Blood And Thunder

• Blood and Thunder
  Author: Hampton Sides 2006 404 pp
  My rating: 3.5*
  Started July 17 2008, Finished Aug 5 2008
  
  This book is consistently engrossing and informative, but suffers slightly from lack of a clearly defined theme. It’s partly the story of the demise of the Navajo people, partly the story of the occupation and annexation of the New Mexico territory by the United States and partly a biography of Kit Carson, mountain man, pathfinder and tracker extraordinaire. The books strengths are substantiating the legend of Carson, a man born for his times, and elucidating the plight of the Navajo (a symbol for all the tribes wiped out by white man’s occupation of the continent) whose historical way of life and general view of the world was simply incompatible with that of the encroaching Anglos. Though neither the Navajo, nor any of the other southwest tribes detailed in the book, whose existences were to a considerable degree perpetuated by rustling and slave-raiding of nearby peoples, come off as completely admirable by today’s standards, the reader cannot help but feel for them, once they have seen their field and flocks destroyed and been starved into accepting confinement outside of their historical territory on an agricultural reservation where the water is bad, the crops would not take and the entire tribe of formerly proud people either dies of disease or sinks into a an engulfing trough of despond.
  
  Observations:
  
• The book could have used more and more detailed maps.
• Major (later Colonel) John Chivington , a Methodist preacher of Old Testament judgment, could well have been the inspiration for the character of The Judge in Blood Meridian a book whose vision of southwest US in the middle of the 19th century, a near apocalyptic world of non-stop violence, this history often mirrors.
  
  
  Carson’s second daughter died as a “toddler was scalded to death when she fell into a boiling vat of soap tallow.” (34)
  
  “What was paper? Most of the Navajos had never seen it, nor ink pens, nor written words. They had no concept of individual land ownership or constitutions or the rule of law or the delegation of political authority. Their traditions were so radically different that they had no idea what the Americans were really talking about.” (239)
  
  Of a Confederate troop marauding through New Mexico territory early in the Civil War: “Most of the Rebels were armed with little more than fowling pieces, squirrel guns, pistols, and other frontier weapons – one quixotic unit was composed entirely of lancers.” (278) The opposing Union units were commanded by US Army officers though the enlisted ranks were comprised primarily of untrained “New Mexican paisanos” who “spoke almost no English”.
  
  Iraq parallel in the Indian Wars: “Before Carleton’s arrival, the vocabulary of the the Navajo wars was centered almost entirely on the principle of punishment – punishment in a raw Old Testament sense. The army was there to “chastise” and “overawe” them, to make them “fell the power and the sting of the government.” But now a certain noblesse oblige had crept into the dialogue, a sense of white man’s burden.”
  
  “Carson believed that most of the Indian trouble in the West were caused, as he once flatly put it, ‘by aggression on the part of whites.’ Most of the raids, by Utes and other tribes, were visited upon the settlements only out of desperation – ‘committed,’ he argued, ‘from absolute necessity when in a starving condition … their game is becoming scarce, much of it having be3en killed by the settlers, and a great deal of it driven from the country …” (334)
  
  “ … the Navajos could not understand the Judeo-Christian universe – its male monotheism was forbidding to a tribe with so many female gods, its stories of a chosen people half a world away had no relevance, and rituals like communion and confession seemed beyond strange.” (368)