Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West (Anchor Books, 2007)
by Hampton Sides
USA, 2006
For a California boy with an unfortunately all too inadequate understanding of how the West was won and lost, I thought
Blood and Thunder was a solid, entertaining, and ultimately an entirely adequate introduction to a subject I hope to be spending some more time with over the course of the year. Its many bibliographical suggestions should prove quite useful as well. Using a biography of famed frontiersman/Indian fighter Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson (1809-1868) as the focal point of an ambitious three-pronged narrative also having to do with the U.S. war with Mexico and the U.S. military's often genocidal war on the American Indians, Sides brings the "Manifest Destiny" era to life with a measured account that manages to be very readable and nuanced despite the sprawling scale of the worlds-in-collision events under consideration. While I'm tempted to complain that the 578-page chunkster is maybe a little too long for its own good in parts (like an overly chatty friend, the journalist Sides apparently never met an anecdote that he didn't like), I suppose that's a small price to pay for a work as sensitive to the costs of American expansionism on the continent as this one. Perhaps because of my own pro-Mexican and Native American and anti-settler biases for this time period, though, I have to say that I often found myself less interested in Carson's remarkable life story than in what was going on around him. Sides writes, for example, of an occasion in 1846 when the so-called Army of the West encountered a "vast herd of buffalo, easily a quarter million strong" near Pawnee Rock on the Santa Fe Trail--part of an overall buffalo population of "as many as 50 million [which] roamed the Great Plains at this time" (69). In thinking about these astounding numbers--way greater than what I had remembered from reading about the senseless slaughter of the buffalo back in my high school days--it's naturally only a short hop, skip and a jump to thinking about the
human population losses that also resulted from U.S. westward movement. To give you just one small example, Sides later writes of the one out of every three Navajos who died in captivity at the first western reservation experiment at Bosque Redondo from 1863-1868 (481). Whatever your feelings on whether these tradeoffs were necessary to bring about an eventual shopping mall culture in 20th and 21st century America, it's hard not to feel an
ubi sunt moment for the eradication of an entire way of life out west even knowing the outcome of the story in advance. (
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Hampton Sides
U.S. diplomacy in action: November 21, 1846
"The United States," [Col. Alexander Doniphan] began, "has taken military possession of New Mexico and her laws now extend over the whole territory. The New Mexicans will be protected against violence and invasion, and their rights will be amply preserved. But the United States is also anxious to enter into a treaty of peace and lasting friendship with you, her red children, the Navajos. The same protection will be given to you that has been guaranteed the New Mexicans. I come with ample powers to negotiate a permanent peace between you, the New Mexicans, and us. If you refuse to treat on terms honorable to both parties, I am instructed to prosecute a war against you. The United States makes no second treaty with the same people; she offers the olive branch, and if that is rejected, then she offers powder, bullet, and steel."
(Blood and Thunder, 189)
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