Hampton Sides’ latest book, Blood and Thunder,
is an expansive treatise on an expansive subject: Manifest Destiny
and the opening of the desert Southwest. Sides uses Kit Carson
— with his distinctive combination of chivalry, heroism,
cruelty and unflinching complicity with inhumane policies —
as a sort of thread to weave together the history of the mid-19th
century Southwest, culminating with Carson’s “scorched
earth” campaign against the Navajo. This campaign resulted in
the death of thousands, the abject surrender of thousands more and
the forced removal of the Navajo from their homeland, Dinetah.
Blood and Thunder offers little new information on its
subject, but Sides’ prose snaps along with the fluidity and
detail of good fiction. Take, for example, this description of
Carson’s arrival in Sonoma, Calif., at the outset of the war
with Mexico:
“The windswept grass on the jumbled
hills had crisped to a fine summer gold when Kit Carson guided his
mule down through the gambel oak thickets and into the tiny village
of Sonoma, California …
“Cows mashed their
cud in the surrounding pastures while the town dogs yipped at the
strangers. Sonoma’s dirt streets thronged with rabbles of
American men drunk on liquor — and drunk on a newfound power.
They shouted out ‘Liberty!’ in slurred cries that
frightened the local townsfolk, who did not know there was a war on
and did not want one.”
Despite the unifying
presence of Kit Carson, the book at times seems to be little more
than a series of historical vignettes. Nevertheless, Sides’
meticulous research and clear descriptions make Blood and Thunder a
worthwhile read. The history of the desert Southwest is too often
romanticized in the popular media; Sides’ book offers a
straightforward reminder of its brutal realities.
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
Hampton Sides
404 pages,
hardcover: $26.95.
Doubleday, 2006.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A tale of shame and glory in the Southwest.
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