Blood and Thunder

“If the Navajo indulged in a tribal pride that bordered on arrogance, it was an arrogance cut with an extraordinary impulse to accept other traditions, a natural ease for ushering in new ways and even new blood. In a sense, the Navajo were the most ‘American’ of the American Indians: They were immigrants, improvisationalists, mongrels. They were mobile and restless, preferring to spread out as far as possible from one another over large swatches of country while still remaining within the boundaries of their land. They inhaled the essence of other cultures, taking what they liked and adapting it to their own ends.” 

Sides often mirrors Indians and Anglo-Americans, and this comparison may be his best example: Owing to their pioneer spirit, their democratic form of government, and their appropriation of other cultures, the Navajo were, he argues, the most American of the Indians. 

“The Americans had their own ideas about New Mexico’s worth. If metals could not be teased from the alkaline dirt, then at least wagon roads could be sunk into its barren ribs, connecting the Eastern cities to California, which Kearny was scheduled to conquer next. Perhaps the Americans were not as metal obsessed as Coronado had been, but they were just as determined to find their own kind of gold.” 

The Americans viewed themselves as superior to other conquerors, often seeing themselves in Indian legends about vague “saviors from the east.” Sides pinpoints their true motivations here: Just like Coronado and the other Spanish conquistadors, their aim was, above all else, profit. Unlike the conquistadors who sought only gold, the Americans sought valuable trade routes to California and Asia.

“It was a kind of dark symbiosis between authority and action: Fremont needed Carson to carry out his dirty work, and Carson needed Fremont, apparently, to tell him what to do. Modern psychiatry might call these two men codependents.” 

Fremont lacked the frontier know-how and practicality to launch a successful expedition, and Carson lacked self-confidence and connections to powerful people. Together, they accomplished many incredible—and horrific—feats. 

“They had strong medicine, these people. But Narbona did not understand what they wanted with this part of the world, or why they had bothered to come from such a long distance—from somewhere far to the east, beyond the buffalo plains—to leave their mark in a place so far from their ancestors.” 

Both the Indians and the Mexicans placed high cultural importance on connection to the ancestral homeland, which Americans, as a young and largely immigrant culture, sometimes lacked. Narbona questioned why they needed to conquer a land to which they had no real connection.

“Although Narbona was perhaps the most eminent figure among the Navajo, he was not, in fact, a chief. The Navajo did not have leaders in any official sense. Their style of social order was too fluid, too haphazard, and too relentlessly democratic to allow for a single man to rise to any such vaunted position of authority. The Navajo discussed everything at great and often frustrating lengths, rarely confronting an issue but rather dancing elliptically around its edges until the true topic at hand was struck and some sort of consensus reached.” 

Sides articulates the customs and practices of the Navajo, especially when they differ from American norms. The tragedy of the West is made all the more poignant by how difficult it was for the Americans and Indians to see each other’s point of view.

“Whatever the case, the attacks and reprisals were simply part of the grim metronome of life, swinging with the same logic of a feud […] The Navajo 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.” 

One of the most important differences between Anglo-American culture and those of the new Americans: Concepts like permanent peace treaties were completely foreign. The Navajo raiding lifestyle was built entirely around “the grim metronome of life.” 

“‘It was a rare sight,’ [Emory] wrote in praise of the Pimas, ‘to be thrown in the midst of a large nation of what is often termed wild Indians, who surpass many of the Christian nations in agriculture, are little behind them in the useful arts, and are immeasurably before them in honesty and virtue.’” 

Such was the power of racism and Manifest Destiny in 19th-century thought that these sorts of revelations—that Indians could be good people too—were surprisingly common.

“They seized Ignacia and one of them raised his rifle to shoot her, but the Navajo servant woman, who had lived as a paeon with the Bent family for much of her life and was as loyal as she was brave, stood in front of her mistress in an attempt to shield her—and was promptly gunned down.” 

Sides’s depiction of the West often challenges us to revisit difficult, complex topics—in this case, slavery. Here, an enslaved woman gave up her life for her mistress; similarly, a black slave of Charles Bent, Dick Green, will later seek revenge for his master’s death.

“Often in his picturesque landscapes, whether rendered in oil or washes or pencil, he turned his gaze away from the decrepitude of the villages. ‘In all New Mexican towns,’ he wrote, ‘the distant view is the best, as it swallows all the dirt and misery.’” 

Landscape artist Dick Kern embodied the attitudes of many of the American conquerors: They were eager to look away from cultures they deemed unpleasant and ugly, but these communities formed the very fabric of western life. 

“In spreading out and regerminating in smaller hunkered settlements, the descendants of the Anasazi learned the final cautionary lesson of Chaco Canyon: the peril of density in the face of the desert. In a meager landscape, civilization must scatter.” 

James Carleton’s insistence on the semi-nomadic Navajo living a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle was equivalent to genocide. It had been tried before, and the results had been deadly.

“Before they left, Richard Kern overheard one of the thoroughly miffed and confused Navajo headmen asking Colonel Washington—‘If we are friends, why did you take our corn? It is hard, but all we can do is submit.’” 

Absurdly, the Americans often introduced themselves as friends and saviors to the Indians before robbing them blind. The Indians had little recourse.

“It was as though they lacked the retinal nerve that allowed them to see the land for what it was; they could see it only for what it refused to be—namely, the green picturesque scenery and tillable farmland of the settled world from which they had come.” 

American preconceived expectations for what a new world should look like blinded them to the beauty of what they found, much as it blinded them the many benefits offered by the Indian lifestyle.

“‘How is it that they have retrograded in respect to their habitations when they have preserved it in their manufactures?’ Simpson wondered. ‘It seems anomalous to me that a nation living in such miserably constructed mud lodges should, at the same time, be capable of making, probably, the best blankets in the world!’”

Working from an Anglo-American cultural framework, Lieutenant Simpson recognized his own cognitive dissonance. The Navajo prized their Hogan homes for their quick deconstruction and mobility, but Simpson could only prize the goods that also had value to him: blankets.

“As they raced through Washington’s various sticking points, one can only imagine how difficult it must have been for either of the two parties to communicate meaningfully with one another—with so many voids in cultural understanding, with the negotiations shifting erratically from English to Spanish to Navajo.” 

In addition to cultural differences, the language barrier explains many misunderstandings in this treaty signing and others. 

“Carson’s ranch was not far from the Santa Fe Trail, the same road that had brought him here in his youth. His father had been a farmer at the other end of that trail, a thousand miles to the east, in newly cleared forestland that was then the frontier. Now the son was repeating the pattern, one that had been followed by countless other pioneering families in the steady westward crawl of America.” 

Carson’s new and pioneering adventures in the West underscore the cyclical nature of human life, both on a large scale and on an individual, familial scale. 

“Everything he touched, it seemed, had withered. The beaver he had trapped were on the verge of extinction. The Indians he had lived among had been decimated by disease. Virgin solitudes he once loved had been captured by the disenchanting tools of the topographers. The annual rendezvous of the mountain men was a thing of the past. Even the seemingly indestructible Bent’s Fort was no more.” 

Sides summarizes the tragedy of Kit Carson’s success. Through the sheer force of his skills and abilities, Carson changed—and destroyed—the West he loved so much.

“It was difficult to exaggerate how hungry the nation had become for a single heroic character who could personify the surge of Manifest Destiny that was so dramatically changing the country. Of course, many Americans suspected that stealing land from another sovereign power ran counter to the country’s noblest first principles—as did stealing land roamed for millennia by aborigines who just might be human beings. Certainly, there were doubts tugging at the national excitement.” 

Often, the Americans in Blood and Thunder looked for something (or in this case, someone) that might justify their problematic actions, rather than reconsidering the merit of those actions.

“The territory’s myriad adversities wore a soldier down. Within the army, no one much cared for the place, and few were inclined to stay long enough to really understand the Navajo and the true nature of the conflict—let alone solve it.” 

One of the main challenges in forming trust between the Americans and the Navajo was the lack of consistency in American personnel. The Navajo territory was an unpopular assignment because it was so difficult, and it was difficult because no one wanted it as an assignment. 

“Through it all, Manuelito had seen where diplomacy led. He had felt his world shrinking. He had watched his people’s pride wither under the politics of concession. And so he urged his countrymen: No more.” 

In contrast to Narbona’s pro-diplomacy stance, Manuelito headed up the younger, pro-war faction of Navajo. Notably, he had seen his father-in-law killed by American shrapnel immediately after signing a peace treaty.

“On the transverse beam, Carleton had his men carve: VENGEANCE IS MINE, SAITH THE LORD: I WILL REPAY.” 

This ode to retributive justice, etched by Carleton to commemorate the Mountain Meadows Massacre, could be called the cardinal rule of the Carson’s Old West. 

“Through all his bloviating, the general was in fact adding a new conceptual layer to the ancient conflict. Before Carleton’s arrival, the vocabulary of the Navajo wars was centered almost entirely on the principle of punishment—punishment in a raw Old Testament sense. The army was there to ‘chastise’ and ‘overawe’ them, to make them ‘feel the power and the sting of the government.’ But now a certain noblesse oblige had crept into the dialogue, a sense of white man’s burden.” 

The concept of the white man’s burden, in some ways, was more insidious than the blind hatred that came before. It gave the white conquerors a self-righteous sense of Christian generosity when in fact, they were committing cultural (and literal) genocide. 

“Let me tell you what we think. You begin when you are little to work hard. After you get to be men, you build big houses, big towns, and everything else in proportion. Then, after you have got them all, you die and leave them behind. Now, we call that slavery. You are slaves from the time you begin to talk until you die; but we are free as air. The Mexicans and others work for us. Our wants are few and easily supplied. The river, the wood, and plain yield all that we require. We will not be slaves; nor will we send our children to your schools, where they only learn to become like yourselves.” 

Mescalero Apache Chief Cadete responds to an American captain’s curiosity about how he viewed his work. It neatly summarizes many indigenous cultures’ criticisms of the Puritan-inspired American work ethic, in which toil was equated with moral goodness.

“It was New Mexico’s dirty little secret. 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.” 

While slavery existed in a different form in the Southwest than it did in the American South—it wasn’t agrarian, and slaves were sometimes treated more kindly—it was slavery nonetheless.