I've lived all of my 38 years in the American West, and sadly, in all that time I've learned nothing of its history. The West, unlike practically every other region in America doesn't have a Lincoln Monument or a Civil War battlefield or a Colonial Williamsburg.
OK, that's not entirely true, historic Spanish missions and ancient Indian ruins dot the Southwest, but the West is better known for monuments of Prehistory (Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Rockies, etc.) rather than American history.
If there was a single man who defined the West and who brought a magical historical gravitas to every rock he touched and every forlorn creek he drank from, it was Kit Carson. Journalist John Sullivan may have coined the phrase, and the curmudgeonly James K. Polk may have been its architect, but it was Kit Carson who willingly or not personified the romance and blood of American "Manifest Destiny."
Hampton Sides' "Blood and Thunder" is a gory and glorious report on Carson and the conquest of the American West. Carson's name of course is ubiquitous in the West with rivers, mountains, parks, and even towns and cities bearing his namesake. As a born and bred westerner, you just grow up taking his name for granted as you can't cross a river he hasn't forded, a mountain he hasn't climbed or a desert he hasn't traversed. However, as many times as Carson escaped certain death at the hands of hostile Indians, drunken French trappers, not to mention that callous bitch Mother Nature, he was also reliably at the fulcrum of events that turned the West from a Spanish/Mexican Outback, to a continent that would spread from Boston to Santa Barbara.
That's not entirely a good thing.
The flip-side of our ocean-to-ocean ambitions was the premeditated destruction of entire civilizations, particularly the Navajos led by their immortal "Chief" Narbona. (I put 'chief' in quotes, because the Navajo didn't have a strict hierarchy, although Narbona's authority is rarely questioned.) Here Sides masterfully shows Carson, in spite of his lack of formal education and simple demeanor, as a complex man wrestling with the contradiction of his reverence for the Navajos and the inevitability of their conquest.
It seems Carson's siding with Polk and his generals was as inevitable as the conquest and subjugation of the Navajos.
This is one of those rare history books that grips you like a Charles Dickens novel...come to think of it, in "Blood and Thunder" we even find Dickens chiming in on the exploits of Kit Carson. Like the labyrinthine network of canyons where the Navajos would make their last stand against a patient and merciless Carson, the book follows every dead end, meticulously probes every cave and every boulder-strewn narrow and when it's done, we no longer see the lonely, crowded West of stretching suburbs and resort communities, but instead we get a rare peek into an enchanted land, a West that quit existing the moment we set foot in it.
A compelling read.
I'd like to thank my Mom for generously donating this book.
OK, that's not entirely true, historic Spanish missions and ancient Indian ruins dot the Southwest, but the West is better known for monuments of Prehistory (Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Rockies, etc.) rather than American history.
If there was a single man who defined the West and who brought a magical historical gravitas to every rock he touched and every forlorn creek he drank from, it was Kit Carson. Journalist John Sullivan may have coined the phrase, and the curmudgeonly James K. Polk may have been its architect, but it was Kit Carson who willingly or not personified the romance and blood of American "Manifest Destiny."
Hampton Sides' "Blood and Thunder" is a gory and glorious report on Carson and the conquest of the American West. Carson's name of course is ubiquitous in the West with rivers, mountains, parks, and even towns and cities bearing his namesake. As a born and bred westerner, you just grow up taking his name for granted as you can't cross a river he hasn't forded, a mountain he hasn't climbed or a desert he hasn't traversed. However, as many times as Carson escaped certain death at the hands of hostile Indians, drunken French trappers, not to mention that callous bitch Mother Nature, he was also reliably at the fulcrum of events that turned the West from a Spanish/Mexican Outback, to a continent that would spread from Boston to Santa Barbara.
That's not entirely a good thing.
The flip-side of our ocean-to-ocean ambitions was the premeditated destruction of entire civilizations, particularly the Navajos led by their immortal "Chief" Narbona. (I put 'chief' in quotes, because the Navajo didn't have a strict hierarchy, although Narbona's authority is rarely questioned.) Here Sides masterfully shows Carson, in spite of his lack of formal education and simple demeanor, as a complex man wrestling with the contradiction of his reverence for the Navajos and the inevitability of their conquest.
It seems Carson's siding with Polk and his generals was as inevitable as the conquest and subjugation of the Navajos.
This is one of those rare history books that grips you like a Charles Dickens novel...come to think of it, in "Blood and Thunder" we even find Dickens chiming in on the exploits of Kit Carson. Like the labyrinthine network of canyons where the Navajos would make their last stand against a patient and merciless Carson, the book follows every dead end, meticulously probes every cave and every boulder-strewn narrow and when it's done, we no longer see the lonely, crowded West of stretching suburbs and resort communities, but instead we get a rare peek into an enchanted land, a West that quit existing the moment we set foot in it.
A compelling read.
I'd like to thank my Mom for generously donating this book.
