Blood and Thunder

Colonel Diego Archuleta’s assessment of the sorry state of the Army of the West was not far from the truth. Traveling at a blistering pace of 20 miles a day, on one-third rations and dying of heat, Kearny’s Army of the West was suffering by mid-August. They had lost two-thirds of their horses, which Sides highlights that Kearny, “the equine sentimentalist,” must have found “hard to bear” (135). Kearny also imposed increasingly stricter punishments on his men to keep order.

Although his young cohort was eager to fight the New Mexicans, Kearny showed a restraint borne of experience. “He preferred not to view the New Mexicans as enemies at all” (137), as he understood that the goal was not to crush an enemy, but to integrate New Mexico into the United States. At every settlement he encountered, he gave a similar speech to that he gave at Las Vegas: The United States will protect you, will not harm you, and will keep your women safe. He released captured spies sent by Armijo, partly to show mercy, partly because he knew they would impart the enormous size of his army to the enemy.

On August 17, Kearny’s men camped at the ruins of the ancient Pueblo city of Pecos. Here, the Pueblo had for hundreds of years secretly tended to a fire which they prophesied would finally be extinguished when they were freed from their Spanish conquerors. Though the Pueblo had been expelled from the ruins in 1838, the Americans liked the symbolism of the legend. They saw themselves as liberators, not understanding that while they weren’t pillaging precious metals, as the Spanish had, they were just as selfishly determined to find “their own kind of gold” (138-9): a route to California.

The American invasion of California began with the “revolt” of a group of self-styled American revolutionaries who called themselves Osos, or “bears.” Described as drunken American “hotheads,” on June 14, the Osos took over the small village of Sonoma, declaring their “Bear Flag Republic” an independent nation-state.

When the Mexican General Jose Monterey responded by demanding the Osos leave the country, Fremont had his excuse for war. He abandoned any pretense of being an explorer and shifted into military mode. When two Bear Flag men were killed by Mexican guerrillas, Fremont reacted with disproportionate violence, sanctioning the cold-blooded execution, by Carson, of three innocent prisoners. The incident remains, Sides argues, one of the most cruel and baffling episodes of Carson’s life, representing “a kind of dark symbiosis between authority and action” (143-5). Whatever Fremont ordered, Carson would comply, often to murderous effect.

Two weeks later, Fremont’s new Californian Battalion arrived at the provincial capital of Monterey, which Robert Field Stockton and his Pacific Squadron had taken without a fight. A well-traveled and ambitious man, Stockton became Fremont’s close ally. Shooting off a hasty and untruthful declaration of war to General Jose Castro, Stockton sent Fremont’s men to San Diego to conquer Southern California. There, the presence of an English flagship, the Collingwood, seemed to confirm American fears that a British invasion was imminent; in fact, the Collingwood was simply there to gather intelligence.

On July 25, Fremont’s men sailed for San Diego. The mountain men, especially Carson, took poorly to sailing. Fremont took San Diego without a fight on July 29; Stockton arrived soon after. They combined their forces and took Los Angeles on August 13, again without a contest, and Governor Pico fled to Baja California. On August 17, Stockton prematurely “declared California to be United States soil and named himself both commander in chief and governor” (149). He planned to push further into Mexican territory, making Fremont the governor in his stead; both men were unaware that a resistance movement was brewing.

On September 5, Stockton and Fremont, “anxious to get the glorious news of the conquest to Washington—and to place their version of events in the hands of President Polk himself” (149-50), sent Carson to deliver their dispatches to the president in person.

With Kearny and his Army of the West only a day away from Santa Fe, Manuel Armijo was frantic. He gathered the legislators and then the officers of the militia, asking them whether he should fight or treat with the enemy. When all responded that they must fight, Armijo seemed exasperated. He claimed that he had no faith in the strength and organization of the volunteers and, to everyone’s shock, disbanded the entire defense force at Apache Canyon. “As he did so, he affected a look of intense exasperation, as if they were the ones who had let him down” (151-2). Armijo wrote a letter to Kearny claiming that he was not surrendering but merely making a temporary retreat, and he raided the coffers of the Palace of the Governors before fleeing. Even Diego Archuleta was somehow convinced (likely through a bribe from Magoffin) not to stay, “a tack quite uncharacteristic of him” (153).

Kearny heard the news but didn’t believe it until he arrived at Apache Canyon. Had it been properly defended, it would have posed a huge problem for his army—“a second Thermopylae,” one historian suggested, recalling the famous battle in which the Spartan king Leonidas and his 300 defended a narrow coastal pass against Persian invasion. With Armijo gone, Santa Fe was left undefended. It became the first foreign capitol captured by the United States. One man, George Gibson, described Santa Fe as “without taste,” offering “nothing to pay us for our long march” (155-6). Santa Fe had always been “the end of the line […] a geographical and cultural terminus” separating civilization from wilderness (156-7).

Kearny announced that the United States had taken possession of New Mexico, to which the governor quickly acceded. The New Mexicans mourned; “‘Their pent-up emotions could be suppressed no longer,’ one lieutenant said, ‘and a wail of grief arose from the depths of the gloomy buildings on every hand’” (157-8).

By fall of 1846, Narbona’s concern about the encroaching Americans—and the fort he’d heard they were building at Santa Fe—was increasing. Culturally, the Navajo had no drive to conquer distant lands and extend their territory as the Americans were doing.

Narbona did not understand what they wanted with this part of the world […] he scarcely had a concept of white men at all and could not fathom that there existed on this earth a people who looked and behaved and spoke and worshiped their gods and organized themselves so differently (158-9).

The Navajo “were a resourceful people, making use of nearly everything they found within their reach” (161-3). Navajo women had an unusual amount of independence and power; they could own property, and Navajo culture was both matrilineal and matrilocal. Tall tales about white men abounded in Navajo circles. They had strange physical attributes, the rumors said: long ears, no anuses, strange growths on their forehead. Southwestern tribes had long believed that a conquering race would emerge from the east, and the rumors of these white invaders seemed to suggest that threat: “Our country,” frets one young man in Navajo Texts, “is about to be taken away from us by men such as these” (159-60).

The Navajo lacked a clear leader, instead ruling by assembly, but if any leader were to be chosen, it would be Narbona. He had an exceeding amount of wealth, commanded respect, and was famed for his generosity. Narbona took a group of warriors to check out the fort at Santa Fe.