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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.
Years before Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea, Carson led the scorched-earth campaign that flushed the Navajos from their canyon homeland, subjugated them and ended their raids on settlers' livestock. Nearly 9,000 Dine , as the Navajo call themselves, were forced to move 400 miles from their cliff fortresses at Canyon de Chelly to badly chosen, alkali-poisoned reservation bottomland along New Mexico's Pecos River. Some 500 died along the way. The exodus was second in size only to the Cherokees' Trail of Tears, and just as heart-rending.
This tragedy, fostered by Maj. Gen. John Henry Carleton, was the final exploit in Carson's long and incredible life. It wore him out, and eventually killed him.
Carson never doubted Anglo-Americans' right to seize the West from its native peoples, yet he believed--and said flat out--that most of the Indian troubles there were created by "by aggressions on the part of the whites." In his dying days, the old Indian fighter became the natives' advocate.
Sides, who wrote the best-seller "Ghost Soldiers," the basis for the 2005 film "The Great Raid," has combed the stacks, consulted scholars, roamed the tribes' homelands and followed in Carson's footsteps. His efforts yield an even-handed historical narrative that respects and shows great empathy for the Indians, but explains events as they were, not as romantics then, or later, painted them.
The work's double-edged title is taken from both the conflicts Sides describes and the frothy "blood-and-thunder" dime novels of derring-do in the West that became hugely popular in the mid- to late 19th century. Carson was one of the first figures chronicled and made famous by those pieces of puffery.
The publisher has subtitled the book "An Epic of the American West." In this case, unlike so many others, the adjective is well-earned.
If you have time for just one volume on how--truly--the West was won, be sure to pick up this one. You won't regret it.
To reach CLINT SCHEMMER
Email: cschemmer@freelancestar.com
Blood and Thunder By Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 480 pages, $26.95) |
