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

by Hampton Sides (Author)
Key Phrases: mountain howitzers, New Mexico, United States, Kit Carson (more...)

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
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 region were considered by the authorities to be little more than noisome pests to be easily dispatched with on the way toward an audacious land-grab from Mexico.

How wrong they were.

The Navajo warrior Narbona was in his 80s when the U.S. Army straggled in from the east, and he watched them come. His age and great wealth, measured largely in herds of horses and flocks of sheep, along with his long experience through peace and war with the Spanish settlers, placed him in a position of influence within an intricate, matrilineal, clan-driven tribe. To what degree he understood the role of chieftain that the Americans thrust upon him can't be known. It appears he accepted at least the premise in an effort to educate the Americans about Navajo culture and concepts of land ownership and use. At the same time, he was quietly determined to maintain the Navajo way of life.

Briefly, it appeared there might be hope for both sides, but Narbona was shot to death by a U.S. trooper who believed one of Narbona's warriors had stolen a horse. With the death of this wise man, all possibility of avoiding open warfare vanished. The Navajo faded back into the vast desert mountains and canyons of their homeland, leading to a protracted and fruitless series of expeditions against them that became successful only after the United States, led by Carson under the command of Gen. James Henry Carleton, initiated a scorched-earth policy. This finally culminated in the Navajo surrender and the infamous Long Walk to a barren redoubt in eastern New Mexico, where the defeated tribe began a disastrous period of disease and confinement.

Although the campaign against the Navajo anchors Blood and Thunder, Sides also details a panoply of events surrounding the Mexican War and its aftermath. These include the taking of California from the Spanish and British, as well as the ill-fated and short-lived Bear Flag Rebellion; the last of the famed rendezvous of the mountain men at Green River, Utah; and the bedraggled Confederate army's failed attempt to extend the Confederacy into the Southwest. There was a constant undercurrent of outrage and barbarity on all fronts and among all principal parties, Americans, Spanish, Mexican and Indian. Toss in accounts of a number of explorers, fortune-seekers, scoundrels, politicians, inept military adventurers, madmen and fools, and it all begins to sound like a collaboration between Cormac McCarthy and Federico Fellini.

But this is neither film nor novel. The truth of history is often fickle and difficult to determine, and Sides demonstrates his awareness of this with a riveting narrative focus. Like the authors of many other recent works of popular history, Sides dispenses with footnotes but offers an exhaustive bibliography that underscores the scope of this monumental undertaking. Not only does Blood and Thunder capture a pivotal moment in U.S. history in marvelous detail, it is also authoritative and masterfully told.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Lent
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; Third Printing edition (October 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385507771
• ISBN-13: 978-0385507776
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (146 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #54,991 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

152 of 174 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly Engaging and Brilliantly Written, October 3, 2006

By	John Sollami (Stamford, CT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The results of manifest destiny. . ., October 20, 2006

By	Bill Pullman "Book reviewer" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a beautifully written book that takes epic form in retelling the settling of the American southwest from 1820 through the 1860s. From the Mexican war to the removal of the Navajo from Canyon de Chelly, Hampton Sides writes an engaging account of the results of manifest destiny, showing both sides, warts and all. The white man, while seeming noble in purpose, is shown to have been lacking in honor, and while the Indians were certainly shafted time and again they had many of their own faults. Central to this story is the famous mountain man Kit Carson, a man of many contradictions: though extremely intelligent he was also illiterate; he could speak many of the native languages, understood the Indian ways, and even had Indian wives but he also participated in the slaughter and removal from their lands of these same Indians. The book also includes engaging portraits of many of the important figures of this time period: Stephen Watts Kearny, John Fremont, the Navajo warrior Narbona, and Senator Thomas Benton. the Author is even handed and fair in portraying all those involved. This book proves that truth is stranger than fiction. And for an excellent read set in the modern American west do check out Across the High Lonesome.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Walks In Beauty, November 4, 2006

By	John R. Lindermuth (Coal Township PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Hampton Sides has given us a multi-faceted examination of the men and forces involved in the conquest of the American West and the way of life of its original settlers.

At the center is Christopher "Kit" Carson, who was a pivotal figure in the events and whose life has been so distorted by legend most today have little inkling of just how complex an individual and how heroic--in the true sense of the word--the man really was.

There are also telling portraits of others: President James Polk, engineer of Manifest Destiny, who believed it was his nation's biblical right to seize real estate all the way to the Pacific, no matter who else might claim the land; Stephen Watts Kearny, father of the U.S. Cavalry and one of the most underrated officers produced by this country, who Polk used to spearhead his land lust; the equally ambitious John C. Fremont and his father-in-law, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, the apostle of Manifest Destiny; the energetic and interesting Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, whose well-meaning dream of a refuge for the Navajo led them to Bosque Redondo and near extinction; the great Navajo leaders Narbona, Manuelito and Barboncito, and many others.

Diminutive in stature, Carson was--as Sides describes him early on: "...a lovable man...loyal, honest, and kind. In many pinpointable incidents, he acted bravely and with much physical grace. More than once, he saved people's lives without seeking recognition or pay. He was a dashing good Samaritan--a hero, even."

In the very next paragraph, Sides says, "He was also a natural born killer."

Carson was all of that. A humble man, a brave man, loyal to his friends, a demon to his enemies. He was a man of his times, yet stood head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries. Married to a Mexican, he shared the viewpoint of his Hispanic relatives and neighbors when it came to the Navajo and was Carleton's spear in driving the Dine from their homeland and on the Long Walk. Yet he loved the Ute and helped save them from the forces destroying other tribes.

Sides does not romanticize. He is a storyteller, and his words keep one turning the pages; no dry history this. He reveals the good and the bad about all the people in this book. It is a grand book. One that should be required reading in high schools and colleges to inform future generations of how we came to our present place in history.