Blood and Thunder

Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides

Category: History Grade: B+

For some reason this period of history - mid 19th century - is not one I've been terribly interested in or read a lot about. The American westward expansion more than doubled the size of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase. It also involved the virtual destruction of almost all Native American tribes in the Southwest. Maybe its because the stories of this period have been so sensationalized over the years, but I don't know that I've ever gotten all the way through a history book about this era.

While, in a lot of ways, Sides has really overwritten this book, with way too much flowery language, the primary hook he decided to use is pretty engaging. The focal point of the book is the life of Kit Carson -- the real life of Kit Carson, not the mostly fictitious stories that were made up and published about him in "blood and thunders", the nickname for the adventure stories told about the west. According to Sides, Carson was actually a pretty mild-mannered man who was only rarely the vicious Indian fighter of legend. He was a quiet mountain man - a trapper in his early days who preferred the isolation of the trail to life in a city. He became a renowned scout and, later, a military leader. He was, most of the time, a friend to the Indians and was married to a Hispanic woman. His home, famously, was in Taos, New Mexico, but he spent much of his life on the trails from coast to coast. In his day, he was, reluctantly, the symbol of westward expansion.

While the book roams all over the country, it geographic focus is Santa Fe. Not surprisingly, given that the timeline runs from the 1830s to the 1870s, much of the story is about the subjugation of the Native Americans. As with most histories of this period, Americans don't particularly come across as the good guys, but Sides is balanced enough to show why the Anglos moving west considered the Indians their enemies. Ultimately, he makes it pretty clear that the aggressive, city-oriented, hierarchical society of the whites could never have coexisted with the nomadic, leaderless tribes, especially like the Navajos. In the end, Sides doesn't make what happened to the Indians acceptable, but he does go a long way to making it understandable.

This is really the story of frontier warfare. The period, though dominated, by the constant skirmishes with the Indians, also includes the war with Mexico and the Civil War. I had never really thought much about how the Civil War played out in the Southwest but there were some pretty major battles there. The Civil War became largely an excuse for the Texas-dominated branch of the Rebel army to attempt to annex the western areas of New Mexico that they had coveted for so long.

This turns out to be a good general introduction to the history of the Southwest. Sides' focus on the people of the era, particularly Carson, make for a very readable overview.