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

by Hampton Sides

  Soon the Missourians were approached by thirty braves wearing eagle feathers and helmets fashioned from the skinned heads of mountain lions. Jacob Robinson, a volunteer who kept a thorough, perceptive journal of this historic first meeting between the American military and Navajos, thought these men looked like formidable warriors, but their intentions appeared to be peaceful. They were “all well-mounted on beautiful horses,” Robinson said, “and had been sent forward to guide us to the heart of their country. They were very active in all their movements, mounting and dismounting their horses in an instant.”

  With them were ten Navajo women “dressed in splendid Indian attire and fine figured blankets.” Robinson found the Navajo women beautiful, with small, delicate feet, long black hair, and brass bracelets jangling on their arms. Impressed with their equestrian skills, he found “the one sex apparently as good at riding as the other…The women of this tribe seem to have equal rights with the men, managing their own business and trading as they see fit; saddling their own horses, and letting their husbands saddle theirs.”

  The following morning these Navajos led Reid’s party forward, and as they rode deeper into the Diné country, more and more locals joined the procession. By the end of the day, however, Reid’s hosts informed him that Narbona’s camp was still another day away. Suspicious but grateful for their seeming hospitality, Reid decided to risk it and continue on. By now the parade of curious Navajos had swelled to several hundred.

  After the third day of riding the Diné guides said they still hadn’t reached their destination, that Narbona’s outfit was yet a ways off. Reid now feared a trap but realized he had come too far to turn around now—he was utterly at the Navajos’ mercy. This was, Reid said, “the most critical situation in which I ever found myself placed—with only thirty men in the very centre of the most savage and proverbially treacherous people on the continent.”

  As Reid’s volunteers pitched camp on the afternoon of October 18, they realized that they were now surrounded by thousands of Navajo. And then to their horror, they discovered that their horses were nowhere to be seen. The Navajos said they had turned them out to graze in a meadow five miles distant and promised to return them when they were needed. Now the Americans were not only encircled, they had no means of escape. They felt like captives—and maybe they were. The situation was, Reid said, “eminently precarious,” and he found it distasteful to have to put “such great confidence in the honesty of…these notorious horse stealers.” He and his men sat glumly in the sinking October sun, trying hard to keep their faces from registering fear. “To have showed any thing like suspicion,” thought Missouri volunteer John Hughes, “would have been insulting to the Indians’ pride and wounding to their feelings. It was safer to risk the chances of treachery than to use caution which would serve but to provoke.”

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, Narbona rode into view. The old man was in terrible shape, obviously in great pain and just barely propped on his horse. His camp was only a few miles away, it turned out, but it seemed a matter of pride for him to be initially seen on a horse—and for him to ride the last distance to greet Reid rather than have the visitor come to him. Narbona had white hair down to his shoulders, and his tall, lanky frame was wrapped in his finest animal skins and polished jewels. He was a giant man, standing more than six-feet six-inches tall in his prime, but his body was considerably hunched and twisted by old age. Captain Reid could tell that although Narbona was “held in great reverence by his tribe,” he was now “a mere skeleton of a man, being completely prostrated by rheumatism.” Reid was amazed and faintly repulsed by Narbona’s clawlike fingernails, which he estimated to be nearly two inches long and sharp enough to serve as “formidable weapons.”

  Someone helped the old headman from his horse, and Reid and Narbona sat down for a long talk, through a Spanish translator, about the recent spate of thefts along the Rio Grande. The captain liked Narbona despite his odd style of manicure, and assessed the leader to be “a mild, amiable man.” Narbona said that he was impressed by all that the Americans had done in Santa Fe in such a short time, and that he was ready to meet with Doniphan and hold a council. The meeting would be held a month away at a place well known to the Navajos called Bear Springs. Reid judged Narbona to be so ill that he thought himself not long for this world and therefore wished to leave a legacy as a diplomat.

  “Though he had been a warrior himself,” the captain said, “he was very anxious before his death to secure for his people a peace with all their old enemies—as well as with us, the ‘New Men,’ as he called us.”

  Some of the other Navajo leaders spoke their minds, and most of them seemed to agree with Narbona: It was time for peace. Robinson records that a headman came forward to declare that he had something special to show Captain Reid. It was a treaty, he said, one that their forefathers had made with American leaders sometime in the distant past. “Seven hundred winters ago,” he said with much solemnity and then brought forth a large roll of buckskins that he “commenced unrolling, taking off skin after skin.” At last, writes Robinson, the headman “came to a blanket, which he proceeded to unfold” and there lay the precious document carefully preserved inside. “With a grunt,” the chief handed the piece of paper to Reid’s interpreter. Upon inspection, however, the “treaty” turned out to be nothing but a yellowed receipt from an American trader—an old bill of sale.

  Reid’s men all erupted in laughter at this odd farce, and then there was a long, awkward moment as the translator tried to explain. It was not altogether clear whether the headman had been spoofed or was himself spoofing—and if it was the latter, then what the point of the joke might have been. Something surely was lost in translation. Robinson writes that “when the chief was informed that the treaty had nothing to do with us, he tucked it away, its value having apparently departed.”

  Then, according to a Diné account of the meeting, a woman rose to speak. She was one of Narbona’s three wives, and the sole woman present at the council. She spoke only in Navajo so that the translator, and thus Captain Reid and his men, could not understand her.

  Narbona’s wife surveyed the encampment and said she was confused. There were very few of these Americans present, she said, scarcely more than twenty-five. On the other hand, there were several thousand Navajos. These bilagaana would be pitifully easy to overpower, she suggested. Then she adopted a shrill tone: Why are you men being such cowards? Why not fall upon these uninvited guests right now and kill every one of them?

  Narbona and his wife began to argue about the merits of this proposition. One imagines Reid and his men watching innocently, their heads swiveling as they tried to follow the spirited repartee while remaining oblivious to its deathly import.

  Then Narbona angrily told his wife to sit down. What did she know about it? She had not been to Santa Fe, she had not seen their armies. These men here were just messengers, behind them were many thousands more. They had come from beyond the buffalo plains and had conquered Santa Fe without firing a shot. If they were provoked, the New Men could surely obliterate the Diné.

  No, he insisted. These bilagaana were not to be harmed, but lavished with Navajo hospitality.

  After Captain Reid and Narbona finished their talk, the Diné suddenly seemed in a mood to celebrate. Music erupted in the camp. The warriors stashed their bows in the limbs of a cottonwood tree and began to dance.

  Other Navajos descended on the Americans in friendly curiosity, eager to inspect the American clothes and goods—and to barter for their buckles, buttons, forks, straps, lockets, and books. Said Robinson: “The principal chiefs continually exhorted them to come away and not molest us, but we found it impossible to keep the Indians from our encampment. There was almost a continual trading going on between our men and the Indians—a tin cup for a buckskin, a small piece of tobacco for a butcher knife.”

  The Missouri volunteers eventually traded off most of their clothes, so that in due time, Robinson said, “we had dressed
ourselves pretty nearly in the Indian style.” Reid noted that the Navajos were “delighted to see our men adopting their costume” and soon the confab took on “much pleasurable excitement.”

  The Diné seemed intrigued by anything metal—weapons especially. “They were curious to examine our guns,” wrote Robinson, “and were astonished when shown the properties of a revolver. One of our men wore a watch, which excited great attention; on placing it to their ears they would start as from a snake.”

  By late afternoon the Navajo drums began to pound and the piñon bonfires crackled and the scent of roast mutton hung heavy in the air. It seemed that the Missourians and their guests were becoming fast friends. Reid’s men were fascinated by the language of the Navajo—with its thousand finicky inflections and throaty pauses. Through clumsy bouts of translation they began to get a vague idea of the Diné’s sense of humor, their unslakable appetite for teasing and puns, their delight in any incongruous or absurd situation. Everywhere about the camp the Navajo were lost in traditional amusements—broad-jumping, stone-throwing, archery contests, stick dice. It was as though they were throwing a spontaneous open-air festival for the Americans’ benefit.

  Reid’s men could see that these spirited people, safe in their own domain, were happy, open, and proud. They were at the height of their power, enjoying the fruits of a particularly successful season of raids. John Hughes described the scene as “truly romantic. Contemplate five hundred dancers in the hollow recesses of the mountains, with the music of shells and timbrels, giving way to the most extravagant joy, and a band of thirty Americans, armed with martial accoutrements, mingling in the throng!”

  Jacob Robinson felt thoroughly at home and almost forgot that he and his comrades were more than a hundred miles inside sketchy territory with their mounts nowhere in sight. It didn’t matter—they were captivated, smitten almost, by their hosts. They abandoned all sense of caution. They gnawed greasy lamb shanks together, they fondled each other’s weapons, they danced and sang, they even swapped clothes. The first American encounter with the Diné had become a love-in.

  Later, Robinson looked back on all this naïve revelry with a sort of what-were-we-thinking incredulity. “It is astonishing,” he said, “how soon our confidence in each other was almost complete. We were in the midst of a desert, surrounded by a nation of powerful savages, whose numbers were great, and whose friendship was doubtful; who had us completely in their power and who might be treacherous. [But] we mingled in their dance…and they appeared much pleased at our coming to their country.”

  All in all, Robinson was deeply impressed with the Navajo as a people, finding them “the most enlightened tribe of wild Indians” he had yet encountered on the continent. “They are of good stature,” he wrote, “and of fairer complexion than any Indians I have ever seen. They are well provided with wool and skins and may be considered wealthy.” Robinson was intrigued by the Diné’s woven blankets, which they “look upon with pride, as a badge of national distinction and superiority.”

  Watching the Navajos fuss over their flocks and woolen goods, Captain Reid struck a comparison to the nomadic shepherds of the Mongolian steppes—an analogy that would crop up frequently in subsequent accounts by Americans trying to put an Old World frame of reference on these unfamiliar people so uniquely tied to their sheep. “They are entirely pastoral,” Reid said, “and in their habits very similar to the Tartars.” Above all, the captain observed, the Navajos were excellent horsemen. “These lords of the mountains,” Reid wrote, “may be said to live on horseback. They pay great attention to the breeding of their horses, and think scarcely less of them than do the Arabians.”

  At one point during the afternoon a rabbit bolted from the underbrush and a group of Navajos on horseback immediately gave chase. Scores of other riders joined in, and, according to Robinson, “the plain was soon covered with these mounted warriors, with their feathers streaming in the wind, their arms raised as for conflict; some riding one way and some another; and in the midst of these exciting scenes they indulged a shout of triumph, as they succeeded in capturing their prey.”

  The Missourians must have relished their last night in Navajo country. At great risk they had tasted an alien culture and completed their mission without incident. It was learned that the American horses were safe and well fed and ready to be saddled up at dawn. They would leave in the morning, and Narbona would even provide them with an escort from the Navajo lands.

  Through their dumb luck and blundering good nature, Reid’s volunteers had succeeded in not getting themselves killed. These young farm boys seemed to believe they could do anything, go anywhere, and not get hurt; the ancient cycles of violence did not quite pertain to them.

  Chapter 25: THE DEVIL’S TURNPIKE

  With Kit Carson now guiding them, General Kearny’s one hundred dragoons rose from the Rio Grande on October 7, 1846, and worked their way west until they struck the Gila River and then followed its tortuous canyons through land that was increasingly barren and bleached. As October melted into November, they passed from the realm of the Apache into territory of unknown tribes: the Wolf Eaters, the Dirty Fellows, the Club Indians, the Pine Forest Dwellers, the Tremblers, the Albinos, the Fools. Such were the informal names gleaned from Spanish interpreters and hastily copied down in official American journals. These remote tribes had never seen Americans, had seldom seen Spaniards, and many were obviously terrified by these strange new warriors boring into their midst. The Tremblers had acquired their name, according to Lt. William Emory, “from their emotions at meeting the whites.” Their shaky chief spoke “in a tongue resembling more the bark of a mastiff than the words of a human being.”

  Carson and Kearny rode together much of the way—the scout in his greasy buckskins, the general in his proud dragoon blues. Fellow Missourians, they shared many friends back home. With laconic good humor, Carson tried to make conversation as they went along, but much of the time he quietly sulked. It wasn’t the hard monotony of having to cover, in reverse, the same sun-scoured terrain he had so recently crossed. Nor was it simply that he missed Josefa, nor the nagging distaste he still felt for surrendering to Fitzpatrick the messages that Fremont had formally entrusted to him. He had let go of all those concerns back on the Rio Grande.

  Mainly, Carson’s stewing had to do with the transcontinental adventure he’d been denied. In all his wide travels, he had never been to the East Coast. Carson had been looking forward to seeing his nation’s capital. He was under no illusions that he belonged to that closed world of books and stylish clothes and drawing room manners. Yet he wanted to meet the well-placed men and women who had effectively served as his sponsors, sending him on the errands that had made him nationally famous, writing about him, broadcasting his exploits: Not only President Polk, but also Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, and the senator’s daughter Jessie Benton Fremont as well as Secretary of State Buchanan, Secretary of War Marcy, and various people connected with the Topographical Engineers.

  Carson, who had in effect been a field agent of Manifest Destiny, wanted to meet its prime movers.

  The competitor in Carson had also been intrigued by the notion of making a sixty-day trip. To cross the continent in two months’ time loomed as a kind of athletic grail. Sixty days was what he had promised Fremont he could do—coast to coast in sixty days! The feat he had proposed hung in the air as a mythic goal of doubtful attainability. In 1846 the quickest way to get information or goods from one coast to the other was by ship, via the antipodal tip of Tierra del Fuego—or alternately, to Panama, then overland to another ship waiting on the far shore of the isthmus.

  Carson was interested in blazing the continental overland route, thereby proving its merits. He had been right on schedule, by his estimation. Carson’s party had spent twenty-six days getting to New Mexico from Los Angeles, but from then on the going would have been easier, riding the well-trod Santa Fe Trail northeast to the Missouri River, then churning by steamboat to St. Louis, then arrowi
ng the final stretches to Washington by rail and stagecoach on good wagon roads.

  Now here he was, ingloriously loping along a slow trail with a middle-aged general who’d pointed him toward a land that had already been conquered. Carson did not like it a bit.

  In fact, Carson’s now-dated information was all wrong; California was not conquered. Since he had left Los Angeles with Fremont’s triumphant dispatches, the territory had been convulsed by an insurrection. The Americans had been kicked out of Los Angeles, out of Santa Barbara, out of every other coastal settlement south of Monterey. The Mexicans, outraged by the harsh terms clamped on them by Commodore Robert Stockton—including curfews and arbitrary arrests without a hearing—had risen up and attacked American positions. In the words of one historian, the revolt had “blossomed like a crown fire leaping through mountain timber.” A manifesto had been circulated among the citizens: “We, all the inhabitants of the department of California, as members of the great Mexican nation, declare that it is and has been our wish to belong to her alone. Therefore, the intrusive authorities appointed by the invading forces of the United States are held as null and void. All North Americans being foes of Mexico, we swear not to lay down our arms until we see them ejected from Mexican soil.”

  Now the reversal was nearly complete. The proud Californians again had the upper hand. The only place the Americans still held was San Diego, where Commodore Stockton had a few warships anchored in the bay. But the Mexicans there had him so thoroughly pinned down that he could scarcely come ashore.

  General Kearny, with his confident guide and his miserably small and haggard force, was limping toward a trap.