Review by Hal Walter
History – December 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Blood and Thunder – An Epic of the American West
by Hampton Sides
Published in 2006 by Doubleday
ISBN: 1400031109
WHEN I LIVED in the nearby town of Wetmore in the 1980s, one of my favorite workouts was a 6-mile round-trip run to “Kit Carson Rock” in Greenwood.
Etched in the blackish-gray stone, covered by iron bars and cemented to the ground, were the scratches purported to be made by the famous scout, guide and military leader. Countless times I stared at this rock. I could never make out anything resembling Carson’s name, and wondered if this local landmark could be authentic.
After reading Hampton Sides’ recent book, Blood and Thunder — An Epic of the American West, I am convinced the rock etching is purely rural legend. Not that I doubt Carson frequented the area. Surely he did as he seemed to be everywhere. Besides, the trail along Hardscrabble Creek is part of a natural route from Bent’s Fort east of Pueblo to Fort Garland and Taos, New Mexico. My suspicion about the rock’s authenticity is based more on a practical notion — Carson didn’t have extra time or spare energy for such an exercise in vanity.
Blood and Thunder is without a doubt the best book I have read this year. Flowing more like a novel than a history lesson, it chronicles the life of Carson from his 1826 “jumping off” on the Santa Fe Trail in Missouri at age 16 to his death at Fort Lyon at age 59. And it does so within the historic context of the settling of the West, a tumultuous time of war and conflict between Spanish and Mexican settlers, Native American tribes, and the encroaching “New Men” from the east, hell-bent on a mission of Manifest Destiny.
From the beginning, Sides masterfully weaves the stories of Carson with those of the Navajo leader Narbona, Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West, President James K. Polk, Army explorer John C. Frémont, William and Charles Bent, Brigadier Gen. James Henry Carlton, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, and a host of others.
Perhaps most striking is the book’s ability to convey the great distances covered by Carson on his various travels and missions. At one point Carson blazes a trail to the Pacific with Frémont, and is sent back east with papers announcing the successful conquest of California. However, he is intercepted by Kearny and his troops near Soccoro, New Mexico, and ordered to accompany the general and his dragoons back to California.
And much of this travel was done on the back of a mule. As the owner of some long-eared equines myself, I was particularly amused by Sides’ short, frank discussion on horses versus mules. He points out that the early explorers relied extensively on mules because they could carry heavier loads for longer on less and poorer-quality feed.
Sides goes to some effort to make it clear that contrary to popular belief, mules, not horses, won the west, writing: “every time Carson aimed for the other side of the continent, he was on a mule.” Even the venerable equestrian Kearny suffered “the indignity of mounting a mule” after his horse expired en route to California.
At one point, when Carson was attempting to retire from fighting and transition into ranching, he drove 6,000 sheep from New Mexico to northern California, battling Indians and wolves the entire way.
As you may guess, the stories surrounding Carson and the others are on a collision course. The book reaches its brutal crescendo following the Civil War, when Carson leads a “scorched earth” campaign to dislodge the Navajo, or Diné, from their homeland surrounding Canyon de Chelly in eastern Arizona. As a result the Diné were forced on a 400-mile march known as “The Navajo Long Walk” across New Mexico from Fort Defiance to Fort Sumner, where Carlton had envisioned a reservation at Bosque Redondo.
The Bosque Redondo experiment was a colossal failure and Sides speculates it was Carson, nearing his death in 1868, who helped convince Sherman to send the Diné back to their country.
It is to Sides’ credit that I was left with an impression of Carson neither as a gallant hero nor a heinous villain. He simply was what he was: a “natural born killer” who was a product of his geography and time. Remarkably, those times really weren’t all that long ago.
I also could not help but to draw striking parallels between the mid-1800s notion of Manifest Destiny and our country’s current predicament in Iraq and the Middle East. It brings up questions of whether we’ve learned anything from history, and whether as a nation our collective psyche has evolved in any way.
The etching on the rock near Wetmore may or may not be real. But it doesn’t really matter either way. As Blood and Thunder makes so poignantly clear, Kit Carson left an altogether different type of signature over the West, one that’s carved into something even harder and more enduring than rock.
For anyone interested in Western history, particularly that of New Mexico and the Southwest, Blood and Thunder is highly recommended.