Blood and Thunder

578 Pages·2006·3.24 MB·English

by  Hampton Sides

CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Hoofbeats
BOOK ONE: THE NEW MEN
1. Jumping Off
2. The Glittering World
3. The Army of the West
4. Singing Grass
5. Blue Bead Mountain
6. Who Is James K. Polk?
7. What a Wild Life!
8. The Ruling Hand of Providence
9. The Pathfinder
10. When the Land Is Sick
11. The Un-Alamo
12. We Will Correct All This
13. Narbona Pass
14. The Uninvaded Silence
15. On the Altar of the Country
16. A Perfect Butchery
17. The Fire of Montezuma
18. Your Duty, Mr. Carson
19. Daggers in Every Look
20. Men with Ears Down to Their Ankles
21. The Hall of Final Ruin
22. The New Men
BOOK TWO: A BROKEN COUNTRY
23. The Grim Metronome
24. Lords of the Mountains
25. The Devil’s Turnpike
26. Our Red Children
27. Cold Steel
28. El Crepusculo
Photo Insert 1
29. American Mercury
30. Time at Last Sets All Things Even
31. A Broken Country
32. The Finest Head I Ever Saw
33. The Death Knot
34. Men Without Eyes
35. Blood and Thunder
BOOK THREE: MONSTER SLAYER
36. The Fearing Time
Photo Insert 2
37. People of the Single Star
38. The Sons of Some Dear Mother
39. The Round Forest
40. Children of the Mist
41. General Orders No. 15
42. Fortress Rock
43. The Long Walk
44. Adobe Walls
45. The Condition of the Tribes
46. Crossing Purgatory
And Monster Slayer said...
Epilogue: In Beauty We Walk
A Note on the Sources
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Art Credits
Also by Hampton Sides
Copyright
Anne
I follow the scent of falling rain
And head for the place where it is darkest
I follow the lightning
And draw near to the place where it strikes
—NAVAJO CHANT
Prologue
HOOFBEATS
One morning in mid-August 1846, in the cool hours before dawn, the New
Mexican villagers of Las Vegas slumbered anxiously. The Americanos were
coming. In distant Washington, D.C., for reasons murky to the inhabitants of Las
Vegas, the president of the United States had declared war on Mexico. Now
scouts had brought word that the invading gringo army was only a few days
away, marching steadily westward, and the townspeople were deeply fearful.
They had heard from their priest that the United States would outlaw
Catholicism, that the soldiers would rape the women in the village and burn the
letters “U.S.” on their cheeks with branding irons. The villagers even debated
among themselves the merits of torching their own church to prevent the
Americans from using it as a stable or a barracks.
Las Vegas—“The Meadows” in Spanish—was a hodgepodge of adobe houses,
set among rustling cornfields irrigated by a muddy acequia that seeped from the
Gallinas River. The town lay at the feet of the Sangre de Cristos—the Blood of
Christ Mountains—the magnificent southernmost peaks of the Rockies, which
rose more than twelve thousand feet over the prickered plain. Set on the eastern
periphery of Spanish settlement, the village was a spore-speck of civilization.
Las Vegas was a three-day ride from the capital of the territory, Santa Fe. Its only
tie to the larger world was the Santa Fe Trail, which passed along the outskirts of
town—the same road the American army would be marching in on. To the east,
the prairie seemed to stretch out forever, to the Staked Plains of Texas and the
buffalo grasslands beyond—and eventually, if one kept on going, to the land of
the American diablos.
Hunters from Las Vegas, the ciboleros, rode out on the plains in search of
antelope and buffalo. Often the villagers made trips to Santa Fe to buy supplies
or confer with the military and religious authorities there. But mostly the people
kept to their homes, and to the pageants of their church. Impoverished in every
way except faith, they were pioneers, resolute in their battles with nature yet
accepting of what they could not control. Although Las Vegas was a new
settlement, founded by a land grant only eleven years earlier, most of the frontier
families living here were descended from Spanish colonists who had arrived in
New Mexico as early as 1598.
The people of New Mexico, especially in rural outposts like Las Vegas, led a
defensive, medieval sort of existence, clinging to Catholic folkways ossified by
isolation. They labored in the safety of their coyote fences and mud walls,
raising peppers and corn, beans, and squash, and tending sheep as their
forefathers had in the shadows of the ancient mountains.
August was always a pleasant month in this part of New Mexico. The nights
were cool, the mornings golden. Days were hot and dry, the sleepy afternoons
frequently doused by thunderstorms that rumbled in from the west. Gardens
swelled with vegetables. Flocks grew fat on the grass that greened in the
foothills from the new moisture of the monsoonal rains. By all outward
appearances, Las Vegas seemed as it always did in this favored season, and yet
the people knew that when the Americans arrived, their world would change
utterly.
Early on the morning of August 12 the fitful quiet of Las Vegas was punctured
by the sound of hoofbeats. By the time the villagers heard the sound and
discerned its menace, it was already too late: The invaders had cut across their
fields and penetrated the town margins. To the people’s surprise, however, these
weren’t the anticipated American invaders. This was an attack just as dreadful
but much more familiar: Navajos.
The raiders came boiling out of the mountains, painted for battle. At the last
moment they let out a blood-chilling war-whoop that sounded to the villagers
something like an owl—ahuuuuu, ahuuuuuu. The Navajo warriors rode
bareback or on saddles made of sheepskin, and guided their mounts with reins of
braided horsehair. They wielded clubs and carried shields made of buckskin
layers taken from a deer’s hip, where the hide is thickest. They had images of
serpents painted on the soles of their moccasins to give them a snakelike
sneakiness as they approached their quarry. Their steel-tipped arrowheads were
daubed with rattlesnake blood and prickly pear pulp mixed with charcoal taken
from a tree that had been struck by lightning. Many of them wore strange, tight-
fitting helmets made from the skinned heads of mountain lions.