Scorched earth

THE title of Hampton Sides’ new book, “Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West,” seems an ironic homage to the shallow, mass-produced western melodramas ground out in the 1800s. But there is nothing shallow about the writing of the bestselling author of “Ghost Soldiers” as he tackles the U.S. campaign to wrest much of the West from its Native American and Mexican occupants in the mid-19th century. Indeed, Sides writes, after President Polk committed himself to extending the nation’s western boundary to the Pacific Ocean in 1845, the howitzers that the Navajo called “lightning bolts” left the ground soaked in blood from Missouri to California.

In stunning detail, Sides reveals how the political ideology of Manifest Destiny led white Americans to believe they were relieving Native Americans of the burden of their land and saving them at re-education centers where they would be taught the ways of whites. Such blatant real estate grabs, undertaken on the basis of racial entitlement, were considered completely justified, given the widespread belief that Native Americans were savages. Sides shows how a pernicious combination of pseudo patriotism, a sense of entitlement and sheer opportunism made annexation of half a continent seem almost inevitable. Then, once that land had been taken, the U.S. government instituted a system of laws to enshrine that seizure.

Sides also points out that the same mind-set existed among Mexicans. He cites the journal of Susan Magoffin, the wife of a white soldier, who wrote that she was “distressed to see a ‘dark-eyed senora,’ from a well-to-do Spanish family who had brought along a ‘human foot stool,’ as Magoffin called it -- an Indian servant crouched on the floor for her mistress to use between dances, ‘as an article of furniture’ ” at a ball in Santa Fe in the Mexican territory of New Mexico. In this land, Westerners of every hue were slaveholders.

What’s remarkable is how serendipitously the occupation of the Southwest lurched along. Sides writes that the Mexican governor of Santa Fe had a clear tactical advantage yet panicked and abandoned the city to the Americans in 1846. He describes how a vengeful Catholic priest incited rebellion at the prospect of losing influence to occupying U.S. soldiers in nearby Taos in 1847, and how a meeting between the Navajo and U.S. forces resulted in the killing of the revered tribal elder Narbona in 1849.

Sides tackles this epic period in American history as though he were a literary mule skinner. He eschews the romantic legends of the West that ennobled the horse, and writes of beasts more suited to heavy lifting. “Cussed though they assuredly were,” he writes, “mules, not horses, were ‘winning’ the West. The sterile cross between a horse mare and a jackass, mules were stronger, sturdier, surer-footed, and less liable to spook.” Handling the reins of this saga with judicious assurance, he pulls us through the seemingly constant series of skirmishes being waged at the time, the tiffs over territory, livestock, women and children. The Mexicans of European descent were at odds with native tribes, which, in turn, were at war with each other. During the Civil War, when the Union was locked in intractable conflict with the Confederacy, it also was battling Seminole and Cherokee, as well as Mexicans, Navajo, Apache and the Ute, among others, in the Southwest. Thousands of horses, mules and oxen were driven to their deaths in forced marches and battles. It was a busy time.

Although this discussion of U.S. history reveals little that is particularly new, especially to scholars, Sides makes this period spring to life by linking his story to that of the legendary guide Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson as he traveled back and forth across the continent on his mule, toting messages he couldn’t read. Those readers with a preference for linear logic will be frustrated to find this loyal husband of two Native American women taking the occasional Indian scalp when he was in a lather. )

Born in 1809 in Kentucky, Carson comes across as the original Western hero. From the very beginning, his instincts were uncanny and his luck was exceptional. He always seemed to be on hand when help was needed. But one of his flaws was his inability to say “no” to a friend.

And so it came to pass that Brig. Gen. James Henry Carleton, “a Puritan schoolmaster with a zeal for social engineering,” tried to recruit Carson to root out the Navajo from their lands and move them to the Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Carson begged off, but Carleton, who was trying to open the land to gold prospecting, pressed hard, knowing that no one else would be as effective in carrying out his orders.

In the end, Carson, who’d been made a general, agreed, invoking a scorched-earth policy with a vengeance that might have shocked Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Carson knew the Navajo could never have been hunted down by noisy whites with their loud guns, but they could be starved out.

The Navajos’ “Long Walk” to the Bosque Redondo resulted in hundreds perishing, but shortly after Carson died, tribal members were allowed to return to their ancestral home near Blue Bead Mountain in what is now northeastern Arizona. Sides captures the barbarity and the complexities of the time and place with singular details that ring absolutely true. Both haunting and lyrical, “Blood and Thunder” is truly a masterpiece. *