Blood and Thunder is a blockbuster! With this sweeping and comprehensive history, Hampton Sides vividly and engagingly retells the story of James K. Polk's and the nation's drive to absorb the West and expand America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Along with this outsized and bold tale of conquest and manifest destiny, Sides generously presents us with a whole constellation of people and events, such as the deliberately provoked (by the U.S.) Mexican-American war, the jarring clash of Native-American and Anglo cultures, the life of the great leader of the Navajos, Narbona, and his awful death, the relentless and brutal efforts of the US Army at eradication of the Navajos and other tribespeople, the coming of the Civil War to New Mexico, and the creation of one of America's first pop heros, Kit Carson. Through newspapers and trashy pulp fiction westerns, known at the time as "blood and thunders," a larger than life western Indian killer and superhero was born, which had nothing whatever to do with the real person. But Americans needed such a hero as Kit Carson to entertain them and to make them feel safe in venturing far away to the west. Sides focuses in on Kit Carson's real life as if it were almost representative of an entire era.
The historian Sides is scrupulously even-handed in the telling of this tale and spares us no details, proving that history is often a messy business where sometimes the bad and good intermingle in the same person and event, and one can perhaps never know the whole truth. Nowhere in this work is this more clearly shown than in the person of Christopher Carson, the quiet, unassuming, and illiterate central figure in this drama who had an urge at a young age to take off to parts unknown. He first apprenticed as a trapper and learned from the best of the mountain men, then took the western landscape in as if it were a part of him. He became the most reliable guide and trailblazer known and began to serve the US Army as it sought to tame not only the wild natives but the nation of Mexico as the one-dimensional president, James K. Polk, pursued his obsession of obtaining the West for America. Carson himself, Sides tells us, had a deep abiding respect for the native peoples, married first an Arapaho woman, whom he deeply loved, and, after her sad death, he married a Cheyenne, which quickly proved to be a disaster. On his farmstead in Taos, he coexisted with and accommodated nearby tribes, who knew of and respected him. And he knew and understood the customs of many of the tribes. Yet he also exhibited unbridled violence and murdered countless warriors for what he thought were just causes. Another seeming irony in Carson's life was his being a willing instrument in opening up the West to the rest of the nation, but then sensing, toward the 1850s, that the very settlers he helped were shrinking the once inexhaustible land. They wantonly and stupidly slaughtered the buffalo, were wiping out the silvertip grizzlies, and had brought smallpox and other European diseases to the defenseless tribes, helping to wipe them out as well. Carson, as Sides says, "saw the tendrils of civilization creeping in; the America he had left behind [in the East] was finally catching up with him."
This is an extraordinary book, filled with heros and villains, and richly and expertly written. Although Kit Carson's life figures prominently in this work, many other pivotal figures are brought to life to tell this tale. One can never go out West again and feel quite the same about it after reading this work. I urge you not to miss it.
