton he was hungry—not for the thin broths and meager gruels he had been subsisting on, but something substantial. He wanted a big buffalo steak like old times, cooked rare, maybe served up with a mess of red chili like he always preferred it. And a big pot of coffee. And after that, a smoke from his clay pipe. Dr. Tilton got to it, and soon the general had his request. He ate and smoked his fill, there on the floor, sprawled on his buffalo robes. Then, at 4:25 in the afternoon, he started coughing violently, and blood spouted from his lips. The aneurysm had ruptured. Carson yelled out, “Doctor, compadre, adios!”