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

by Hampton Sides

  To his credit, Carson pursued an investigation into Blakeney’s actions, and the officer was soon dismissed, with an examining surgeon claiming that the unpopular major suffered from a “nervous debility” and a bad case of indigestion. When Carson described the Blakeney incident to Carleton in his next report, the general promptly shot back a curt letter: “You are right in believing that I do not wish to have Indians destroyed who are willing to come in. Nor will you permit an Indian prisoner once fairly in your custody to be killed.” However, Carson was not to let this minor setback deter him from the main task at hand—nor was the colonel to slacken the ferocity of his rhetoric when he next encountered Navajos willing to talk. Carleton reminded Carson to tell the Navajos that “you have deceived us too often and robbed and murdered our people too long to trust you again at large in your country…. This war shall be pursued against you if it takes years, until you cease to exist or move. There can be no other talk on the subject.”

  In the fall, Carson embarked on two more ambitious scouts, but these, too, were seeming failures. Mules and horses collapsed in alarming numbers while others were cleverly stolen in the night by unseen Navajo rustlers. His Ute warriors deserted upon learning that General Carleton would not permit them to keep the booty or slaves they captured along the way. At one point Carson came very close to catching the great warrior Manuelito—or at least a man described by the Hopis as Manuelito—but the prize refugee slipped away, living with his people on secret stores of corn he had presciently stashed throughout the Navajo lands.

  After a series of smaller scouts in late November produced similarly underwhelming results, Carson became truly fed up and not a little embarrassed. He was not a man used to failing, certainly not on this scale. One can sense the undertones of rising frustration in his letters to Carleton. He wrote the general that given the sorry state of his horses, he did not think he could continue to prosecute the campaign through the winter. He thought it more prudent to wait “until the weather opens sufficiently” before resuming “extended operations.” At times, it sounded as though he was giving up.

  And in fact, he was—at least temporarily. Carson formally requested a two-month leave of absence that would begin on December 15. He wanted to see Josefa, who was approaching her due date. From the field, Carson had been sending her dictated letters whenever he could. One of them survives:

  Beloved Wife—

  Do not worry about me, because with God’s help we shall see each other again. I charge you above all not to get weary of caring for my children, and to give each one a little kiss in my name…. I remain begging God that I return in good health to be with you until death.

  —Your husband who loves you and wishes to see you more than to write to you

  In his request for a leave, Carson did not explicitly mention his concern about Josefa’s pregnancy; he said only to Carleton that he needed to attend to “some private business of importance.” In any case, Carleton denied Carson’s request, claiming, “I have not the authority to grant you a leave.” Winter was not the season to relax pressure on the Navajos, the general insisted. “Now while the snow is deep is the true time to make an impression on the tribe.” Carleton ended his note with a prissy addendum: “Please forward no more applications for leaves of absence.”

  Carleton was willing to cut a quid pro quo deal with his colonel, however. Carson could come home for a brief visit, the general said, “as soon as you have secured one hundred captive Navajo men, women, and children.” It was an incentive package that captured the irritating paternalism lodged so deeply within Carleton’s personality: Perform your task, and then you can go see your wife.

  But there was one more caveat. Through all his exhausting scouts, Carson had carefully stayed away from the stronghold of Navajo country, Canyon de Chelly. Back in September he had paused at the tantalizing western mouth of the canyon, but steadfastly refused to go in. Perhaps he was daunted by the scale of the chasm itself—which he regarded as “stupendous” and “impregnable”—or by the considerable logistics that would be required to mount a campaign through it, something no army had ever successfully done in wartime. Perhaps he was aware of the fact that an American colonel named Dixon S. Miles, after scouting a section of the canyon in 1858, had ominously proclaimed, “No command should ever again enter it.” Whatever the reason, Canyon de Chelly was a dread subject for Carson.

  Now Carleton had other ideas. Carson would not only have to reach his quota of one hundred captives, but he would have to do it by invading Canyon de Chelly in the dead of winter—and traversing every twisted mile of it.

  Chapter 42: FORTRESS ROCK

  The Navajos knew that Carson was coming to Canyon de Chelly, perhaps even before Carson did. Or at least they assumed that he was coming. Down through the ages, all manner of enemies had trespassed into the great gorge, but usually they would slink home, bewildered by its endless mazes, having caused little harm. The 1805 massacre at The Place Where Two Fell Off was a grotesque exception the Navajos seldom spoke of—a tragedy ascribable to witchcraft, perhaps, or some violated taboo.

  In their heart of hearts the Diné had always regarded Canyon de Chelly as their last stronghold and sanctuary, the one place where they felt truly safe. When their wider world was in turmoil, when they could find no relief from pestilence or harrying foes, they had always fallen back here, to hide in the timeless folds.

  Along the floor of Canyon de Chelly grew three thousand peach trees, gnarled and scabbed with insect boreholes and now ghostly in the depths of winter, their brittle branches creaking in the wind. These orchards were the pride of the Navajos, the trees hybridized from stock dating back to the Spanish arrival in New Mexico. The succulent fruit they bore helped feed the many hundreds of clansmen who streamed in each fall for elaborate rituals; for nine consecutive nights the people renewed themselves in ceremonial chants, watching their shadows flicker on the thousand-foot-high walls, their lips and fingers sticky with the sour-sweet juice of canyon peaches.

  Not only was de Chelly a bountiful place, it was, the Diné believed, protected by supernatural powers no white man could touch. The four yei gods lived deep in the canyon, as did Spider Woman, the great Navajo goddess. Spider Woman was a lovable old crone, cryptic but wise, who gave Navajo women the gift of weaving and otherwise amused herself by inflicting harmless and often instructive mischief on her beloved people. She lived atop a nine-hundred-foot-tall pinnacle erupting from the floor of the canyon that is still known today as Spider Rock. From her commanding perch, Spider Woman surely would look out for the Navajos and protect them from any enemies who presumed to invade her realm.

  Back in the summer, when Kit Carson was leading his first campaigns across the Navajo country, the Diné who lived in the vicinity of Canyon de Chelly began to prepare themselves for the coming onslaught. Many miles inside the canyon, near an important junction of two lateral gorges, stood a massive anvil of sandstone well known to the Navajos. Fortress Rock, as it was called, soared nearly eight hundred feet and was connected to the main wall of the canyon only by a thin stone bridge sagging from centuries of erosion. To use an urban analogy, it looked rather like a natural rough draft of New York’s Flatiron Building—a thin monolithic wedge standing at the confluence of three sharply angled thoroughfares. Any stranger who happened to pass by Fortress Rock would doubtless find it impressive if not menacing, but he would scarcely imagine that a path led up its sheer walls to the tableland at its summit.

  Yet it was so: Long ago the Anasazi had chiseled a fretwork of toeholds and handholds, almost invisible, into the face of the rock. On top they had discovered that there was enough room for hundreds of people to camp. Various caves and fissures provided welcome places to hide. Scattered about the surface were pocks and bowls that functioned as cisterns to capture rainwater. Fortress Rock was protected from all sides, its parapets were invisible from the canyon floor and too distant from either canyon rim to be within arrow range.

  The A
nasazi had apparently used Fortress Rock as a secret haven to hide from their enemies; now the Navajos would do the same.

  According to Navajo oral history, the Diné met at the base of Fortress Rock sometime in the late summer and discussed what to do. “A frightened feeling had settled among the Navajo people, a feeling of danger from enemies,” says Akinabh Burbank, one of a dozen storytellers poignantly captured in a 1973 oral history. “Now they were moving into our territory to search for us and kill us all.”

  The women began to stockpile foods and supplies—smoked mutton, piñon nuts, wild potatoes, juniper berries, dried grain and peaches, blankets, and water-bearing vessels of all kinds. The men, meanwhile, made improvements to the old network of Anasazi toeholds, gouging them deeper, so that children and even elderly Navajos could safely pull themselves up. They shored up a particularly precarious passage of loose rock by building a sturdy wooden bridge. As it was related to historian David Roberts, the Navajos then scaled the last vertiginous heights by laying two trunks of ponderosa pine at sharp angles—trees they had hauled from stands in the Lukachukai Mountains, some twenty-five miles away—cutting the bark with notches to function like rungs on a ladder.

  It was a public works project of great ambition as well as peril, one that took weeks to complete. Fortress Rock had always been a formidable place, but through their efforts “this thrusting fin,” as Roberts puts it, had become “the most sovereign of hideouts, the place of ultimate refuge.”

  Now that the way up was deemed safe, the Navajos began to haul their supplies and foodstuffs to the top—everything they thought they’d need to get them through a long siege. Then, as winter closed in, the people began to assemble. “You can go to the safe place until the soldiers are gone—we still have time,” says Navajo storyteller Teddy Draper, recalling a story passed down from his grandmother. “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.

  Some accounts say Manuelito was among the faithful on Fortress Rock, although that is doubtful, because he was also said to be somewhere in the Grand Canyon at that time, and also around Navajo Mountain, and also in the vicinity of Monument Valley. Manuelito, in short, was everywhere—and nowhere—his phantomlike ubiquity made possible by his fame and his great wealth in sheep. His roving defiance was a rallying cry, a source of hope to his people.

  As December passed into January, the three hundred Navajos atop Fortress Rock tarried at their now smokeless camps and huddled in their blankets, trying to stay warm. They heard that the American soldiers had been spotted, that the enemy would arrive any day now. They made arrows and sharpened lances while keeping their ears tuned for untoward sounds down in the canyon.

  And they waited.

  Col. Kit Carson left Fort Canby on the cold, gray morning of January 6,1864. Six inches of snow powdered the ground. The nearly five hundred men under his command moved slowly, and the oxen groaned at the weight of the wagons. Most of the men were on foot, the snow crunching under their boots. They were draped in blankets or serapes, or buttoned up tight in wool greatcoats, their numb hands thrust deep in the pockets. They hated having to greet the New Year in such bleak surroundings, so far from home, in a wilderness so godforsaken. To pass the hours they invented their own battle song, a bit of doggerel that they belted out over the winter solitudes—

  Come dress your ranks, my gallant souls, a standing in a row

  Kit Carson he is waiting to crush the savage foe

  At night we meet and march o’er lofty hills of snow

  We’ll first chastise

  Then civilize

  Bold Johnny Navajo

  Colonel Carson rode up and down the column, his jaws clenched in resolve. A few days earlier Carson had assured Carleton that he had “made all the necessary arrangements to visit the Canon de Chelly” and thought Carleton would be relieved to learn that the expedition he had so long insisted upon was finally happening. “Of one thing the General may rest assured,” Carson vowed to Carleton. “Before my return, all that is connected with this canon [canyon] will cease to be a mystery. It will be thoroughly explored [with] perseverance and zeal.”

  Carson had divided his command into two units. Taking the larger contingent of 375 enlisted men and 14 officers, Carson himself would head toward the western mouth of the canyon, while a smaller party of approximately 100 New Mexico Volunteers under the command of Capt. Albert Pfeiffer would aim for the eastern end. The plan, which General Carleton played a large role in devising, called for executing a kind of pincer movement, with the two separate detachments traversing the chasm from opposite sides and reuniting somewhere in the middle. The idea was to stopper the canyon at both ends so that its denizens could not easily escape. It was a strategy, Carleton hoped, that would also allow him to achieve maximum shock value. He recognized the symbolic power that Canyon de Chelly held for the Navajos. If Carson could sweep the entire length of it, puncturing its aura of impregnability, the maneuver might demoralize the Navajos far more profoundly than the resulting casualties might suggest. In this sense, the thrust of the coming campaign was less purely military than it was psychosocial: By cutting into the soul of the nation, Carleton hoped to break the people’s collective will to fight.

  The snow was more than Carson had bargained for, however. What should have been a three-day march took six, and the oxen, already weak and straining, began to collapse. Along the way, twenty-seven of the beasts died, their hulking bodies capsizing in the drifts and soon freezing solid, their hooves pitched in the air.

  On January 12, Carson arrived at the mouth of the canyon, near the present-day town of Chinle, Arizona, and promptly sent out reconnaissance parties in various directions, both along the rims and down in the canyon itself. Sgt. Andres Herrera, with a detachment of fifty men, intercepted a band of Navajos who were attempting to escape through a side canyon. Herrera attacked and soon the vast ochre walls echoed with gunfire. Herrera’s troops killed eleven Navajo warriors and captured two women, two children, and 130 goats and sheep. The battle for Canyon de Chelly had begun.

  The next morning Carson began a more ambitious study of the south rim in preparation for his big offensive surge into the canyon, which he planned to undertake in a few days. For many miles he marched along the rim, peering down into the spectral depths, worrying over the puzzling landscape and the ease with which it could conceal snipers or ambushing parties. The idea of taking a party of men through the canyon went against his best mountain man instincts and offended his sense of caution. It looked to him like a trap.

  Carson also began to wonder where Albert Pfeiffer and his company might be. Surely Pfeiffer had reached the eastern entrance of the canyon by now and had begun marching westward. Yet as Carson and his men scoured the canyon from its southern rim, they saw no sign of him.

  Capt. Albert Pfeiffer was a colorful and somewhat tragic figure. Though a heavy drinker, he was one of Carson’s ablest officers. He had kind blue eyes and a stout build, and while he was an immigrant from the Netherlands, he had lived for some time in New Mexico and had, like Carson, married a local woman. Pfeiffer was tranquil by nature, except when he got into a tight situation. The possibility of combat threw him into a blind rage, causing him to curse wildly in Dutch and transforming him, said one contemporary, into “the most desperately courageous fighter in the West.”

  Captain Pfeiffer was still recovering from a brutal incident that had befallen
him several months earlier, down in Apache country, where he had campaigned with Carson in the Mescalero roundup. It seems that Pfeiffer suffered from some sort of skin problem—exacerbated by alcohol—that Carson repeatedly chided him about. “When will you have sense?” Carson admonished the Dutchman in a letter. “Can’t you try and quit whiskey for a little while, at least until you get your face cured? If your face ain’t well when I next see you, you had better look out.”

  To cure his dermatological malady, Pfeiffer regularly soaked in a mineral hot spring not far from an army fort where he was stationed. One bright day he and his wife were bathing in the spring when a band of Apaches set upon them. Pfeiffer was seriously wounded by an arrow and his wife was killed. Half naked, Pfeiffer somehow managed to straggle back to camp, becoming badly sunburned in the process. Some accounts have it that the murder of his wife changed Pfeiffer forever, turning him into an inveterate Indian-hater.

  Captain Pfeiffer and his company of one hundred rank and file reached the eastern end of Canyon de Chelly without incident on January 11, a day earlier than Carson entered the western end. Traveling lighter, and with most of his men on horseback, he had been able to keep a brisk pace. Pfeiffer wasted no time—he dropped down into the canyon, following the route of an ice-rimmed creek until it spilled into a deep gorge. Then he started plodding west.

  But he had entered the wrong canyon. Somehow he had skirted the main branch of Canyon de Chelly and had instead entered Canyon del Muerto, a secondary though no less awesome artery of the de Chelly complex.

  Pfeiffer blundered ahead, employing teams of sappers, equipped with pickaxes, to break trail through ice and snow. It was extremely tough going, and one of the mules bearing a particularly heavy load broke suddenly through the ice and “split completely open.” With every turn, the canyon’s multifaceted walls bulked larger, enveloping them in an eerie silence. Some men chiseled their names or the letters U.S.A. in the sandstone facades—Kilroys visible to this day. The men found it impossible not to gape at the great opiates of rock and the half-hidden ruins and petroglyphs gracing the walls. But their reveries were quickly punctured when they realized that there were Navajo warriors all around them—perched on the rim, hidden in crannies, watching every move the Americans made. Some of them rose up, Pfeiffer wrote, “and jumped about on the ledges, like Mountain Cats, hallooing at me, swearing and cursing, and threatening vengeance on my command in every variety of Spanish they were capable of mustering.”