Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (13 page)

This outpost of American civilization boasted all sorts of incongruous pleasures and amenities, including peacocks that roamed the compound, a French tailor, white tablecloths in the dining room, ice for the fort’s signature mint julep–like drink, which the Bents called a “hailstorm,” and the most outlandish luxury imaginable,
a billiards table
.

Kearny’s dragoons set up an encampment on the north side of the Arkansas while the legions of Missourians pitched their tents in a sprawling meadow just south of the river. The volunteers picketed their exhausted horses and mules in the pasture, but others were turned loose to graze. Something spooked them—one witnesss claimed it was merely the snap of a falling tree limb—and they began to stampede.

In an instant the constrained horses broke free of their irons and galloped off with the others—with dangling picket pins biting into their flanks and spurring them to greater fury. For miles the prairie swirled with hoofbeats and manic patterns of dust. General Kearny was livid at the volunteers for letting the horses graze loose. On the Santa Fe Trail, stampedes like this were considered a disaster of the first order, and a danger even graver than Indians. In their madness, many horses bolted for the far horizon and were never seen again. The Missourians spent a whole day recapturing their scattered animals, several of which were found more than fifty miles from the fort. Eighty horses were never recovered.

Among the travelers who had taken refuge in one of the fort’s many rooms was Susan Magoffin, the young diarist from Kentucky. She had taken ill and was trying in vain to get some rest, but Bent’s Fort was no place to be sick. “There is the greatest possible noise,” she wrote. “The shoeing of horses, neighing, and braying of mules, the scolding and fighting of men, are all enough to turn my head.” Not knowing what was wrong with her, she took her Sappington’s Fever and Ague Pills, a popular frontier cure-all containing quinine, and hoped to nurse herself back to health. Magoffin complained of “strange sensations in my head, my back, and hips. I am obliged to lie down most of the time, and when I get up I must hold my hand over my eyes.”

But Magoffin’s condition progressively worsened. Because she was an unusually well-connected traveler, inquiries were immediately made and a doctor was called for. Her husband, Samuel, had worked the Santa Fe trade for fifteen years and was well known to the Bent brothers. Her brother-in-law, James Magoffin, was also a shrewd old hand on the trail, fluent in Spanish and a popular fixture in Santa Fe.

A few days earlier, in fact, General Kearny had met with James Magoffin at the fort and dispatched him as a kind of shadow envoy to Santa Fe to conduct secret talks with Gov. Manuel Armijo, whom Magoffin knew well. Kearny hoped Magoffin could persuade Armijo not to fight. Although the details are lost to history, it is also believed that Magoffin was given specific instructions to sweeten the negotiations with considerable bribes. Susan Magoffin, suffering in her room, was oblivious to all of these doings.

Two other notable women had sought haven in Bent’s Fort while Kearny’s soldiers massed outside. They were two sisters from the prominent Jaramillo family of Taos, Ignacia and Josefa, Kit Carson’s young bride. Ignacia was married to Charles Bent, who normally kept his home in Taos when he wasn’t on the trail or tending to business at the fort. Fearing that the arrival of the American invaders would cause turmoil in Taos that could jeopardize his wife’s safety, he had sent for Ignacia and Josefa, intending to keep them safely ensconced in the fort until the occupation was complete and passions had cooled.

As more and more soldiers trickled in from the trail, Susan Magoffin’s illness advanced. She began to suffer “much agony and severest of pains.” Finally, around midnight on July 31, a French doctor arrived and gave her morphine. She slumped into her husband’s arms and then, as she put it, “I sunk into a kind of lethargy.”

Later that night Magoffin had a miscarriage—brought on, the French doctor assumed, by the jolting of the long trail. She had not even known she was pregnant. A few days later she was able to return to her diary. “The mysteries of a new world have been shown to me,” she wrote. “In a few short months I should have been a happy mother and made the heart of a father glad, but the ruling hand of Providence has interposed and by an abortion deprived us of the fond hope of mortals.” She feared she would not recover, that she would die of some infection in her chamber, and that she would never see “the fair and happy America again.”

The night of her miscarriage, her husband told her, a Cheyenne woman, probably the squaw of one of the traders, had given birth to a healthy baby in a room directly below hers. Within a half hour of the birth, the woman, following an ancient tribal custom, ventured out to the Arkansas and bathed herself and her newborn in the river.

While Magoffin was recovering in her bed, she listened to the noises of Kearny’s army as it made final preparations for marching one Sunday morning. “Although it was the Sabbath,” she wrote, “necessity compelled them to be busily employed. The clang of the blacksmith’s hammer was constant. The trumpet sounded oft and loud; swords rattled in their sheaths, while the tinkling spur served as an echo. Ever and anon some military command was heard.”

Magoffin, exhausted and probably medicated, lay in her darkened room and reflected on the baser shadings of Kearny’s mission. “Though forbidden to rise from my bed, I was free to meditate on the follies and wickedness of man! Of a creature formed for nobler purposes, sinking himself to the level of the beasts, waging warfare with his fellow man, even as the dumb brute. And by his example teaching nothing good, striving for wealth, honour and fame to the ruining of his soul, and losing a brighter crown in higher realms.”

Then, at Kearny’s command, the Army of the West departed the fort with more than 1,500 wagons and nearly 20,000 animals. The long columns forded the Arkansas River, thus crossing the international border into Mexico, and marched en masse across the high plains to conquer Santa Fe.

Fremont’s second exploratory expedition, undertaken in 1843, proved an even greater success than the first. En route to Oregon, Fremont and his party lingered beside the Great Salt Lake and, by studying the region’s hydrology, correctly surmised that its rivers and streams were strictly inland bodies of water. At the time, a curious and persistent myth, perpetuated in scholarly publications, asserted that the Great Salt Lake was drained by a monstrous whirlpool that somehow connected, through a network of subterranean rivers, with the Pacific Ocean.

Fremont gradually came to realize that all the country between Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and California’s Sierra Nevada was landlocked; this was a major contribution to North American geography, and Fremont’s term for the desert sink, the Great Basin, graces atlases today.

In the late summer of 1843, Fremont’s party reached Oregon, where he mapped the Columbia and its tributaries and caught magnificent glimpses of Mount Rainier, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Hood. Growing restless, Fremont then strayed from his original assignment and crossed the international border into what was then called Alta California.

Fremont seemed unconcerned that his illegal incursion into Mexican territory might lead not only to his own arrest but also to an international incident that would embarrass government officials in Washington. He was now preoccupied with a hunt that transcended mere borders: He was looking for a mighty waterway that, if it existed, could change the course of history. Many maps of the day showed a major east-west river that led from the Great Lakes all the way across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. This fabled conduit, called the Buenaventura, was widely accepted as a scientific fact even though no known explorer had actually seen it.

With visions of cartographic glory, Fremont was set on finally proving, or disproving, the Buenaventura’s existence and thus solving one of the most vexing continental puzzles of his day.

But once he set foot in California, the misadventures began to pile up. He promptly led his party into the winter snowdrifts of the Sierra Nevada, and it was only through luck—and Kit Carson’s good judgment—that the expedition was able to avoid the sort of grisly ordeal that would befall the Donner Party a few years later. When they staggered out of the mountains, frostbitten, half naked, and eating scalded dog-meat, they were, Carson thought, “in as poor condition as men could possibly be.” One man became “deranged…and perfectly wild from the effects of starvation,” said Carson, while the ravenous mules ate “one another’s tails and the leather of the pack saddles.”

Restored with good food provided by American settlers, the party turned south and marched down the full length of California’s Central Valley before veering toward the Mojave Desert and points east. Along the way, one of Fremont’s men died in a gun accident, another was killed by Indians. Inevitably, Mexican officials got wind of Fremont’s uninvited presence in California and threatened to send an army after him.

So Fremont exited the California stage altogether and slinked into Nevada, passing a bucolic watering hole known as Las Vegas. In the desert, Carson chased after a band of Indian horse thieves and showed Fremont how to drink water from a barrel cactus. As the party slowly made its way east toward civilization, Fremont admitted he had never found the fabled Buenaventura River, but that in itself was an important find. Like the Great Salt Lake whirlpool, the Buenaventura was another great hoax that could be consigned to geography’s dustbin. The party reached Bent’s Fort on July 2, where a July Fourth celebration was held in their honor.

In August 1844, Fremont stumbled into Washington like a ghost; the gaunt explorer was a year late and rumored to be dead. His much-anticipated expedition narrative, which he turned in a few months later, was so well received that the congressional printing office bound the first and second reports in a single volume and published ten thousand copies. Again the newspapers printed excerpts and hailed Fremont as the American Magellan. He was already being touted as a future candidate for president. And why not? Fremont had set in motion one of the great mass migrations of history: The following summer the Oregon Trail saw an even greater hegira of emigrant caravans, with thousands and thousands of pioneers headed west. Many of these emigrants were Mormons. On the strength of Fremont’s glowing descriptions of the Great Salt Lake country, Mormon leader Brigham Young decided to move his whole flock from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Utah.

The army, willing to overlook the fact that Fremont had blatantly disobeyed orders by lurching into California, promoted him to captain. The national media, meanwhile, gave him a new sobriquet drawn from James Fenimore Cooper: From then on, John C. Fremont was known as The Pathfinder.

If Fremont had become a household name, so had his scout. By 1845, thanks to the expedition reports, Kit Carson’s name, with its sturdy alliterative snap, had crossed the threshold of the national imagination. Fremont painted Carson as an explorer of nearly mythic competence and perspicacity on the trail. He consistently came across as courageous but never rash, a person with a sure presence of mind. And also, crucially, a person who seemed to have enormous stores of luck on his side: Time after time, the stars smiled on Kit Carson. In nearly every contretemps Fremont got himself into, Carson found the way out.

The special thing that Carson had couldn’t be boiled down to any one skill; it was a panoply of talents. He was a fine hunter, an adroit horseman, an excellent shot. He was shrewd as a negotiator. He knew how to select a good campsite and could set it up or strike it in minutes, taking to the trail at lightning speed. (“Kit waited for nobody,” complained one greenhorn who traveled with him, “and woe to the unfortunate tyro.”) He knew what to do when a horse foundered. He could dress and cure meat, and he was a fair cook. Out of necessity, he was also a passable gunsmith, blacksmith, liveryman, angler, forager, farrier, wheelwright, mountain climber, and a decent paddler by raft or canoe. As a tracker, he was unequaled. He knew from experience how to read the watersheds, where to find grazing grass, what to do when encountering a grizzly. He could locate water in the driest arroyo and strain it into potability. In a crisis he knew little tricks for staving off thirst—such as opening the fruit of a cactus or clipping a mule’s ears and drinking its blood. He had a landscape painter’s eye and a cautious ear and astute judgment about people and situations. He knew how to make smoke signals. He knew all about hitches and rope knots. He knew how to make a good set of snowshoes. He knew how to tan hides with a glutinous emulsion made from the brains of the animal. He knew how to cache food and hides in the ground to prevent theft and spoilage. He knew how to break a mustang. He knew which species of wood would burn well, and how to split the logs on the grain, even when an axe was not handy.