Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  One day when Kit was four, Lindsey Carson went out with a small group of men to survey a piece of land when they were ambushed by Sac and Fox Indians. In the attack, Kit’s father was nearly killed. The stock of his rifle was shot apart and two fingers on his left hand were blown off. Another man in the party, William McLane, fell in the fight and, according to one vivid account, his Indian attackers cut out his heart and ate it.

  Despite many incidents like this, some Missouri tribes were friendly with the settlers, or at least found it pragmatic to strike alliances and keep the peace. As a boy, Carson played with Indian children. The Sac and Fox tribes frequently came into the Boone’s Lick settlements and carried on a robust trade. From an early age, Carson learned an important practical truth of frontier life—that there was no such thing as “Indians,” that tribes could be substantially and sometimes violently different from one another, and that each group must be dealt with separately, on its own terms.

  Before settlers like the Boones and the Carsons arrived, the country along the Missouri River, like so much of North America, was heavily forested. To clear land for planting, pioneers would sometimes “girdle” trees—cutting deep rings around the trunks—to deaden them. But the most expeditious way for farmers to remove dense thickets of timber was to set them afire. One day in 1818, Lindsey Carson was burning the woods nearby when a large limb broke off from a burning tree, killing him instantly.

  Kit was only seven at the time, and his life would be profoundly changed. Although some of Lindsey Carson’s children had grown up and moved out of the house, Rebecca Carson still had ten children to raise on her own. The Carsons were reduced to a desperate poverty. Kit’s schooling ceased altogether, and he spent his time working the fields, doing chores around the cabin, and hunting meat for his family. As Carson put it years later, “I jumped to my rifle and threw down my spelling book—and there it lies.”

  Briefly, Kit became a ward of a neighbor. Then in 1822, Kit’s mother remarried, and the obstreperous boy soon rebelled against his new stepfather. At age fourteen, Kit was apprenticed to a well-known saddler named David Workman in the small settlement of Franklin, Missouri. The boy hated this close and tedious shopwork. For nearly two years he sat at his bench each day, repairing harnesses and shaping scraps of hide with leatherworking tools. Because Franklin was situated on the eastern end of the newly cleared Santa Fe Trail, Workman’s clientele largely consisted of trappers and traders, and the shop was often filled with stirring tales from the Far West. This bedraggled tribe of men in their musky animal skins and peltries must have impressed the young boy mightily, and one senses how the worm of his imagination began to turn. Sitting miserably at his station with his shears and his awls and his crimping tools, transfixed by the bold stories of these feral men, Kit began to dream of Santa Fe—the name signifying not so much a specific place as a new kind of existence, a life of expanse and possibility in fresh precincts of the continent.

  The Santa Fe Trail had opened only two years earlier, and for young Missourians with any spark of ambition or wanderlust, the burgeoning commerce of the prairies had become a compelling romance. Out west, new fortunes beckoned. For generations, Spain had forbidden all U.S. trade with Santa Fe, and American travelers caught in New Mexico were routinely arrested and treated as hostile spies. But when Mexico won independence in 1821, the new officials in Mexico City were eager for American goods—and the tariffs that could be levied against them. A veil had been lifted; suddenly Americans were welcome. Soon the long road between the ancient capital and the westernmost settlements was creased with traffic. A new term came into vogue for those leaving the settlements for Santa Fe, a term that conveyed the excitement of piercing the unknown: Upon departing the familiar world of Missouri, travelers were said to be “jumping off.”

  Enchanted by the stories he kept hearing and “anxious to see different countries,” Kit resolved to break the contract of his apprenticeship. Although he considered his employer “a good man,” Carson found the work suffocating. “The business did not suit me,” he said in loud understatement, “and I concluded to leave him.” Carson realized that if he stayed with Workman, “I would have to pass my life in labor that was distasteful to me.”

  In August of 1826, at the age of sixteen, Carson secretly signed on as a laborer with a large merchant caravan heading west to Santa Fe. “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” the caravan leader asked Carson when he applied for a job.

  “Nothing,” Carson replied, “except I can shoot straight.”

  He was given a slot as a “cavvy boy,” the lowliest job on a caravan. The cavvy boy was a hired hand charged with caring for the caballada, the herd of spare horses, mules, and oxen that was always brought along to replace those that wore out or died on the long journey. It was menial cowboy work—herding, feeding, and reprimanding the animals—but he loved it. He was grateful to find himself sitting in saddles every day instead of making them.

  And so Carson jumped off. As the boy made his way west, David Workman, his employer back in Franklin, posted a notice in the Missouri Intelligencer, the local paper, announcing his apprentice’s flight. It was the first occasion that Kit Carson’s name would ever appear in print—

  Notice is hereby given to all persons that CHRISTOPHER CARSON, a boy about 16 years old, small of his age, but thick set; light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard County, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler’s trade, on or about the first of September last. He is supposed to have made his way towards the upper part of the state. All persons are notified not to harbor, support, or assist said boy under the penalty of the law. One cent reward will be given to any person who will bring back the boy.

  Workman was required by law to report his apprentice’s truancy. Reading between the lines, however, it is clear that the saddler was less than zealous in his efforts to secure Carson’s return and that, in fact, he may have been aiding the getaway. Workman’s advertisement did not appear until a full month after Carson fled. By waiting so long, by providing a false clue as to which direction Carson was headed, and by offering such a conspicuously slim reward, one senses that Workman was smiling on Carson’s decision to light out for the West and perhaps wishing him godspeed.

  In his autobiography, Carson recalled only one incident from his first trek across the plains. One day as the caravan worked its way along the great bend of the Arkansas River, in present-day southwestern Kansas, a traveler in the party named Andrew Broadus had an accident. The wagon train had passed into buffalo country, which was rife with wolf packs that preyed on the migrating herds. Spotting a wolf in the distance and presumably fearing that it would attack the caravan stock, Broadus reached for his rifle from his wagon. The gun prematurely discharged, and he shot himself point-blank in the right arm.

  In a few days the wound became infected and then gangrene set in. No doctors were traveling in the caravan, but it was obvious to everyone that Broadus’s arm would have to be amputated if he hoped to live. He was in utter agony now, his pitiful cries going out with each jounce and rattle of his wagon. Still, Broadus would not let the others perform the inevitable, and several more precious days passed, with the line of putrefaction steadily creeping up his arm.

  Finally, the party could not take the screaming anymore. They held Broadus down and one of the men sliced through the dead flesh with a razor. Another man then went to work on the arm bone with an old saw while a third cauterized the severed arteries by applying a piping hot king bolt that had been removed from one of the wagons and heated in the fire. As Broadus shrieked, Kit watched in wide-eyed amazement and tried to help out however he could—according to one probably specious account, he volunteered to wield the scalpel and actually made the first cut. Certainly the ordeal gave the sixteen-year-old boy a vivid idea of the sorts of crude and creative expedients to which men on the prairie were often compelled to resort.

  At last the operation was complete and Broadus
’s cries subsided. The men applied a protective plaster to his stump composed of tar taken from a wagon axle. Given the atrocious hygiene common on the caravans, most of the party did not expect Broadus to survive, but the wound soon healed without infection. As Carson put it, Andrew Broadus was “perfectly well” by the time the caravan crossed into New Mexico.

  As fascinated as he was by life on the Santa Fe Trail, Kit Carson did not apparently think much of its namesake city. The caravan groaned into the old capital and created a stir among its bored denizens, but Kit did not linger long in Santa Fe. In his autobiography, Carson scarcely even mentioned the place. As soon as he could, he made his way up to Taos, the mountain village of whitewashed adobe houses some seventy miles north of the capital, and found the rough-and-ready life there much more to his liking. Taos would be his home, sentimentally if not in fact, for the rest of his life.

  Spread on the sage plains at the feet of a particularly stunning stretch of the serrated Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Don Fernando de Taos was a cluttered old Spanish settlement of a few thousand souls built close to an even older settlement of Pueblo Indians, who continued to live as they had for centuries in a mud citadel of terraced apartment buildings stacked seven stories high. The town took its name from the thick chokes of willows that lined the stream flowing through the pueblo—taos means “people of the red willows” in the Tiwa language. A few miles west of the village, the Rio Grande had cut a deep gorge into the earth, with the cold whitewater spilling through a chasm six hundred feet below the canyon rim.

  Taos was also the capital of the Southwestern fur trade. Free-trappers and mountain men associated with various outfits—Hudson’s Bay, the American Fur Company, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company—spent their winters in Taos. Here they mended their traps and often blew their summer earnings in sprees of dancing, gambling, lovemaking, and booze. Their poison of choice was a local moonshine known as Taos Lightning, a wheat liquor that had become a form of frontier currency among trappers, Mexicans, and Indians alike. The trappers were a spirited enclave in this remote provincial outpost. The locals resented and at the same time envied these uncouth foreigners who, with their boisterous wanderings and their easy squaw arrangements, lived apart from the stark morality of the padres.

  Kit was drawn to the strange fraternity of the mountain men. He was entranced by their freedom, their ready competence, their otherworldly air, and he vowed to become one himself as soon as they would have him. That first winter he was taken in by a trapper and explorer named Mathew Kinkead, who had been an old friend of his father’s back in Missouri. From this seasoned frontiersman, Carson absorbed the elements of mountain living. Staying in Kinkead’s cabin through the snowy months, sitting before the fire in the gray tang of piñon smoke, Kit began to practice Spanish and several Indian dialects. He learned how to sew his own buckskin clothing, and how to make a good tight bed of cornhusks draped in a buffalo robe. Venturing on his first bison hunt, he learned how to jerk the meat and turn it into a fine pemmican, and how to enjoy the Plains Indian delicacy of the still-hot liver, sliced fresh from the pulsing animal and seasoned with bile squirted from its gallbladder.

  In 1828, after making a caravan journey to El Paso and working long stretches of the Santa Fe Trail, Kit signed on as a cook for another mountain man named Ewing Young, who had opened a store in Taos to outfit trapper expeditions. The eighteen-year-old kid apparently was a competent chef, but then these greasy wayfarers, accustomed as they were to such odd field entrées as cougar, dog, mule, bear, and prairie oysters, 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.”)

  By the spring of 1828, Kit had become proficient enough in Spanish to sign on as a translator for a merchant caravan that was bound for Chihuahua City, a thousand-mile journey round-trip along the Camino Real. The ancient capital, with its ornate cathedral, its beautiful stone aqueduct, and its stately colonial architecture hewn from the brutal wealth of Chihuahua’s silver mines, was the largest and most dazzling city Carson had ever visited, and throughout his wildly peripatetic life, Chihuahua would remain the southernmost extent of his travels.

  Carson returned from his sojourn and took a job as a teamster in the Santa Rita copper mines of southwestern New Mexico. Then, in the spring of 1829, Ewing Young asked him to accompany a party of some forty Taos fur men on a journey deep into unexplored Apache country to trap the tributaries of the Gila River. Carson had at last received his wish: Although still a greenhorn, he was embarking on his first full-fledged expedition as a trapper, an occupation that would hold his interest for the next dozen years.

  It was an insanely difficult way to make a living, but, for Carson, that was no deterrent. A congressional survey of the trapping profession, completed in 1831, described the mountain man existence this way: “The whole operation is full of exposures and privations…leading to premature exhaustion and disability. Few of those engaged in it reach an advanced stage of life. The labor is excessive, subsistence scanty, and the Indians are ever liable to sudden and violent paroxysms of passion, in which they spare neither friend nor foe.”

  Although Carson probably did not know it, trapping was already a storied profession in the East. The mountain men became popular avatars of a wild and free life that was romanticized by such writers as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. The fur trade would produce many legendary names, men like Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith. But through a peculiar confluence of events, Kit Carson would become the most famous mountain man of them all.

  Carson’s first paid voyage into the mountains was an especially ambitious and dangerous one, for in addition to the usual hardships—grizzlies, Indians, hypothermia, the prospect of a killing thirst or starvation—this mission was strictly illegal. Most trapping excursions ventured north into the unclaimed wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, but this time Young planned to trap within the jealously held, if extremely porous, borders of Mexico. The government in Santa Fe rarely issued trapping permits to foreigners, so in order to confuse suspicious officials, Ewing led his party north into the mountains, then doubled back and rode southwest through the country of the Navajo and the Zuni before striking the Gila River. The Gila watershed had scarcely been trapped, and Young’s men found it incredibly rich in beaver and other game.

  From Young and his international ragtag of mountain men, Carson began to soak up the nuances of the trapping trade—how to read the country and follow its most promising drainages, how to find the “slicks” along the banks where beavers had slithered from their tree stands, how to set and scent the traps with a thick yellow oil called castoreum taken from the beaver’s sex glands, how to prepare and pack the pelts, how to cache them safely in the ground to prevent theft and spoilage. And when the traps came up empty, how to invade and dismantle a dam and club the unsuspecting animals in their dark, wet den.

  From his new comrades, Carson learned to savor beaver tail boiled to an exquisite tenderness—the trapper’s signature dish. He became expert with a Hawken rifle and a Green River skinning knife. He began to pick up the strange language of the mountain men, a colorful patois of French, Spanish, English, and Indian phrases mixed with phrases entirely of their own creation. “Wagh!” was their all-purpose interjection. They spoke of plews (pelts) and fofurraw (any unnecessary finery). They “counted coup” (revenge exacted on an avowed enemy), and when one of their own was killed, they were “out for hair” (scalps). They said odd things like “Which way does your stick float?” (What’s your preference?) They met once a year in giant, extended open-air festivals, the “rendezvous,” where they danced fandangos and played intense rounds of monte, euchre, and seven-up. Late at night, sitting around the campfires, sucking their black clay pipes, they competed in telling legendary whoppers about their far-flung travels in the West—stories like the one about the mountain valle
y in Wyoming that was so big it took an echo eight hours to return, so that a man bedding down for the night could confidently shout “Git up!” and know that he would rise in the morning to his own wake-up call.

  From these men, too, Carson began to learn how to deal with the Western Indians—how to detect an ambush, when to fight, when to bluff, when to flee, when to negotiate. It is doubtful whether any group of nineteenth-century Americans ever had such a broad and intimate association with the continent’s natives. The mountain men lived with Indians, fought alongside and against them, loved them, married them, buried them, gambled and smoked with them. They learned to dress, wear their hair, and eat like them. They took Indian names. They had half-breed children. They lived in tepees and pulled the travois and became expert in the ways of Indian barter and ancient herbal remedy. Many of them were half-Indian themselves, by blood or inclination. Washington Irving, writing about Western trappers, noted this tendency: “It is a matter of vanity and ambition with them to discard everything that may bear the stamp of civilized life, and to adopt the manners, gestures, and even the walk of the Indian. You cannot pay a freetrapper a greater compliment than to persuade him you have mistaken him for an Indian brave.”