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Epic account of conquest of the West

Kit Carson and the wild West come to life in 'Blood and Thunder'

Date published: 10/22/2006

By CLINT SCHEMMER

If you grew up watching Hollywood Westerns, you may still harbor romantic visions of the old frontier, colored by the myth-making of director John Ford, actor John Wayne and countless others.

Well, if Dustin Hoffman's 1970 film "Little Big Man" didn't snuff out your illusions about heroism in the West, Hampton Sides' riveting saga of Manifest Destiny will. It's the most chilling account of our conquest of the Western Indians, and its result, since Peter Matthiesson's book "Indian Country."

But before Sides arrives at the tragic conclusion to decades of Indian fighting, he delivers a sweeping, nuanced account of Western exploration, trapping, gold fever, Indian raids, the Mexican war, the capture of California, massacres, the Navajos' Long Walk and the creation of the U.S. reservation system.

This is a hugely impressive work, five years in the making. For all its breadth, it never loses sight of the small human stories, and is rich in detail, context and first-person voices.

Sides, who lives in Sante Fe, N.M., intended to write a book on the Army's 1863 siege of the Navajos' last stronghold, the dreaded Canyon de Chelly, and the cruel hardships that sprang from it. But digging into various archives, he realized that story was just part of a much larger one--that of the 20-year campaign to wrest the West from the Mexicans, various tribes and even a strange fragment of the Confederate army.

At the center of all that stood one colorful figure, Kit Carson. Revered by his contemporaries for his courage, cool judgment and military prowess, he was feared by the natives, to whom he showed little mercy. The old trapper--who spoke six Indian languages and had both Indian and Mexican wives--had joined the Union army to evict Gen. H.H. Sibley's Texan rebels from the Southwest, not fight Indians. But he wound up with a far different mission.

Blood and Thunder By Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 480 pages, $26.95)

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Date published: 10/22/2006