Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West Read Online Free Page B
Author: Hampton Sides
Tags: United States, General, History, Biography & Autobiography, Military, Native American, 19th century, Indians of North America, Adventurers & Explorers, Frontier and Pioneer Life, Wars, West (U.S.), West (U.S.) - History; Military - 19th Century, Indians of North America - Wars, Indians of North America - History - 19th Century, Frontier and Pioneer Life - West (U.S.), West (U.S.) - History - 19th Century, Navajo Indians - History - 19th Century, United States - Territorial Expansion, Carson; Kit
so, like the Blackfoot and the Comanche. But they also knew that the Indian style of battle was often very different from European warfare, that it was difficult to engage Native Americans in a pitched battle, that their method was consistently one of raid and ambush, attack and scatter, snipe and vanish. The mountain men said that Indians were often like wolves: Run, and they follow; follow, and they run.
The trappers murdered Indians in countless kill-or-be-killed scenarios, and some made a practice of hammering brass tacks into the stocks of their rifles for every native dispatched. But their greater slaughter was unwitting: As the forerunners of Western civilization, creeping up the river valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought smallpox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.
That spring Carson and Ewing Young’s party worked along the Gila tributaries, moving into increasingly strange country that had never been mapped. One day Young’s camp on the Salt River was approached by Apaches. Sensing hostility, most of Young’s men concealed themselves beneath packsaddles and blankets, emboldening the Apaches to swoop down on what they thought was an easy target. Soon “the hills were covered with Indians,” as Carson recalled, but when the attackers drew within range, Ewing’s men sprang from their hiding places and drew their beads. Aiming his rifle, Carson killed his first Indian, shooting him, as an early biographer put it, “straight through the nipple at which he had aimed—straight through the heart within.”
He does not mention it in his autobiography, but according to one account, Carson then removed his sheath knife and pulled back the dead Apache’s scalp, as was the common custom among the mountain men.
Carson was nineteen years old.
Chapter 2: THE GLITTERING WORLD
All across New Mexico, the threat of Navajo raiders gave life an undertow of anxiety. The settlers dwelled in a state of vigilance, always half-listening, scanning the sagebrush for movement. Everyone knew some family whose child or mother had been carried off. In the foothills, cairns often studded the pastures. Decorated with crosses or flowers, these markers memorialized shepherds who had been cut down. At a very young age, New Mexicans learned to hate and fear the word “Navajo.”
Other tribes preyed upon the New Mexican settlements as well. The Utes in the north, the Kiowas and Comanches in the east, the Apaches in the south. But the Navajos were the strongest, richest, and most creatively adaptable of all the raiding tribes. They were the ancient scourge of an ancient province. As a result of Navajo attacks, the very first Spanish colonial capital of New Mexico, a promising settlement on the Rio Grande called San Gabriel, had been quickly abandoned in 1610 and relocated to the safer remove of present-day Santa Fe. The word “Navajo”—a word of Pueblo Indian origin meaning “people of the great planted fields”—first appeared in a Spanish document in 1626. (The Navajo called themselves “the Diné,” which simply means “the people.”) An account from the early 1600s by a Spanish friar referred to “the Nabaju” as “a very bellicose people…who occupy all frontiers and surround us completely.”
In 1659, Fray Juan Ramirez referred to the Navajos as “heathens who kill Christians and carry off others alive to perish in cruel martyrdom.” A half century later, Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez condemned the Navajos for “their crimes, their audacity, and their reckless depredations upon this kingdom.”
The Spanish had tried for a time to Christianize the Navajos—literally chaining them to church pews,
The trappers murdered Indians in countless kill-or-be-killed scenarios, and some made a practice of hammering brass tacks into the stocks of their rifles for every native dispatched. But their greater slaughter was unwitting: As the forerunners of Western civilization, creeping up the river valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought smallpox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.
That spring Carson and Ewing Young’s party worked along the Gila tributaries, moving into increasingly strange country that had never been mapped. One day Young’s camp on the Salt River was approached by Apaches. Sensing hostility, most of Young’s men concealed themselves beneath packsaddles and blankets, emboldening the Apaches to swoop down on what they thought was an easy target. Soon “the hills were covered with Indians,” as Carson recalled, but when the attackers drew within range, Ewing’s men sprang from their hiding places and drew their beads. Aiming his rifle, Carson killed his first Indian, shooting him, as an early biographer put it, “straight through the nipple at which he had aimed—straight through the heart within.”
He does not mention it in his autobiography, but according to one account, Carson then removed his sheath knife and pulled back the dead Apache’s scalp, as was the common custom among the mountain men.
Carson was nineteen years old.
Chapter 2: THE GLITTERING WORLD
All across New Mexico, the threat of Navajo raiders gave life an undertow of anxiety. The settlers dwelled in a state of vigilance, always half-listening, scanning the sagebrush for movement. Everyone knew some family whose child or mother had been carried off. In the foothills, cairns often studded the pastures. Decorated with crosses or flowers, these markers memorialized shepherds who had been cut down. At a very young age, New Mexicans learned to hate and fear the word “Navajo.”
Other tribes preyed upon the New Mexican settlements as well. The Utes in the north, the Kiowas and Comanches in the east, the Apaches in the south. But the Navajos were the strongest, richest, and most creatively adaptable of all the raiding tribes. They were the ancient scourge of an ancient province. As a result of Navajo attacks, the very first Spanish colonial capital of New Mexico, a promising settlement on the Rio Grande called San Gabriel, had been quickly abandoned in 1610 and relocated to the safer remove of present-day Santa Fe. The word “Navajo”—a word of Pueblo Indian origin meaning “people of the great planted fields”—first appeared in a Spanish document in 1626. (The Navajo called themselves “the Diné,” which simply means “the people.”) An account from the early 1600s by a Spanish friar referred to “the Nabaju” as “a very bellicose people…who occupy all frontiers and surround us completely.”
In 1659, Fray Juan Ramirez referred to the Navajos as “heathens who kill Christians and carry off others alive to perish in cruel martyrdom.” A half century later, Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez condemned the Navajos for “their crimes, their audacity, and their reckless depredations upon this kingdom.”
The Spanish had tried for a time to Christianize the Navajos—literally chaining them to church pews,
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