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

by Hampton Sides

  Here and there Narbona encountered pockets of life, little communities clustered around a feeble river or an underground spring. He found one such place in a well-watered valley below the Hopi settlements of Black Mesa. Narbona climbed up to the mesa to seek the Hopis’ permission to squat on their land until the drought had passed. An 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.

  Certainly the Hopis had good reason to be skeptical of Narbona’s proposed living arrangement. But for some reason the Hopis assented, and Narbona’s people settled down. It was a testament to Narbona’s diplomatic skills that he was able to secure safe haven among ancestral enemies—he doubtless sweetened the deal with many sheep and goats and other gifts, and promises of more when the drought ended. He may have also floated threats at the Hopis, who perhaps feared that more Navajos were coming to reinforce Narbona’s warriors. (Visionary artists and inspired metaphysicians known for their elaborate dances and their fine kachina dolls, the Hopis were inferior fighters; so ingrained was their habit of running that the Navajos called them “little rabbits.”)

  By whatever methods of persuasion, Narbona lived among the Hopis for much of the 1820s, more than a hundred miles to the west of his beloved Tunicha foothills. During their exile, his people became close friends with the Hopis—learning their elaborate songs and dances—and three of his children even married members of the tribe.

  But sometime in the late 1820s, news reached Narbona that the Tunicha Mountains were packed with fresh snow: The drought was over. Soon the people gathered their things and made the happy exodus back to the Chuska Valley.

  The province of New Mexico had seen one major change during their absence: The era of Spanish rule was over. In 1821, Mexico had won its independence from Spain, and now all official affairs were run by a fledgling government out of Mexico City that had no relationship to the crown. The import of this development was lost on most Navajos, and in practical terms they saw no difference between Mexican New Mexicans and Spanish New Mexicans; by whatever name, they were still the enemy.

  In fact, while Narbona and his followers were away in Hopi country, the violence between the Hispanic settlers and the eastern Navajos who stayed behind had only escalated. During times of drought the cycles of violence always seemed to intensify, and the drought of the 1820s was particularly harsh. While Narbona was away, some 250 Diné women and children had been stolen in raids and, presumably, sold into slavery.

  Certainly the Navajos had struck back wherever and whenever they could. But in March 1822, having grown weary of the bloodshed, a group of sixteen Navajo emissaries had accepted an invitation from the new government in Santa Fe to hold a peace council. Some Navajo leaders understood that the timing was fortuitous—only a month earlier the authorities in Santa Fe had celebrated their independence from Spain. If there were ever a promising moment to strike a chord of peace, it was now, with fresh new leaders lodged in Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors.

  The Navajo emissaries set off for the capital with high hopes. But when they passed through the Jemez Pueblo, en route, they walked headlong into a trap set for them by the Mexican commander stationed there. Thomas James, an American trader then living in Santa Fe, documented the episode.

  The [Jemez] commander invited them into the fort, smoked with them, and made a show of friendship. He placed a Spaniard on each side of every Indian as they sat and smoked in a circle, and at a signal each Indian was seized by his two Spanish companions and held fast while others dispatched them by stabbing each one to the heart. A Spaniard who figured in this butchery showed me his knife, which he said had killed eight of them. Their dead bodies were thrown over the wall of the fort and covered with a little earth in a gully.

  A few days afterwards five more of the same nation appeared on the bank of the river opposite the town, and inquired for their countrymen. The Spaniards told them they had gone on to Santa Fe, invited them to come over the river, and said they would be well treated. They crossed, and were murdered in the same manner as the others.

  There again appeared three Indians on the opposite bank, inquiring for their chiefs. They were welcomed across, taken into the town under the mask of friendship, and also murdered in cold blood.

  In a few days two more appeared, but could not be induced to cross, when some Spanish horsemen went down the river to intercept them. Perceiving this movement, they fled and no more embassies came in.

  In all, twenty-four Navajo leaders were treacherously murdered, many of them esteemed elders of the tribe. When news of this three-stage massacre filtered back to the Diné, they prepared for full-scale war. If the Navajos had entertained any vague hopes that the new government in Mexico might treat them any differently than had the Spanish crown, those hopes were shattered. And so that spring of 1822, the Navajos went on an unprecedented rampage of revenge, slaughtering countless Mexican settlers at Valverde, Las Huertas, and many other communities strung along the Rio Grande.

  “They killed all of every age and condition, and burned and destroyed all they could not take away with them, and drove away the sheep, cattle, and horses,” James wrote, adopting an almost Armageddonish tone. “They came from the South directly towards Santa Fe, sweeping everything before them and leaving the land desolate behind them. They crossed the Rio Grande below Santa Fe and passed to the North, laid bare the country around the town of Taos, and then disappeared, with all their booty.”

  Chapter 11: THE UN-ALAMO

  To call any of Fremont’s expeditions purely “scientific,” as he often did, would be disingenuous. Ulterior considerations lurked behind nearly all his movements in the West. Overtly or not, his larger purpose was to advance the cause of American emigration, American expansion, American hemispheric hegemony—which is to say, he was carrying out Sen. Thomas Benton’s vision like a good and dutiful son-in-law.

  But from the beginning, Fremont’s third expedition, begun in 1845, was the most political and least scientific of all. He seemed to trust that the third time really was the charm, that this journey would catapult him from the musty studio of a mere mapmaker into another role altogether—that of a glorious conqueror. Before he left Washington, Fremont had met with Polk, and it was clear that the president wanted the Mexican province of Alta California. He was happy to buy it if Mexico would entertain his overtures, but he was willing to fight for it, too.

  California was then an errant state, only weakly tied to Mexico City. It had recently been convulsed by a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions. Its Hispanic inhabitants, proud and fiercely independent, had primarily settled along the lush Pacific coast, clustered around a constellation of Spanish missions. Yet other parts of California were slowly and steadily becoming Americanized: For years, a growing trickle of American emigrants had been crossing the Sierra Nevada and settling the fertile Sacramento Valley, and American whalers had been using the fine port of Monterey for a generation. Richard Henry Dana, in his immensely popular Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, had opened the nation’s eyes to California’s charms and quickened the popular yearning for American ports on the Pacific.

  In 1842 an American commodore named Thomas Catesby Jones, acting on false reports that war was on with Mexico, had actually sailed into Monterey harbor, seized the port, and raised the American flag. (He soon profusely apologized and quit the port with his tail between his legs.) Though it was a ridiculous action, the fact that Commodore Jones was able to take Monterey without the slightest resistance showed leaders back in Washington just how easily the ripe fruit could be plucked.

  All the trends were inevitable, Polk felt. It was only a matter of time before California, like Texas, would be fully absorbed by the United States. Why not now?

  Such was the pregnant international climate when John Fremont left St.
Louis on June 1, 1845, with fifty-five volunteers and headed out for points west on his third exploratory expedition. As far as his immediate superiors at the Corps of Topographical Engineers were concerned, Fremont’s mission was quite limited: The assignment they’d given him was to map and explore the eastern slope of the southern Rocky Mountains, tracing the watershed of the upper Arkansas River, and returning to St. Louis by year’s end.

  But Fremont seems to have been operating under secret orders, or at least some tacit understanding of a wide latitude, afforded by higher authorities (precisely who has never been clear—Benton? Polk? Other officials within the army or navy?). He had no intention of dallying in the Rockies taking dreary measurements. As soon as he reached the Arkansas River in the late summer of 1845, Fremont abandoned his tame-sounding survey project. As though diverted by some pressing appointment with destiny, he made a beeline for California.

  Along the way there were the usual sorts of misadventures that often seemed to befall Fremont on his transcontinental jaunts. In the Great Salt Lake Desert, he insisted on routing his men across a fearful malpais that local Indians assured him humans had never successfully traversed. His party could have expired from thirst in this dicey passage, but Carson saved the expedition again, this time riding some sixty miles ahead of the others toward a distant mountain, where he quickly located water and grazing grass, and then, by prearranged agreement, built a signal bonfire on the summit as a beacon to Fremont to come on, there was hope ahead.

  By early winter 1846, Fremont had crossed the Sierra Nevada and dropped down into the Sacramento Valley. There he made contact with American settlers, taking the political pulse of the province and trying to stir up a nascent patriotic fervor on which he might capitalize. Already Fremont was quietly building alliances with these rough-and-ready expatriots and making bold assurances that, should war break out with Mexico as expected, his party—which, after all, was an official (and reasonably well-armed) expeditionary force of the United States Army—would be there to protect them. Captain Fremont was the only army officer within two thousand miles of California: Should hostilities begin, he was, by default, the commander apparent.

  He quietly slipped into Yerba Buena, as the tiny town of San Francisco was then called, making inquiries among Americans there and staying long enough to coin a name for the picturesque mouth of the great bay—the Golden Gate, he called it. Fremont then brought his men south and had them set up camp in the vicinity of the provincial capital of Monterey.

  Naturally enough, Mexican authorities took issue with the seemingly bellicose presence of sixty armed American “explorers” insinuating themselves without invitation in their fair province. On March 5, Gen. Jose Castro, the comandante in Monterey, issued Fremont an unequivocal demand to leave California at once.

  Fremont responded with pure histrionics. He moved his men to Gavilan Peak, a small mountain in the Coastal Range, northeast of Monterey, and there he built a rough-hewn fort. Hunkering down for an Alamo-style defense, he ordered his men to erect a tall sapling on which he hoisted the American flag. It was a brazen if thoroughly half-cocked act of war, and one that could well have gotten his men slaughtered in the face of the thousands of soldiers Castro could easily have organized. Fremont wrote to the American consul in Monterey, in a melodramatic and almost comically dishonest explanation of his actions: “We have in no wise done wrong to the people or the authorities of the country, and if we are hemmed in and assaulted, we will die every man of us, under the Flag of our country.”

  General Castro issued a passionate proclamation to his people urging them to “lance the ulcer” of the American invasion. He began to muster a response, and in the fields below Gavilan Peak there were rumblings of an imminent battle. In two days Fremont seemed to come to his senses and realized this was a standoff he could not win, one that would only result in certain death and dubious martyrdom. Perhaps Carson injected a note of sanity into his commander’s thinking. Conveniently for Fremont, his hastily erected flagpole tumbled to the ground on March 9, and he apparently took the soiling of the flag as a bad omen: “Thinking I had remained as long as the occasion required, I took advantage of the accident to say to the men that this was an indication for us to move camp.”

  So ended his defiant (and short-lived) stand at Gavilan Peak, the un-Alamo. Fremont slinked away to the safety of the north again, following the course of the Sacramento. By April he had found his way into Oregon and halted on the southern shores of Klamath Lake, where for a time he resumed his role as explorer while keeping a weather eye on California. He seemed to be stalling for time, hovering within striking distance, waiting for something to break.

  And then something did. Out of the forest stepped a stranger named Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, bearing cryptic messages from Washington. He was a gimlet-eyed Marine from New Jersey, sickly but irascible and quite arrogant.

  The trek Gillespie had taken to reach this lakeside wilderness has to rank as one of the great solo courier missions in history. He had left Washington in October of the previous year after having met with President Polk and other government officials, including the secretary of the navy, George Bancroft. He took a steamship from New York City down to Veracruz, Mexico. While on board he committed to memory the texts of his most sensitive dispatches and then destroyed the original documents. From Veracruz, he traveled inland to Mexico City, assuming various disguises and taking copious notes on the turbulent political climate and the nation’s disposition toward war.

  By December, Gillespie reached Mazatlán, on the west coast of Mexico, and boarded an American whaling ship bound for Hawaii—the Sandwich Islands, as they were then known. From Honolulu he made an about-face, sailing east toward California in an American man-of-war. His ship hove into Monterey in April, and he slipped ashore posing as a merchant. After meeting with the American consul there, Thomas Oliver Larkin, he quietly pushed inland to the Sacramento River, wending his way north along the river until he caught Fremont’s scent.

  Gillespie, it seemed, was Polk’s far-flung secret agent, not just a messenger but someone who had been given considerable discretion to improvise decisions on the ground. History does not know precisely what his dispatches said, or precisely what oral information might have been lodged in his head. Neither Gillespie nor Fremont ever came clean on this question. It remains one of the imponderables of American history just what Fremont knew, when he knew it—and what he chose to ignore.

  This much is clear: Polk and others in Washington were worried about California, and they wanted Fremont to return there posthaste to help ensure that the coveted province fell into American hands while simultaneously making certain the British did not try to seize it for themselves.

  This fear was not entirely unfounded. England’s interest in California dated all the way back to 1579, the year Sir Francis Drake came ashore somewhere north of present-day San Francisco and claimed “Nova Albion,” as he called it, for the British crown. In 1846 the British were well-ensconced in Oregon. Their ships prowled the Pacific coast of California, and officials in Mexico City were offering to sell California to England in exchange for a war loan. In addition, an Irish priest named Eugene McNamara had secured Mexican permission for a curious scheme (never to reach fruition) that would have brought over boatloads of Catholic immigrants from English-held Ireland to start a new utopian colony in Southern California. Through official and unofficial channels, then, Britain was certainly intrigued by California—the question was how far it was willing to go to antagonize the Americans.

  Fremont stayed up talking with Gillespie and reading his dispatches in the flickering firelight. War with Mexico had already broken out, and plans for the grand march of the Army of the West were under way, but Gillespie did not—could not—know that yet; such was the snail’s pace of communication then that it would be another month before anyone in California heard the news.

  It was perhaps a measure of the national arrogance that in the flushed excitemen
t over the possible intrigues of England and Mexico and the course of empire, the Americans forgot about the other inhabitants of the region—the Indians all around them. Fremont was so preoccupied that he neglected to post a watchman that night.

  But by the time he drifted off to sleep, Fremont had already made up his mind which path he would take. He later wrote, “The information through Gillespie had absolved me from my duty as an explorer, and I was left to my duty as an officer of the American Army with the future authoritative knowledge that…to obtain possession of California was the chief object of the President.” Fremont said he now fully appreciated that “the men who understood the future of our country, and who ruled its destinies, regarded the California coast as the boundary fixed by nature to round off our national domain.”

  Chapter 12: WE WILL CORRECT ALL THIS

  On August 14, 1846, two days after the Navajo raid on Las Vegas, General Kearny marched with his Army of the West into the town’s central plaza, dismounted from his bay charger, and demanded that the mayor, or alcalde, join him in addressing a milling crowd of several hundred shocked villagers.

  This was the first village of any size that Kearny’s army had encountered, and he wanted to set a certain tone. The people of Las Vegas were fascinated by the Americans, but also afraid. The women cowered in the shadowy edges of the square, drawn up in their shawls and rebozos, some of them nervously smoking cornhusk cigarettes, while the men in their brightly colored serapes and glazed sombreros pushed forward into the open light of the plaza. (Susan Magoffin, who passed through town a few days later, described the Las Vegans as “wild looking strangers” who “constantly stared” and “swarmed around me like bees…some of the little ones in a perfect state of nudity.”) The village dogs barked incessantly, and pigs could be heard snuffling in their sties, but otherwise the town was silent, the people waiting to hear what the American general had to say.