Blood and Thunder

Hearing of Carson’s approach, the Navajo stockpiled food and fortified Anasazi toeholds, which allowed them to scale the sheer cliff faces and even Fortress Rock, a towering formation in the middle of the canyon. In December, they climbed Fortress Rock and pulled up the ladders, hoping the danger would pass beneath them.

Carson left Fort Canby on January 6, 1864, for Canyon de Chelly. He divided his forces into two units in a pincer formation: One force, led by Carson, would enter the canyon on the eastern end; the other, led by Carson’s trusted officer Albert Pfeiffer, would enter on the West. They would meet in the middle, trapping any Navajo between. It was both a practical plan and a psychosocial attack: Carson “recognized the symbolic power that [the canyon] held for the Navajo” (457-8).

Pfeiffer was a capable man, though prone to alcoholism. He accidentally entered the wrong canyon, an artery of Canyon de Chelly called Canyon del Muerto. As they rode along the canyon, they passed the corpses of many Navajo along the way, evidence that Carson’s war of attrition was working. On January 12, Pfeiffer and his men passed under Fortress Rock with no idea the Navajo hid above them. On January 13, Carson and Pfeiffer finally reunited. Carson himself never entered the canyon proper; Sides attributes his reluctance to his mountain man wariness about being trapped and “a superstitiousness that made him heed odd hunches and omens” (463).

Despite the lack of a pitched battle, the Navajo began surrendering by the thousands in the early months of 1864. “Hunger, Carson realized, had been his greatest ally, and it had exacted a mean price” (464). To finish them off, Carson laid waste to everything in the canyon, including the Navajo’ sacred peach orchards. The job finished, Carson limped home to Josefa. He didn’t know it, but he had developed an aneurysm on his aorta, which would prove deadly when it burst.

The Navajo made the Long Walk to the reservation Carleton had created for them in Bosque Redondo, a forced migration second in size only to the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Although only a few young men were responsible for the raids, “now all the Diné would finally suffer for the trouble caused by its most incorrigible members” (470-1).

Along the Long Walk, soldiers withheld food, raped women, and abused the weak and elderly. At night, enemy tribes stole children from the train to and enslaved them. Hundreds died. For Carleton, a newly crowned hero among the New Mexicans, the march was “a beautiful metaphor […] ‘[The Navajo] have fought us gallantly for years […] but at length, they found it was their destiny, too, to give way to the insatiable progress of our race’” (472). Carleton’s goal was to elevate the Navajo to self-sufficiency via agriculture. Carson volunteered to be the superintendent there and “worked tirelessly on behalf of the Diné” (476), but he wasn’t a good fit for the job, lacking any talent for bureaucracy.

At the reservation, the Navajo clashed with Mescalero Apache, who were brought there first and despised the pueblo-style housing, preferring their own hogans and nomadic lifestyle. They recognized Christianization and the schooling of their children for what it was, “instinctively resist[ing] any attempt to indoctrinate their children in the white man’s ways” (479). Carleton sought to “civilize” the Indian youth and had long given up on the adults as a hopeless cause. Disease and hunger ran rampant, and raids from the Comanche remained a constant threat. Worst of all, a blight of cutworms destroyed the corn crops just before winter, putting the Navajo at serious threat of starvation.

Kit Carson was not present for the cutworm blight. By September 1864, Carleton had already moved him to fight the Comanche. Though Carson was in poor health and knew the Comanches to be powerful warriors, he took the assignment anyway.

On November 12, 1864, Carson headed out; on November 24, the first Thanksgiving holiday in America, he ambushed and razed a village of the Kiowa, allies of the Comanche. When the Kiowa and Comanche rallied together in one of the largest confederations of warriors the West had ever seen, outnumbering Carson’s men 10 to one, Carson retreated to Adobe Walls, a strong defensive outpost. Carson and his troops would have been in serious trouble if it weren’t for the mountain howitzers, which kept the Indians at bay until they could retreat. The last fight of Carson’s life was technically a defeat, but Carson lost only three men.

Four days later, the Fighting Parson, John Chivington, slaughtered a village of Cheyenne who had already surrendered to American authority, “a massacre that is now widely regarded as the worst atrocity committed in all the Indian wars” (494). Carson loathed Chivington for his cruelty.

Carleton panicked about the failure of the crops at Bosque Redondo. He went into overdrive, shipping emergency supplies of all kinds and begging Washington for more.

Manuelito made a secret journey there was “was repulsed by the truly pathetic state of his people” (498). In November 1865, the Mescalero Apaches fled and never returned. The American government began to recognize Carleton’s experiment for what it was: a tragic and costly failure. The Navajo, most agreed, should be moved elsewhere, likely back to their own territory. Carleton wouldn’t let the idea go. After tightening his grip by enacting martial law, he was derided throughout the territory.

When the Civil War ended in April 1865, renewed attention was turned to the West. When Senator James Doolittle asked Carson what to do with the Navajo, Carson’s thinking on the subject had evolved substantially. “He now seemed to believe that most of the troubles ‘rose from the aggressions of the whites’” and longed to serve as a diplomat between Anglo-Americans and the Indians (502). Carson understood the bosque to be a failure but wasn’t sure of an alternative; with white settlers everywhere, the Indians had nowhere else to go. As Carson spoke, his Navajo slaves moved about the house. “Doolittle was finally absorbing the uncomfortable truth that the United States, having fought a bloody war in large part to banish the evil of chattel slavery, still had slavery flourishing in various pernicious forms in the West” (504).

Predictably, Carleton stood by his concept of reservations and Christianization of the Indians, but he ultimately felt it was their destiny to fade away in the face of the superior white race. He was removed in September 1866, but the bosque continued. In spring of 1868, the Diné simply refused to plant crops. They had given up.

That same week, Kit Carson was coughing up blood, a sure sign that his aneurysm was leaking. During Carson’s convalescence, his physician, Dr. Tilton, read to him from the first Carson biography; Carson commented as he saw fit. “Though he’d lived a full life, Carson knew he had little to show for it” (507). He was dirt poor and would leave behind seven wild and unruly children. Lincoln promoted him to Brevet Brigadier General, a title more honorific than functional.

In his later years, Carson became a peacemaker, advocating for Indians as they tried to carve out a new place for themselves. His representation of his closest Indian friends, the Ute, brought him to Washington, where age had somewhat mellowed his hatred of celebrity. He met with the Fremonts for the last time before rushing home; he was desperate to see Josefa, who was about to give birth, before he died. 

He got home before Josefa gave birth to their last child, Josefita, but she passed away in his arms soon after from complications. A few weeks later on May 23, Carson rallied and ate a big buffalo steak, then died in a fit of bloody coughing. The Rocky Mountain News ran a notice:

Over what an immense expanse of plains, of snow-clad sierras, of rivers, lakes, and seas, has he cut the first paths? His guiding instinct was an innate chivalry. He had in him a personal courage which came forth when wanted, like lightning from a cloud. (514)

The same week that Carson died, the Navajo held a ceremony which indicated to them that they would soon leave the bosque and move home. On May 28, General Sherman arrived with his Great Peace Commission and took stock of the reservation. Despite being “no softhearted advocate for the Indians” (518-9), he quickly understood it to be an abject failure.

Sherman asked the Navajo to explain the situation as they understood it. An eloquent speaker named Barboncito moved Sherman with his account. Barboncito highlighted the crop failures, the belief that the Navajo should have never crossed the boundary line formed by the four sacred mountains, and their deep love for their own country. After securing a promise that they would cease to raid and fight, Sherman agreed to allow them to live in a bounded area within their own territory.

On June 1, a treaty was drawn up, and on June 18, the Navajo returned to their ancestral lands.