Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (Hardcover)

by Hampton Sides (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Although delivering little in the way of new information, Sides, an Outside magazine editor-at-large and bestselling author (Ghost Soldiers), eloquently paints the landscape and history of the 19th-century Southwest, combining Larry McMurtry's lyricism with the historian's attachment to facts. Inevitably, Sides's main focus is the virtual decimation of the Navajo nation from the 1820s to the late 1860s. Sides depicts the complex role of whites in the subjugation of the Navajos through his portrait of Kit Carson—an illiterate trapper, soldier and scout who knew the Native Americans intimately, married two of them and, without blinking, participated in the Indians' slaughter. Books about Carson have been numerous, but Sides is better than most Carson biographers in setting his exploits against a larger backdrop: the unstoppable idea of manifest destiny. Of course, as counterpoint to the progress of Carson and other whites, Sides details the fierce but doomed defense mounted by the Navajos over long decades. This culminated in their final, desperate "stand" during 1863 at Canyon de Chelly, more than a decade after a contingent of federal troops—operating under a commander whose last name of "Washington" seems ironic in this context—killed their great leader, Narbona. (Oct. 3)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
With Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides has taken an implausibly broad canvas of time, people and events and created a brilliantly realized portrait on an epic scale. The United States conquest of the Southwest involved territory ranging from St. Louis to Mexico City and California, as well as a large array of principal figures. Sides has wisely chosen Christopher "Kit" Carson and Santa Fe as the human and geographical touchstones.

Carson was the consummate frontiersman, who had traveled widely across the West as a trapper, scout and adventurer long before the events of the Mexican War brought his abilities to the attention of the U.S. military. Illiterate but fluent in five Indian languages as well as Spanish, he'd had two Native American wives before marrying into an old Spanish family from Taos. Carson, who seems often to have been at the right place at the right (or wrong) time, had a deep understanding of the complex clash of cultures taking place. And yet his ultimate devotion to duty and patriotism earned him an enmity among the Navajo that extends to the present day. In Sides's depiction, Carson was a humble loner who became an unflinching killer when circumstances or superiors demanded it.

The center of events, in many ways, was Santa Fe, the old Spanish territorial capital almost forgotten by the authorities in Mexico City, more or less functioning under self-government often at the expense of the settlers and natives. It was also the long-sought terminus of the famous trading trail bearing its name, believed by the United States to offer the best possible route to California and the Pacific coast. In truth, it was more symbolic than anything else: a dusty backwater of an empire under collapse, whose occupants were subject to routine raids from a number of tribes.

President James Polk entered office with one absolute intention: to extend the western boundary of the territorial United States to the Pacific Ocean. While not the author of the concept of Manifest Destiny, he was the first president to initiate military action under that theory. There's no doubt Polk inaugurated the Mexican War with little or no basis beyond his own will. At that point, the native peoples of the regi