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

by Hampton Sides

  Forty-eight years old, he was a New England Calvinist with the posture of a lamppost. There was a snap and rigor to his movements that fairly telegraphed his titanic work ethic. His sun-crisped face, hedged in a trim topiary of muttonchop sideburns, projected the intellectual pugnacity of Teddy Roosevelt. In photographic portraits, his pronounced jaw is often tensed, his teeth gritted, his lupine eyes trained on something far away, as though he were intensely preoccupied with another, better world. Carleton by all accounts liked the sound of his own voice and had much to say, enunciating with shrill precision in the flinty inflections of his native Maine.

  It can’t be said that Carleton came out of nowhere. On the contrary, he was a well-established and highly regarded officer, the cream of the frontier army. Carleton seemed to know everyone: U. S. Grant, William Sherman, John C. Fremont, George McClellan, George Crook, the whole pantheon. His wife Sophia was the niece of Gen. John Garland. As a young officer, Carleton had trained as a proud dragoon at Fort Leavenworth under the late great Stephen Watts Kearny, and it was General Kearny, that consummate soldier-student of the prairie, whom Carleton seems to have consciously emulated.

  Over his long career as a dragoon, Carleton had ridden all over the West—from Oklahoma to Utah to California—and he had dealt with countless Indian tribes. The only place he had lingered for any length of time, however, was New Mexico. For five years during the 1850s, he had been stationed at various forts in the territory, chasing Indians, protecting immigrant trains, and immersing himself in the peculiar problems of the Southwest. In those years he had seemed to hate everything about the place save its magnificent ruins. He once wrote with disgust that the local people of New Mexico were “utterly ignorant of everything beyond their corn fields and acequias” and noted a “universal proclivity for rags, dirt, and filthiness. The national expression of quien sabe (who knows?) appears deeply written on every face.”

  Carleton believed that the Navajo conflict was the largest reason for New Mexico’s depressing backwardness; the wars sapped resources, rendered enterprise impractical, made travel unsafe, produced a perpetual cycle of enslavement, and gave life in the territory a quality of chronic despair. He recognized that if slavery was the underlying issue of the Civil War as it was being fought in the East, then slavery was also the underlying issue here. As a New England Calvinist from an abolitionist state, he could not countenance the concept of human chattel. There was no hope for any advancement in New Mexico until the citizens confronted what he called “this great evil.”

  He had been away for five years, and during his absence he’d thought long and hard about how to solve “the Navajo problem.” Now, for better or worse, New Mexico would experience the second coming of James Henry Carleton.

  To reach the territory, he had marched all the way from California, leading a column of fifteen hundred soldiers and miner volunteers. He had come with the original intention of helping Canby repulse the invading Texans. By the time he reached the Rio Grande, however, the main action was over. Carleton and his California column did successfully flush the territory’s southern precincts of avowed Confederates; he instituted martial law and reclaimed Tucson, Mesilla, and other important southern towns for the Union. But he and his men were sorely disappointed to have missed out on the laurels of real battle.

  Then, in September 1862, he was named commander of the 9th Military Department, and Carleton rode north to assume his office in Santa Fe.

  For the next four years he would preside over New Mexico virtually as a dictator. But he was an uncommon kind of despot: a Puritan schoolmaster with a zeal for social engineering, a martinet of the cod liver oil–dispensing, this-is-for-your-own-good variety. He was a utopian in an odd sense, and a Christian idealist. Carleton saw a perfect world on the horizon but could not imagine the real-world horrors that would be required to reach it. C. L. Sonnichsen, a historian of the Southwest Indian wars, wrote that if Carleton had “never had to function as God in a war-torn and distracted country, his determination and organizing ability might have been put to better use. He had intelligence and foresight, driving energy, and a consuming ambition to do well. His trouble was that he could not admit an error, or take a backward step.”

  It was his abiding fascination with Indians, with their dying habits and vanishing worlds, that originally brought Carleton to the West.

  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.

  The time of Carleton’s youth was a fragile period in the history of eastern Maine. During the War of 1812, British forces had occupied most of Maine east of the Penobscot River and annexed the territory to New Brunswick. Much of it was an unknown, blackfly-ridden wilderness that had never been properly surveyed and had been in dispute since the Revolutionary War. Like many other American loyalists, the Carleton family became exiles, forced to abandon their original home on what became British-held Moose Island. All through his boyhood the lingering boundary dispute remained a volatile subject, and clouds of war constantly threatened (the border was not finally settled, in fact, until 1842). Some have speculated that it was Carleton’s memory of this unpleasant experience from his adolescence—of his family having to endure a bitter, protracted, worrisome dispute along what amounted to a wild frontier—that gave him later in life such an urgent impatience to solve the Navajo problem with clean, stark finality. Whether by constitution or experience, Carleton was a man who hated social messiness.

  Apart from the boundary dispute and the early passing of his father (the boy was only fifteen when John Carleton died), James Henry’s childhood seems to have been happy. Carleton grew up as a “salt-water Yankee,” spending his summers along the Penobscot River and the rocky coastline, fussing with boats, hunting for clams, fishing for quoddies. His friend David Barker (who later became known as the “Robert Burns of Maine”) wrote a poem to Carleton about their adolescent years together that captures the mood of those times:

  When happiness lived up this way

  When feet could stroll and hearts could beat

  And never feel fatigue

  Those times we swam and fished and sailed

  Upon old Kenduskeag

  Yet even back in those salad days, Carleton vaguely yearned for the Western frontier and sensed that his destiny lay there. Though his formal schooling was shaky, he had ambitions to be a novelist, and like many aspiring writers of his generation, he was drawn to the narratives of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and other American authors who made the frontier a central theme. Carleton was a tireless composer of letters and seems to have made a habit of writing to prominent writers, seeking advice. When he was twenty-four he wrote a letter to Charles Dickens, in which he professed his literary ambitions and his desire to write stories about the “aborigines” of the West. In the letter, he suggested that if he could not make a go of his career in America, he was considering moving to England and trying his hand there. He then somewhat impertinently asked if he might come to London and call on the great novelist as a friend.

  To his shock, Dickens actually replied.

  The letter, dated March 27, 1839, is quite lengthy. In it, Dickens vehemently suggests that Carleton by all means stay in the United States and write. “I cannot but think that good tales—especially such as you describe, connected with the customs and history of America’s aboriginal inhabitants who every day become more interesting as their numbers diminish—would surely find patrons and readers in her great cities.” Adopting a tone of paternal kindness cut with just a hint of don’t-quit-your-day-job exasperation, Dickens offers very sensible advice: “Satisfy yourself beyond all doubt that you are qualified for the course to which you now aspi
re…and try to achieve something in your own land before you venture on a strange one.” Finally, Dickens says that if Carleton came to London, he may or may not call on him as a friend—it was a question he simply could not answer. “To pledge myself to find a friend in a man whom I have never seen and with the whole tenor of whose thoughts and feelings I am unacquainted—as I find them expressed in one enthusiastic letter—would be to prostitute the term.”

  Ironically, even as Dickens’s letter of advice was steaming across the Atlantic, young Carleton was preparing to fight against the countrymen of the famous novelist. Like thousands of Maine youths, Carleton joined the militia to engage a mounting force of English-Canadian troops in what became known as the Aroostook War. This conflict was only the latest chapter of the Northeastern boundary controversy, a crisis that proved bloodless in the end but gave Carleton his first taste of military life.

  That same year, Carleton joined the regular U.S. Army and trained at the Cavalry School of Practice, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 1840 he married Henrietta Tracy Loring, a fair young Boston Brahmin with beautiful brown curls. The couple was married only a year, however: In 1841, while stationed with her husband at Fort Gibson on the Arkansas River, Henrietta died, probably of malaria. Her body was shipped back to Massachusetts and buried in Cambridge.

  Racked with grief, the widowed Carleton threw himself into his army career. Perhaps because of his prickly personality and his sometimes overzealous desire to fulfill the letter of military protocol, he had a penchant for getting into soldierly altercations—one of which resulted in a brief suspension and reassignment. He was a difficult man to deal with, the sort of man who would not back down.

  True to his correspondence with Dickens, Carleton remained fascinated by American Indians and carefully documented his prairie experiences in a series of logbooks that were later published. At Fort Croghan, near Council Bluffs, Carleton was intrigued to interview a tribe of Plains Indians who had a grotesque habit of grinding up the dried remains of their enemies into a lucky powder, which they stored in their medicine bags. He also met a Potawatomi warrior who ate the heart of one of his foes. “Make heap strong,” Carleton says the Indian told him. “Like him very much—great medicine.”

  On the Missouri River, in October 1843, Carleton befriended James Audubon, who was then traveling the West studying and sketching quadrupeds. In his journal, the great naturalist called Carleton “a fine companion and a perfect gentleman” and presented him with a signed plate from a recent study of the Oregon flying squirrel. Carleton, in turn, gave Audubon a bearskin and a fine set of elk horns.

  Carleton’s years as a young frontier soldier were by all accounts his happiest. Among his many adventures, he accompanied a unit of dragoons, led by Colonel Kearny, on a march of more than two thousand miles from Fort Leavenworth to the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains; the young officer loved every step of the odyssey. Carleton’s logbooks are filled with paeans to life in the frontier army. In one passage he rhapsodizes about “the white tents standing in long rows over the green grass, the blue smoke curling upward, the athletic figures of the soldiers intent upon their duties…surrounded by nature in all her purity…on fields no plough has ever furrowed, in groves no axe has ever sullied.” Returning to Fort Leavenworth after a long campaign, Carleton writes that all he can think about is returning to the trail, noting that his heart “would pant with impatience to mount and be away again” with his “staunch and cheerful comrades, the roasted buffalo ribs, the broiled venison and the coffee, the sociable pipe and the accompanying story, joke and song.”

  But even his pristine prairie was starting to see major changes. Along the Oregon Trail, he marveled at the dusty spectacle of the wagon trains—so many hopeful immigrants pushing West, “all going to the other side of the mountains to bury their bones there and never return.” In one passage from his logbooks, Carleton fairly swelled with a national—even racial—pride at the seemingly endless caravans plodding along: “Judging from the way they go on, by the time the leading company reaches the valley of the Columbia, there will be a broad stream of the real Anglo-Saxon stock stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a regular Life-river traveling at a steady three-knot current.”

  The Mexican War abruptly ended Carleton’s frontier idyll, and he soon found himself fighting under Gen. Zachary Taylor in Monterrey. It was a very different war against a very different enemy. The light and supple dragoon tactics he had honed under Kearny proved irrelevant; in most of the action Carleton witnessed, the fighting was pitched and concentrated, and heavy artillery carried the day.

  The battle of Buena Vista, the engagement Carleton fought in and subsequently wrote about, was a turning point of the war—quite possibly the turning point. For two murderous days in February 1847, in a mountain pass not far from Saltillo, Taylor’s force of 5,000 Americans managed to rout an army of 14,000 Mexicans serving under Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the phoenix-like, one-legged generalissimo. In his combat narrative, Carleton describes the morning of the battle as “unusually bright and clear,” with the sunlight “seeming to cover with flashing diamonds the burnished Mexican weapons…and the fluttering pennons of what appeared to be a countless forest of lances.” Carleton vividly recalls the curious quiet in the pass, and then the sudden fury of the battle’s opening fusillade: “The sharp rattle of musketry, the sullen reply of the rifle and the bugle-calls, intermingled with the shouts of those who were struggling high up the mountain…the rushing sound of the balls as they tore up the ground in the midst of us, or went screaming through the air—all will come back to memory until [we] shall be old men.”

  The gruff General Taylor is supposed to have acted so coolly during the heat of battle (or so a popular story went) that when he spotted a small cannonball hurtling directly toward him, he nonchalantly rose in his stirrups to let the ball pass between his derriere and his saddle. That one was doubtless apocryphal, but the general did became famous for a command he casually issued during the battle to a young artilleryman, Braxton Bragg. Grumbling in his phlegmy voice, Taylor asked the gunner to pack the howitzers with more lead shot. “Maybe,” the general suggested, “you should give ’em a little more grape, Captain Bragg.”

  Another artillery captain who made a name for himself on the battlefield at Buena Vista was the young John M. Washington, who would, a few years later, put his ordnance acumen to more dubious use in the absurd shelling of the aged Narbona and other fleeing Navajos during the first expedition into Navajo country.

  Santa Anna’s defeat at Buena Vista marked the beginning of the end of his spirited homeland defense. Leaving their campfires burning, he and his tattered army retreated to Mexico City in semidisgrace and prepared for the inevitable American onslaught. It was said that he brandished his prosthetic cork leg over his head when troops questioned his dedication to the republic.

  Many of the officers who fought at Buena Vista—including John Wool, Jefferson Davis, and the aforementioned Braxton Bragg—would swiftly rise in rank and apply the lessons of their hard-won experience, with brutal efficiency, on the battlefields of the Civil War. As for the commanding general, the battle of Buena Vista made Zachary Taylor an almost immediate national hero and catapulted him to the White House with the pitch-perfect campaign slogan “A Little More Grape.”

  The battle also cemented James Carleton’s career: The able young lieutenant was cited for gallantry and double-promoted to major. Contracting a serious illness—possibly dysentery—he was sent back to Washington on sick leave, and it was during his convalescence there and in Boston that he started writing about his war experiences while courting and marrying his second wife, Sophia Garland Wolfe. Carleton’s book, The Battle of Buena Vista, published by Harper Brothers in 1848, was well received by the popular press and closely read by War Department officials as well as President Taylor himself. Mostly the book is a nitty-gritty battle narrative, clear and concise if a little purple, but at times Carleton lapses into passages of gro
ss hyperbole. “When all is carefully considered,” he writes in his gushy conclusion, “the Battle of Buena Vista will probably be regarded as the greatest ever fought on this continent; and it may be doubted if there can be found one that surpasses it in the history of any nation or of any age.”

  Glorious though he made it sound, the Mexican War was really only a brief interlude for Carleton, an aberration in a career almost exclusively spent fighting, policing, and studying Indians. He gladly returned to the life he loved as a frontier dragoon and soon found himself stationed in New Mexico. It was there, during the early 1850s, that Major Carleton struck up a lasting and improbable friendship with Kit Carson.

  Their first meeting was occasioned by an incident that befell Carson on the Santa Fe Trail in the summer of 1851. Carson was returning from a trip to Missouri to retrieve his now sixteen-year-old daughter Adaline and bring her back to New Mexico to live. He and Adaline were traveling in a small party of about a dozen people that included several Mexican trail hands, Carson’s niece Susan, and her new husband, a young man named Jesse Nelson.

  Somewhere in western Kansas, the party had a sticky encounter with a village of hostile Cheyenne Indians. Carson was confident at first that trouble could be averted; for he knew the southern Cheyennes well—his second wife had been a member of the tribe—and the Cheyennes were closely tied, by blood and friendship, to the Bent clan. What Carson didn’t know was that this particular band had recently been “chastised” by a column of U.S. Army soldiers. Apparently an inebriated American officer had publicly flogged a Cheyenne for some minor infraction, and the man’s whole band, which like many Plains tribes did not countenance this sort of physical violence outside of battle, considered the punishment an unforgivable insult. (Days later, when Carson learned about the flogging, he instantly understood its cultural repercussions; in his autobiography he sneers with contempt at the perpetrator: “I presume courage was oozing from his fingertips, and since the Indians were in his power, he wished to be relieved of such a commodity.”)