Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West
Hampton Sides, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
624 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400031108
Summary
In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.
In Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides gives us a magnificent history of the American conquest of the West. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation.
Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Memphis, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—PEN-USA for Nonfiction
• Currently—Santa Fe, New Mexico
Hampton Sides is an American historian and journalist. He is the author of Hellhound on His Trail, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction.
Sides is editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Men's Journal, and the Washington Post. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing.
Ghost Soldiers (2001), a World War II narrative about the rescue of Bataan Death March survivors, has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. Esquire called the book "the greatest World War II story never told." The book was the subject of documentaries on PBS and The History Channel, and was the basis for the 2005 Miramax film, The Great Raid. Ghost Soldiers won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction. The book's success led Sides to create The Ghost Soldiers Endowment Fund, a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving the memory of the sacrifices made by Bataan and Corregidor veterans by funding relevant archives, museums, and memorials.
Sides' Blood and Thunder (2006) focuses on the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson, and his role in the conquest of the American West. A critic for the Los Angeles Times described Blood and Thunder as "stunning, haunting, and lyrical," while the Washington Post called it "riveting, monumental...authoritative and masterfully told." Blood and Thunder was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time magazine, and was the subject of a major documentary on the PBS program American Experience.
Hellhound on His Trail (2010) is about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history to capture James Earl Ray, who pled guilty in 1969 and served the rest of his life in prison. Sides, who is a native of Memphis, is the first historian to make use of a new digital archive in Memphis, called the B. Venson Hughes Collection, which contains more than 20,000 documents and photos, many of them rare or never before published. Sides’ research forms much of the basis for PBS’s documentary "Roads to Memphis" which originally aired May 3, 2010, on the award-winning program, American Experience.
Sides has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as American Experience, the Today Show, Book TV, History Channel, NPR's Fresh Air, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Colbert Report, Imus in the Morning, and NPR's All Things Considered.
A native of Memphis with a BA in history from Yale, Sides lives in Santa Fe with his wife Anne Goodwin Sides, a journalist and former NPR editor. They have three sons. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Like a Cinemascope western, Blood and Thunder abounds in colorful characters, bristles with incident and ravishes the eye with long, lingering pan shots of the great Southwest…as the title suggests, [it] resounds with war whoops, rifle fire and hoofbeats. Many scalps are taken, by both sides, and Carson dies on cue, with a jaunty farewell on his lips. In other words, the story always moves. In this case, that may be enough.
William Grimes - New York Times
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.
Jeffrey Lent - Washington Post
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.
Publishers Weekly
Two related but not interdependent epic themes run through this book: the wresting of the Southwest and California away from Mexico to make them a part of the United States and efforts by the Navajo to protect their territory from inroads by Mexico and the United States. Outside magazine editor Sides (Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission) does not give readers much guidance as to which is the principal theme or what his exact intent is here. It appears that he began with the Navajo resistance and kept adding interesting stories as he came upon them, without considering how they related to the dual theme. But he does know how to tell a good story, drawing on a wide variety of published sources. Academic libraries already have analytical works that cover all these topics. However, little has been written for the general reader on either theme, so this book fills that gap and will be useful for public libraries. —Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette
Library Journal
Kit Carson versus the Indians-and everyone against everyone else in the Hobbesian world of the newly conquered American West. Whereas Bernard De Voto, Wallace Stegner and latter-day historian David Roberts were and are concerned with the ideas and social trends behind historical facts, this author's chronicle mostly blends just-so stories with human-interest sketches: Americans stream west into Spanish-speaking lands as James Polk ("possibly the most effective president in American history-and likely the least corrupt") urges them to empire; the Navajo people, a case study in the terrible collision of nations, fight well even though they are culturally indisposed to draw blood; and few in the war between Mexico and the United States are inclined to play by the rules, leading to such little-sung moments as the Battle of San Pasqual, which should make no gringo jingoist proud. Sides (Ghost Soldiers, 2001, etc.) has studied the historical literature diligently and turned up some engrossing tales, from the fate of mountain man Bill Williams to the exploration of the Great Basin to the circumstances of Carson's first marriage; if the details of native customs and the wealth of future senators are sometimes repetitive, his attention to what motivates people to act is refreshing, and Sides has a fine way of complicating his heroes and villains so that they emerge as flawed humans rather than misty figures of legend. And the flaws are endless, as with one fellow, for whom more than a few points on the map are named, who writes back to Washington following the death of a Navajo leader, "I very much regret that I had not procured Narbona's cranium, as I think he had the finest head I ever saw on an Indian."Popular history in the Alvin Josephy vein. Sides works material well-known to historians, but less so to general readers, into an unchallenging but informative narrative.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Were you familiar with the Navajo wars before reading Blood and Thunder? How do the book’s historical details compare with what you previously believed about the West?
2. The contradictions in Kit Carson’s personality make him an alluring figure. How was Carson able to embrace so many aspects of Native American culture, even marrying two Indian women, but nonetheless lead campaigns that crippled them? To whom (or what) was he most loyal?
3. What was John Fremont’s essential quest in exploring the West? What spurs all explorers to pursue risky journeys?
4. What do the biographical details in chapter six indicate about James K. Polk? What might have stoked his determination to claim the West? How did he manage to keep military leaders motivated, despite Polk’s ambiguous leadership style?
5. Is American literature’s love of the “noble savage,” inspired by characters such as Fremont and his pathfinder Carson (chapter nine), a thing of the past? Who are the heroes in new fiction of the twenty-first century?
6. How did the post-colonial unrest in Mexico affect U.S. attempts to purchase and conquer the West? What racial hierarchies were in place among Hispanic and Indian populations there? What is the current legacy of these conflicts?
7. Is the underlying concept of Manifest Destiny still used to justify violence around the world? What did Carson’s words and actions reveal about his understanding of divine will?
8. What does Carson’s illiteracy, paired with his knowledge of numerous languages, say about him? What distinguishes the power of the written word from the power of the spoken word,as evidenced by Carson’s enthusiasm for an epic poem by Lord Byron? Is a society truly literate if its members are not versed in more than one language?
9. Did the Texas Confederates believe they were different from (or even superior to) the Confederates fighting closer to the Mason-Dixon line? What were the stakes for both sides as the Civil War played out in the West? How did the reasons for this war compare to the reasons behind Native American warfare and raids (such as the Comanche raids on dwindling Pecos resources at the end of chapter seventeen)?
10. Why was Carson able to scorn generalizations and see Native Americans as individuals? What made him resistant to the hubris of men like General Carleton? How would you have responded if you had been a witness to both the death of Navajo chief Narbona (which closes chapter thirty-two) and the brutalization of Ann White (depicted in chapter thirty-five)?
11. In what way was the landscape a “warrior” in Blood and Thunder (as in the Washington Expedition’s encounter with Canyon de Chelly, depicted in chapter thirty-four)? How have various populations perceived the landscape of the West, from ancient populations to modern-day tourists?
12. Discuss the promises that were made to Mexicans and Indians by Americans such as General Kearny. Why did so many of the treaties and pacifist proclamations prove to be hollow? How was this lack of concern for credibility justified?
13. What did Carson seek in a wife? What prevented him from being more involved in the lives of his children? Did his first child, Adaline, fare better or worse than his other children, who were raised with less structure?
14. How did you react to the scorched-earth tactics that forced the Navajos to begin their doomed migration? How would you categorize these tactics of war? Why has the Navajos’ Long Walk, until now, been less well-known than the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears?
15. The book’s title is derived from the rousing “blood-and-thunder” pulp novels that made Kit Carson a caricature. Were fictionalized versions of his life harmful? Is exaggerated storytelling a necessary component of most cultures? Why have some Native Americans rejected historical and linguistic evidence for their global migrations, preferring to maintain dramatic myths instead?
16. Why did Kit Carson die in poverty? What does it say about Carson that his estate comprised considerable debt–owed to him by others? What are the appropriate means of measuring a life’s accomplishments?
17. What was the ultimate fallout of the history contained in Blood and Thunder? Where do Indian and American identities now stand in response to each other?
18. How would Kit Carson advise contemporary America on diplomacy and fighting terrorism? How did he balance the need to win allies with the need to be perceived as a fearsome warrior?
19. How did Kit Carson’s ideas about American Indians evolve over the course of his life?
20. Do Americans still have an emotional investment in believing that the “winning” of the West was a glorious, even heroic endeavor? How does the real story of Western conquest differ from the one we were taught in grade school?
21. During its first war of foreign aggression, the United States seized many thousands of square miles of territory from Mexico. How should this historical fact shape the current debate over Mexican immigration–especially considering that the states most keenly affected by the immigration controversy (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) are the very states the United States appropriated from Mexico?
(Questions issued by publisher.)