Blood and Thunder Quotes

“We do not want to go to the right or left, but straight back to our own country!”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

“Kit Carson, more than any figure on the Western stage, filled the role. Honest, unassuming, wry around a campfire, tongue-tied around the ladies, clear in his intentions, swift in action, a bit of a loner: He was the prototype of the Western hero. Before there were Stetson hats and barbed-wire fences, before there were Wild West shows or Colt six-shooters to be slung at the OK Corral, there was Nature’s Gentleman, the original purple cliché of the purple sage. Carson hated it all. Without his consent, and without receiving a single dollar, he was becoming a caricature. In”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!” A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home. June 18 was set as the departure date. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp—they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves. The next morning the trek began. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins. When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.” They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. And as they marched, they chanted—”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“He practiced the code of swift reprisal that was almost universally practiced by the Indians themselves: Failure to strike back, he understood, would only be interpreted as weakness and inevitably lead to an even bolder assault.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“More than 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, were murdered in cold blood that day, in a massacre that is now widely regarded as the worst atrocity committed in all the Indian wars.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“I follow the scent of falling rain And head for the place where it is darkest I follow the lightning And draw near to the place where it strikes —NAVAJO CHANT”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“horizon, he would race back to the hogan, covered in a rime”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“was an exotic curiosity all the more endearing for”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“at a place not far from their actual”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“The exodus of this whole people from the land of their fathers is a touching sight,” Carleton wrote. “They have fought us gallantly for years on years; they have defended their mountains and their stupendous canyons with heroism; but at length, they found it was their destiny, too, to give way to the insatiable progress of our race.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“Most of them were guilty of nothing more than being Navajo. The errant young men responsible for most of the raids represented but a small percentage of the tribe. Yet now the many would pay for the malefactions of the few; now all the Diné would finally suffer for the trouble caused by its most incorrigible members. It was the poorest Navajos, the ladrones, who had surrendered first. They were the sickest and weakest, the ones who had lacked the wherewithal to hold out. Now they had less than nothing—not their health, not their animals, not even a country.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“East was the direction of hope, after all—the direction that every Navajo hogan faced to greet the morning sun. But east was also the direction from which the bilagaana had come. There was a paradox to this, and also an admonition: Ever since they could remember, the Diné had been told never to leave the confines of their four sacred mountains. If they did, the ceremonials would cease to work. Ancient chants would become meaningless, and even the best medicine men would lose their touch. And so, as the refugees filed out of Navajo country, past Acoma and Laguna pueblos, and down into the Rio Grande rift, they began to fear the consequences of drawing so close to the land of the sunrise.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“prig,”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“This legendary effort—which Navajos who live around Canyon de Chelly insist to this day is entirely true—allowed the three hundred refugees on Fortress Rock to outlast the siege and slip from Carson’s long reach. They were never captured.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“Kill most of the livestock and prepare the meat. It is getting cold now, so we have to start. We must be on the top before it snows. The men have been working on the trails. The ladders have been put up. Be strong and prepare to defend yourselves.” One day in December, as it started to snow, some three hundred men, women, and children, perhaps tipped off by a sentry that the bilagaana army was on its way, ascended to the top and pulled up their ladders and bridges. Hoping the evil might pass beneath them, they planned to dwell in silence for months—and, if necessary, make a last-ditch defense, like the doomed Jewish rebels who defied the Romans from the stone ramparts of Masada.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“In the end Carson’s men leveled and burned untold thousands of acres of crops—by his estimation nearly 2 million pounds of food, most of it in its prime, ready for harvest. The impact of this obliteration had a built-in time lag; it would not really show itself until the autumn, when the Navajos would face the coming cold in the grip of inevitable famine. Carson only had to be patient. At one point in his August logs, he pondered the fate of a particular band whose cornfields had just fallen under his blade and torch. “They have no stock,” he writes in a tone devoid of either pleasure or remorse, “and were depending entirely for subsistence on the corn destroyed by my command on the previous day.” The loss, he predicts, “will cause actual starvation, and oblige them to come in and accept emigration to the Bosque Redondo.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“The Navajos were another matter. Theirs was a sprawling nation, wealthy in stock, obdurate in its ways, open to change but only on its terms.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“Ulysses S. Grant, to name one prominent doubter who actually fought in the conflict, would call the Mexican War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Even Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had at first so staunchly supported the war (as a way to extend slavery), began to have his doubts. He told the Senate: “A deed has been done from which the country will not be able to recover for a long time, if ever; it has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable.” Nicholas Trist, the American envoy sent to Mexico City to negotiate the treaty, later recalled sitting down with the Mexican officials and trying to hide his guilt about concluding a treaty that sheared from Mexico nearly half of its territory: “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was strong…. For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“(more than 150 years later, these crude breastworks are still in place). At dusk the men picked the meatiest of their stringy mules and slaughtered them for a thin gravy dinner. From that day on, this forlorn spot would be known as Mule Hill.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“bloviating,”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“Navaho Expedition: Journal of a Military Reconnaissance, would become one of the classics of Western exploration literature.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“During its long isolation, New Mexico had preserved archaic traditions, vestigial dialects of Spanish, and fierce strains of a sometimes unorthodox Catholicism that dated back to the most hysterical days of the Inquisition. Throughout New Mexico there were families who carried on curious traditions—lighting nine-lamped candelabras, singing verses of Hebrew, refusing to eat pork. These were the “crypto-Jews,” as they’ve been called, descendants of Spanish Jews who had fled to Mexico in the 1600s to escape the rampant anti-Semitism of the Inquisition, and then had spread to the most isolated and (they hoped) more tolerant precincts of the empire. Heeding a stubborn cultural memory, these families pursued Hebraic customs in semisecrecy, often without knowing why.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“Up and down the Rio Grande the padres had fed the fires of resistance. These gringos sought to outlaw the Catholic religion, the priests warned. They would ban the Spanish tongue, scrap the fiestas and feast days, and jettison all the old ways of doing things. The priests were not above spreading wild untruths, but they had genuine reasons to feel threatened. With the Kearny Code, the Americans had already instituted radical concepts, such as the separation of church and state, and jury trials in which the padres would play no role whatsoever. What was to stop them from going even further? These Americans had godless ideas that sprang from the cold marble halls of a secular republic. The priests now understood that Washington was determined to reform the marooned Catholic world they had run for so long—and this reformation could only mean the steady erosion of their power.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“quisling”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“were decidedly unpicky eaters known for their blasé culinary motto, “Meat’s meat.” (It was said that the trappers’ diet was so full of lard that it made a mountain man “shed rain like an otter, and stand cold like a polar bear.”)”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West