Blood and Thunder

Kearny, Carson, and the Army of the West were about to fight the battle of San Pasqual, “generally described as the most significant clash of the Mexican War that took place on what is now U.S. soil” (216). It opened with a critical mistake. Kearny yelled out the command to “trot,” but Captain Johnston up ahead heard “charge.” Johnston took off toward the village at full speed, spreading the line dangerously thin and leaving Kearny and others on slower animals behind.

This blunder would prove deadly for the Americans. Johnston was killed instantly on first contact with the Californians. Carson himself was almost trampled in the fray. With their gunpowder made too wet by mist for firing, the American fell back on using swords, which were ill-matched against the lances and leather lassos, called reata, of the Californians. The Californians used these stock weapons and their agile mounts to rope Americans off their mules and kill them. In the chaos, Carson quietly snuck off and began sniping off enemies one by one. “It was vintage Carson, to sidestep the tumult and romance of a conventional class and find the cleanest path to efficient fighting” (219).

Kearny and Lieutenant Emory arrived to a bloodbath. Kearny was seriously wounded and Gillespie, too. The Californians finally retreated when the Americans began firing one of their howitzers, but not before stealing the second gun for their own. In 15 minutes, 21 Americans had died. Worse still, under enemy fire, the wounded could not be moved in retreat; an abortive attempt at doing so failed. Kearny set up a siege defense for his starving and wounded men on Mule Hill and sent Carson, a lieutenant named Edward Beale, and an Indian named Chemuctah to get help from Stockton in San Diego.

Facing significant adversity—including losing their shoes on the trail—all three messengers made it to San Diego somehow. Carson’s account of the journey enhanced his celebrity. Reinforcements from San Diego arrived and chased the Californians away, saving Kearny and his men. The re-conquest of California essentially secured, the Army of the West looked upon the Pacific for the first time.

In January 1847, the war was over, but many residents of New Mexico held deep resentment toward the Americans. They “had failed to fight at first, but they despised these foreigners just as surely as any occupied people must despise their oppressor” (231). The Americans often treated them rudely, spread disease, and did not place the same cultural value on family.

The governor of Taos, Charles Bent, thought his good standing with the Hispanic community inoculated him from danger. He was aware, though, that the Catholic clergy in Mexico, especially Padre Antonio Martinez, was stirring up trouble. He had just discovered an insurrectionist plot a few weeks before. Bent thought Martinez was corrupt and hypocritical; Martinez thought Bent was just another American opportunist.

New Mexico was a difficult post. It was home to a diverse community of Indians, Catholics, and even “crypto-Jews,” descendants of Spanish Jews who still held onto many Jewish traditions; it remained a backwater to most. Indians of the surrounding area continued to be hostile. Only the neighboring Pueblo Indians were seen as peaceful. Thus, Charles Bent was not expecting to be attacked by the Pueblo when he arrived home in Taos.

The Pueblo wanted two Indian prisoners released; Bent refused. The situation escalated, and Bent had to bar himself in his home with his family. The next day the attackers returned. Sieging the home, they killed, mutilated, and scalped Bent in front of his wife and children. Carson’s wife Josefa witnessed the event.

The revolt of the Taos Pueblo Indians and their Mexican allies spread: “What had started as a localized Indian grievance had ignited into a full-scale Hispanic rebellion of the north” (244-5). Among the American response force were Sterling Price; Ceran St. Vrain, a Missourian fur trapper and friend of Carson; and Dick Green, Bent’s black slave. On February 4, they crushed the rebellion at St. Jerome’s church in Taos. The Indians felt both physically and spiritually safe there until Price destroyed the church with a howitzer; it quickly became “a charnel house, the smoke inside ‘so dense it was impossible to exist in it’” (248-50). By the end of the day, nearly 200 Indians were dead. What they had hoped to gain in the rebellion remains unknown; no Taos accounts of the revolt exist.

Six condemned Indians were convicted in a kangaroo court and hanged. As they died, “the hands of two of the Taos Indians found each other […] their fingers became locked in a firm grip, a handshake of brotherhood” (253).

About a month had passed since the Taos Revolt, and Fremont had granted Carson the cross-continental errand he’d been hoping for: together with Ned Beale, Carson ran Fremont’s letters concerning the war to Washington. “He was the illiterate bearer of written messages, an irony that probably did not escape him” (254-5).

In St. Louis, Carson began to understand his own celebrity; ever an introvert, he didn’t like it much. Especially excited to meet him was Thomas Hart Benton, Fremont’s father-in-law and the figurehead of Manifest Destiny in the Senate. Benton’s home was the nexus of the burgeoning American Empire: “It was the age of happy dilettantes and gentleman explorers, when disciplines easily blurred, when a soldier might be a geologist, cartographer, botanist, ethnologist, linguist, and artist, all at the same time” (257-8). Benton was the fulcrum on which Western exploration swung.

Benton liked Carson. He was interested to learn that his son-in-law, Fremont, had been caught up in an internecine struggle for power between Stockton and Kearny in California after the war. He offered to connect Carson to his daughter Jessie, in Washington to help him move in the social circles there, and Carson was grateful. Carson saw St. Louis as a “dress rehearsal” for Washington, where he would need to move among even higher echelons of society, a nerve-wracking prospect.

Carson visited his 10-year-old daughter by Singing Grass, Adaline, in nearby Fayette. Carson was pleased to learn she could already read. “Education was an understandable sticking point with him […] He wanted to spare his firstborn the lifelong embarrassment he’d felt” (259-60).

Carson arrived in Washington and was taken in by Jessie Fremont, Benton’s favorite daughter and the wife of Carson’s good friend, John. Jessie was a charming and charismatic woman. When her father enrolled her in society school, “she protested by cutting off her hair so that she would look like the son she thought her father wished her to be” (261-2). Benton gave in and tutored her personally. Jessie’s political talents in Washington and her skill at writing would play no small part in her husband’s success. She was incredibly devoted to him—perhaps unhealthily so—and she actively collaborated in writing his expedition reports.

Though appreciative and fond of Jessie, Carson hated his time in Washington. He was trapped there for several weeks waiting for an audience with President Polk and was not much impressed with the city or her politicians. Beyond his insecurities about his illiteracy, he deeply loved his first wife, Singing Grass, and was concerned that his marriage to her might become the source of gossip.

In reality he had little to fear. Carson was loved in Washington society, “an exotic curiosity all the more endearing for his social awkwardness, like some Tarzan figure removed from the jungle” (264-5). Jessie was particularly fond of him. Carson loved to be read to, she discovered, and recalled him being “intensely stirred” by a passage from Lord Byron about the power of revenge. “The rage seemed to come out of nowhere […] This was a side of him Jessie had never seen” (266-7).

On June 14, 1847, Carson and Jessie met President Polk, who “greeted them as warmly as his mirthless personality would allow” (267). Despite the good news from the West, Polk remained a micromanaging worrywart, convinced that his underlings were unreliable. He had privately decided that Fremont was in the wrong in the power scuffle with Kearny, though Polk did not inform Jessie and Carson of this.