Blood and Thunder

Kit Carson was the quintessential frontier man, impossibly connected and almost mythic in his omnipresence in the West: He “was present at the creation, it seemed” (31-2). Carson is 36 and has already lived for two decades in the frontier.

Physically, Carson is short and unassuming; in temperament, superstitious and cautious. Paradoxically, he knew many European and Indian languages, but was illiterate himself. Paradox is, in fact, central to understanding Carson’s character: “Yes, Carson was a lovable man. Nearly everyone said so. He was loyal, honest, and kind. […] He was also a natural born killer” (33-4). He lived “more like an Indian than a white man,” yet made a profession out of hunting and killing Indians for years (34-5).

Born on Christmas Eve of 1809 in a log cabin in Kentucky, Carson, along with his family, soon moved to Missouri, the “Ur-country of the trans-Mississippi frontier” (32). Carson learned the dangers of the frontier early in life. His father, Lindsey Carson, was almost killed by local Indians when Kit was four, and he and his siblings lived in fear of being kidnapped. Yet Carson also played with Indian children. He learned “an important practical truth of frontier life—that there was no such thing as ‘Indians’ […] that each group must be dealt with separately, on its own terms” (36-7). 

Kit’s life was changed when his father was killed in a logging accident in 1818. His mother struggled with raising their 10 children, and Kit soon needed to make his own way. At 14, he became an apprentice to a saddler named David Workman in Franklin, Missouri, but the assignment lasted only two years. Kit grew bored after being exposed to the more exciting lifestyle of the trappers who passed through Franklin on the new Santa Fe Trail. Mexico had gained independence from Spain in 1821, opening up new trade opportunities for Americans in the West. In August 1826, Carson signed on with a merchant caravan as a low-wage “savvy boy” and embarked on his first trip across the plains.

Although not impressed by Santa Fe itself, Carson fell in love with the home of the fur trade, Taos, which would become his home base for most of his life. He took up with the mountain men who wintered there and soon joined their ranks. He learned their unique traditions and language, taking various trapping, caravan, and wayfarer jobs and absorbing how to interact with various Indian tribes, experiences that would prove crucial to his success as a frontiersman.

The Navajo had long been a formidable opponent for Mexican settlers. “It was the Navajo menace as much as anything else,” Sides argues, “that made New Mexico so poor, so militarily anemic, and so unready to resist the coming American invasion” (47). Despite being the most feared tribe of the region, the Navajo preferred raiding to outright combat as they were hugely afraid of the supernatural (e.g., Skinwalkers), and, subsequently, of death.

Almost uniquely among Indians in the West, the Navajo lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle (“transhumance”) which centered on the pasturing of livestock. The introduction of the Spanish churro sheep and the horse transformed the Navajo lifestyle, and the sheep of Spanish settlers became their favorite quarry.

Originating from Canada and Alaska, the Navajo and their linguistic cousins, the Apache, traveled to the American Southwest around 1300 C.E. According to the Navajo creation story, the Emergence, they were wandering exiles until they found the “glittering world” in which they settled. Like Kit Carson, “the Navajos had a hand in everything, it seemed”; as “immigrants, improvisationalists, mongrels,” mobility was crucial to their lifestyle, and they adapted the inventions of other cultures to suit their needs (51-2).

In May 1846, at the outset of the Mexican-American War, President Polk called for volunteers. A ragtag squadron of Missourians, soon to become the Army of the West, was led by Stephen Watts Kearny. He trained this army of greenhorns and led them down the Santa Fe Trail on a two-month journey through the Great Plains.

Kearny was pragmatic, disciplined, and measured above all; he expected these same qualities in his troops. A well-to-do Easterner and son of a British loyalist in the Revolutionary War, by 1846, he already had decades of experience exploring the frontier. Unlike many men of his status, Kearny had good relations with the Indians and felt it critical to make peace with them. Not only did he identify alcohol as a great source of ill among them; he even warned them of it: “[…] Whenever you find it in your country, spill it all upon the ground,” he said. “The earth may drink it without injury but you cannot” (57-8).

Prior to the Mexican-American War, Kearny even acted as a referee between warring tribes, a newly common issue due to the American policy of transplanting disparate tribes of eastern Indians into the Plains. He also had a soft spot for horses and personally developed the U.S. Dragoons at Fort Leavenworth, a precursor unit to the U.S. Cavalry. Kearny was distinguished by his bravery in the War of 1812 and steadily rose through the ranks until he was made the commander of this Army of the West.

Chapter 4 opens with a fantastical tale about how Carson won the hand of his first wife, an Arapaho woman named Waa-ni-beh, or Singing Grass. Singing Grass apparently preferred Carson to his rival, a large French-Canadian trapper named Joseph Chouinard, called “the Bully of the Mountains” (61-2). In a knee-jerk shootout atypical of Carson—he had a hot temper, but tended to think such things through—Carson wounded Chouinard and took Singing Grass as his bride. Their marriage was, by most accounts, loving and happy. They had their first child in 1837.

As a mountain man Carson worked first for the fur-trapping Hudson’s Bay Company and then for the famous frontiersman Jim Bridger—“trapping gave him, he later said, ‘the happiest days of my life’” (64-5). The golden years were short-circuited when the economy fell in recession following the Panic of 1837. Worse still, fashion now favored silk hats over the beaver pelts supplied by mountain men like Carson.

Trapping ceased to be a viable trade, and Carson attended the last mountain man rendezvous in 1840. Sometime in 1839, Singing Grass passed away shortly after giving birth to their second child. Carson’s second wife, Making-Out-Road, was significantly less agreeable than Singing Grass, but their marriage was short. By 1842 Caron had fall in love with Josefa Jaramillo, who would be his partner for the rest of his life.

That same year, Carson sent his eldest daughter, Adaline, to be educated with his white family in Missouri. He was ashamed of his own illiteracy and aware of the importance of education. His younger daughter, whose name is unknown, died in a household accident. His children gone, Carson leaned into his frontier lifestyle. To his relatives back home, he was the black sheep of his family; “a wild uncouth boy who married, of all things, an Indian squaw and had a little half-breed girl” (68-9).

Although the Navajo culture had no place for a single, clear-cut chief, Narbona was perhaps the closest thing they had. Narbona was a name given by the Spanish. His Navajo name has been lost, and the superstitious Diné, as the Navajo call themselves, prefer euphemistic names. Chapter 5 explores the Navajo way of life through the imagined upbringing of their great leader Narbona. Sides imagines what Narbona’s childhood might have been like, from being strapped in a cradleboard as an infant to receiving his first pony at six and his first bow at 12.

During Narbona’s time and beyond, the Navajo prized balance above all else. Colors, gemstones, even housing were conceived of on a plane of symmetry. Despite this penchant for balance, Navajo (Dinetah) was characterized by geological chaos, larger-than-life landmarks, and the twists and turns of its red rock canyons. The most impressive formation near Narbona’s home turf was Tsoodzil, or Blue Bead Mountain, one of the four sacred mountains which encompassed Navajo land. Navajo “were not supposed to venture beyond the borders formed by these great peaks or else they would face sickness or death” (72-3).

The greatest Navajo enemy was the Ute. In the 1770s and 1780s, warfare and slave-catching between the tribes were constant. Narbona came up in this climate and proved himself an excellent raider of both rival Indian tribes, and Spanish settlements along the Rio Grande. In 1804, he almost drove the Spanish from a contested fort known as Cebolleta. Although the Spanish had won a land grant to settle there from the governor in Santa Fe, the Navajo considered Blue Bead Mountain to be sacred land belonging to them. These sorts of cultural misunderstandings and conflicts were common in the Southwest.