Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

by Hampton Sides

  General Kearny stared at the alcalde in annoyed disbelief. On the contrary, he thought eight dollars was a scandalous fee, especially for such a poor population. More to the point, it was a ridiculous bit of finery that had no legitimate purpose—Kearny found it offensive on every level. He dashed off a new command with his pen: “The use of ‘stamp paper’ by the government of New Mexico is hereby abolished. Done by the governor.”

  Everywhere he went, Kearny preached amnesty and inclusion. No one’s property would be harmed, he said. Past wrongs would be forgiven. Even Manuel Armijo was welcome to return—and if he did, Kearny urged the people to greet the old governor and not molest him in any way. Kearny paid a visit to Armijo’s wife, Trinidad Gabaldon, in Albuquerque and thought her “a good-looking woman and rather cheerful.” (A subordinate traveling with Kearny described her more interestingly: “A comely dame of forty, with the remains of considerable beauty, but quite passe.”) Mrs. Armijo indicated that probably her husband would not return to New Mexico. Nearly all his relatives and former friends said the same thing: “The governor has gone to hell.”

  The constitution that Kearny had Colonel Doniphan draw up was a model of fairness and progressive statecraft. The “Kearny Code,” as it was called, had deliberate echoes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights and was so well crafted that it continues as the basis of New Mexico state law to this day. Whether the New Mexicans appreciated all of these doings, in the end, is hard to say. Spanish documents from the period are spotty and circumspect. It was clear that however much the locals might have liked the sound of Kearny’s high-minded documents and lofty pledges, they remained skeptical and still clung to a national pride, hoping the war in the south would turn in Mexico’s favor. Private Gibson said it best when he wrote in his diary, “The people are civil and well disposed, not being able to resist the force brought against them. But they are far from receiving us generally as deliverers.”

  In back of all his goodwill and diplomacy, Kearny’s main purpose remained starkly military—to solidify the American victory and quash any remaining sentiments of defiance. The larger war was raging deeper in Mexico, and Kearny had almost no knowledge of how the American armies were faring. He constantly had to sift rumors of alarming developments to the south, and he had good reason to fear that Mexican reinforcements might be sent up from Chihuahua or Durango to retake Santa Fe.

  Within days of his arrival in the capital, Kearny ordered the building of a mighty new fortress on a hill overlooking the town. Fort Marcy, it would be called, in honor of William Marcy, the secretary of war back in Washington. Looming over the plaza, the fort was laid out in a complex zigzag pattern like a misshapen star. Buried safely in its center was a magazine capable of storing many tons of ammunition. The fort’s walls were stuck with cannons and notched with various loopholes and crenellations. It was built over a large area, with room enough to garrison a thousand soldiers. One day Kearny took Susan Magoffin by horseback up to see the construction site, where hundreds of masons were building the enormous walls. “It is the sole master of the entire plain below,” Magoffin wrote cheerfully of the emerging fort. “Every house in the city can be torn by the artillery to atoms.”

  Kearny’s orders had been to stay in New Mexico as long as necessary to thwart any possibility of a revolt, and then to continue on posthaste to California. The general felt confident he had achieved his goal—“All is quiet and no armed force of any kind remains in the field,” he reported in mid-September. But this was a somewhat hollow statement, he must have realized, for the real war in New Mexico was not between the Americans and the Mexicans, but rather between the nomadic Indian tribes and everyone else. He had stumbled into an age-old conflict that showed no signs of abating with the American presence.

  Kearny threw himself into the chaos of the Indian conflicts with his characteristic optimism and resolve, but it was clear that the problem was too complex, too multidimensional, and too long-festering for his army to “correct” during its brief stay. Knowledgeable Indian-fighters recognized that the situation with the Southwestern tribes could potentially escalate into the kind of costly, lengthy, messy war the U.S. government had recently fought against the Seminole Indians of Florida—although instead of pursuing their defiant enemy in the swamps of the Everglades, soldiers would have to fight in equally inaccessible desert mountains. Wrote Capt. William McKissack, an assistant quartermaster stationed in Santa Fe: “I fear another Florida War if the Indians desire to protract it.”

  Kearny, for his part, was much more optimistic. He demanded that representatives of these “wild tribes”—the Utes, the Apaches, the Comanches, and especially the Navajos—come in for council. And if they did not “desist from all robberies and crimes,” Kearny said, he would send his soldiers amongst them “and destroy them from the earth.”

  This tough talk made little impression on most of the Navajos—if they received the import of his message at all. In fact, during her short stay in Santa Fe, Susan Magoffin records that the Navajos descended on the very outskirts of the capital “and carried off some twenty families.” Perhaps realizing that she herself could be kidnapped, Magoffin seemed acutely distressed by the news, noting that “there is mourning and lamentation in the streets, for friends who may never again be seen on earth.”

  In response to the attack, Kearny demanded that the Navajos return all kidnapped prisoners. Susan Magoffin, for one, was optimistic that they would heed his warning, “as the Navajos deem the general almost superhuman since he has walked in so quietly and taken possession of the palace of the great Armijo, their former fear.”

  Chapter 22: THE NEW MEN

  Narbona crouched in the scrub above Santa Fe, looking down upon the battlements and earthworks the Americans had constructed with such haste. He watched the soldiers marching, practicing their marksmanship, drilling in close order. He saw the glint of their guns and swords, the resplendent uniforms of the dragoons. He saw an unfamiliar flag flying over the Palace of the Governors, with crisp stars and bands of red and white. He saw the ambassadors of other Indian tribes trickling into the city to pay homage to the great general, Kearny. On the outskirts of town he could make out the legions of American conquerors quartered in smoky tent cities, erected in the pastures and cornfields of the Mexicans.

  The American logic escaped Narbona: How could they make war with the Mexicans and in the next instant not only declare themselves friends with them, but vow to subjugate their enemies? Why would they willingly absorb another people’s war? What fickle spirits drove these men?

  Then Narbona heard the explosions, the terrific booms of the American guns—the mountain howitzers and other cannons the soldiers periodically shot for artillery practice or for some sort of demonstration. The skies shuddered and the ground shook when these great guns fired. The barrels flashed and seethed smoke. The sounds were terrifying.

  Many Native Americans at the time were said to have an overwhelming, irrational fear of artillery—according to one prominent Western historian, Indians often expressed a belief that these big guns “could shoot holes through the earth and kill on the far side of mountains.” Whether Narbona shared in this dread is not known, but clearly the howitzers made an impression on him.

  Narbona realized that these were a different sort of people. The rumors were correct—their armies really did fire lightning bolts. He saw no point in fighting them, there was nothing to be won. He would make his way back to Navajo country and advocate a permanent peace with the Americans.

  A corner had been turned, a fresh era had arrived, and New Mexico was now in the hands of an altogether different race. He called them, with an emphatic simplicity, “the New Men.”

  Narbona was amazed and troubled by the implications of everything he saw—for if his old enemy had been so quickly and completely vanquished, what lay in store for his own people?

  Book Two: A BROKEN COUNTRY

  Chapter 23: THE GRIM METRONOME

  On the morning of
September 25—the day after the party—the bells of Santa Fe were tolling again. This time they rang to announce General Kearny’s departure and to send the dragoons off in style. Three hundred of his best men assembled at Fort Marcy. Kearny raised his hand in salute, and the column struck out at noon, bearing south by southwest for the Rio Grande. For his guide Kearny had a veteran mountain man, Tom Fitzpatrick, an old friend of Kit Carson’s. Most of the Missouri volunteers would be staying behind with Colonel Doniphan, holding down the place until more reinforcements would arrive from Fort Leavenworth—and then they, too, would dash off, for Chihuahua and points south. Most of the Missourians had grown fond of their commander and waved him off with genuine emotion. “We were sorry to part with General Kearny,” one wrote. “He had gained the good wishes of every man.”

  Kearny’s dragoons were thrilled finally to be on their way, even if some of them were a bit hung over from the previous night’s ball. After spoiling for a fight in New Mexico, none had been forthcoming. Instead they had spent most of their time camping out, getting scurvy from a bad diet, and nursing their sick horses back into shape. They had drunk their share of Taos Lightning and lost innumerable hands of monte over at Madame Tules’s place. If they had stayed in Santa Fe much longer, they might well have gone astray in her hall of ruin. Perhaps California would offer something more exciting in the way of battlefield glories.

  In truth, no one had liked Santa Fe very much. The soldiers filled their diaries with disparaging descriptions of the place. It was a greasy, smelly, drunken, superstitious little town, they thought, loud with the fulminations of fat friars who scratched their itches and wore the same robe every evening. Santa Fe was a place of goats and chickens, of twisted offshoots of Catholic doctrine, of spiritual and medical guesswork. The axes and hammers and saws were miserable, the apples stunted, the windows did not have glass, the houses lacked furniture, and the doors had leather straps and wood pegs for want of hinges. Sugar came from corn, alcohol from cactus, and the town’s only musical instruments were used for fandangos and masses alike. A demented beggar lady picked among the garbage and sucked on old melon rinds. Burros were constantly abused. Wagons did not have true axles or wheels, but rather clumsy trucks hacked from gnarled cottonwood stumps. It seemed an exotically primitive place, one said, as though their hosts had not quite mastered the concept of the wheel.

  The soldiers were especially sick of the food, all those chile stews made with mutton fat, and the dubious slop it made on their plates. They were sick of the grit, too, and the goathead thorns and the lice. Lieutenant Emory dutifully reported on the “universal presence of vermin on the bodies of all the inhabitants…it is not unusual to see people stop suddenly, expertly hunt, and then cause a sharp sound announcing a tiny death to you—and then the next minute to see them handle the fruit or cheese which they are offering to sell to you.”

  Santa Fe was indeed a dirty and impoverished place, and yet it had something—some quality of spectacle that Kearny’s men would sorely miss as they headed out into the desert. The old city offered odd incongruities of culture and the accrued weight of history. Games of chance were always being played in the streets, and the markets were filled with an interesting babble of Indian tongues. The surrounding land was strange and dramatic, the light danced on the hills, and the mountains were everywhere, in the middle distance, breathing a draught of limitless possibility. The climate was extraordinary, especially in September; all the soldiers’ diaries speak soaringly of it: “…singularly mild, equable, and salubrious…with sunsets as rich as an Italian sky could boast.”…“The weather continues delightful, as fine as a heart could wish it.”…“The air is fine and healthy, and the atmosphere perfectly pure.”

  In the clear air, Kearny and his men could look one hundred miles to the west and see the sacred southeastern mountain of the Navajos, the dormant volcano not far from Narbona’s outfit that was called Blue Bead Mountain. The New Mexicans called the mountain San Mateo, but despite the assurance of a good Christian name, it was an especially nagging landmark, a kind of geological rebuke, reminding them that although they had lived hereabouts for three long centuries, they had never entirely conquered this land. The Navajos grazed sheep on the mountain’s flanks, sheep they had stolen from the New Mexicans. They thundered across it on stolen horses, and lived all around it, often with women and children they had stolen from New Mexican villages. San Mateo was close enough to see, but too far away to reach safely without mounting an expedition so large as to tip off the Diné encamped there. By the time a party approached the mountain, the stolen horses and sheep and women and children would be long gone with their Navajo captors, scattered into the infinite recesses of Navajo country.

  Kearny did not know what to do about the Navajos, and he left the matter in the hands of the new governor, Charles Bent. Bent did not know what to do either, other than to build forts closer to the Navajos to keep a better eye on their movements. Shortly after assuming office, Bent wrote a long and insightful letter to Washington describing the Indian situation in New Mexico—and singling out the Diné as public enemy number one. “The Navajos are an industrious, intelligent and warlike tribe,” he wrote, “numbering as many as 14,000 souls. They are the only Indians on the continent having intercourse with white men that are increasing in numbers. Their horses and sheep are said to be greatly superior to those raised by the New Mexicans. A large portion of their stock has been acquired by marauding expeditions against the settlements. Their country consists of high table mountains, difficult of access, and affording them protection against their enemies. Water is hard to find by those not acquainted with their country, affording another natural safeguard against invasion. They have in their possession many prisoners, men, women, and children, taken from the settlements of this Territory, whom they hold and treat as slaves.”

  Not that the New Mexicans had failed to find ways to make Navajo life miserable. They, too, stole Navajo sheep and horses and women and children. Although slavery was technically illegal, anyone of means in the province had at least one or two Indian criados (servants), and a young Navajo woman was considered most valuable of all—in large part because of her assumed talent for weaving.

  There were slave markets in Taos and other towns where Indian servants could be purchased for a pittance. Often captives were sold in the town plazas on Sunday afternoons following mass. Other tribes that happened to be enemies of the Diné came to understand their high market value, and so inevitably, Navajo children in ever larger numbers would end up on the auctioning blocks. There was also a phenomenon known as the “New Mexican Bachelor Party,” in which a groom and a few of his swashbuckling friends would gamely push into Navajo country and go hunting for a few slaves to give to the bride on her wedding day to help her keep house. Professional slave raiders were part of the ordinary commerce of daily life.

  Remarked one disgusted traveler to Santa Fe: “I have frequently seen little Indian children six years of age led around the country like beasts by a Mexican who had probably stolen them from their mother not more than a week before and offered for sale from forty to one hundred and twenty dollars.”

  Said Lewis Kennon, an American doctor well acqainted with life in New Mexico: “I know of no family which can raise one hundred and fifty dollars but what purchases a Navajo slave. Many families own four or five—the trade in them being as regular as the trade in pigs or sheep.”

  It has been estimated that of the 6,000 people then living in Santa Fe, at least 500 were Indian slaves or peons. The Mexican families usually baptized their Indian servants in the Catholic faith and often treated them well, like secondary relatives; some even won their freedom. Amado Chaves, son of one famous New Mexico slave raider, wrote: “On arriving home after a slaving expedition, the first thing to do was to take the children to the priest and give them a name. They would naturally take your name and as they grew up they would consider you and your wife as their parents.” Certainly the system differed
in form and particulars from its agrarian counterpart in the American South, but it was slavery nonetheless.

  In general, it was said that the Mexicans were better at stealing people, and the Navajos were better at stealing animals. Whatever the case, the attacks and reprisals were simply part of the grim metronome of life, swinging with the same logic of a feud. In truth there were some on both sides, most of them aggressive young men, who rather liked these cycles of violence: They relieved boredom, they tested courage and resolve, and honed warrior skills. The Navajos and their Mexican adversaries were not accustomed to the concept of all-out war or unconditional surrender or treaties that endured beyond a season—these were European concepts. The combatants in this centuries-old war did not observe tidy declarations or cessations of hostilities. A persistent, low-grade violence was always there, a possibility lurking on the horizon, like San Mateo. It was the only life they had known.

  The Navajos were immediately aware of Kearny’s departure from Santa Fe, and they interpreted it as weakness: The Americans were already quitting New Mexico, they thought. These “New Men” would not press their demands; the great general Kearny lacked staying power.