Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (24 page)

Narbona was one of the richest men in all the Navajo country, probably
the
richest. He had thousands of sheep, it was said. He had scores of horses and herds of cattle. He had three wives and many slaves. He was blessed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren and in-laws too numerous to count. His fields in the Chuska Valley rippled with fine corn, and pumpkins and muskmelons swelled on their vines. Stones taken from the wet heat of the sweathouse had been ceremonially set among the plants to prevent them from dying of an early frost. Narbona had many songs, it was said, and he observed all the rites and rituals, taking care to respect the
jhozho,
the sacred balance of life, and that was why he was wealthy and had so many properties.

Narbona was generous with his wealth, too, and was known for taking in children orphaned from the ongoing wars with the Utes and the Mexicans.

His outfit was a loud and lively place, stirring with prayers and songs and horse races, a loose string of hogans spread out on the grassy slopes, smoke tendriling from the central chimney holes, every doorway facing east to greet the day. Instead of doors, mats woven from yucca twine billowed in the wind. Thin strips of drying mutton and venison hung from the surrounding sagebrush bushes and trees. Women worked at their looms, the bright designs of their blankets growing in the sun as they tamped down each new thread of dyed and carded wool and clacked their shuttles smoothly back and forth. They were a resourceful people, making use of nearly everything they found within their reach; they fashioned thread from the fibers of the agave. They snared birds in nooses made from their own hair. They bathed themselves with the suds that could be coaxed from the soapy stalk and root of the yucca. In the foothills, the medicine men gathered willow wands or sprigs of sumac, mint, and sage to use in healing ceremonies.

Adolescent boys led flocks of bleating churro sheep and Angora goats with their large twisted horns toward brush-arbor camps through mountain passes—the mingled animals made distinct to their owners by signifying marks cut into the flaps of their ears. The older men, meanwhile, might be seen heading off to collect salt at ancient seeps, or to hunt mule deer and elk that grazed in the long shadows thrown by ponderosa pines.

If he had enjoyed a long and abundant life, Narbona now seemed to fear that it all hung in jeopardy. Through couriers sent to him, General Kearny had threatened full-scale war if he did not agree to a peace treaty. The Americans had even stated that they would send a peace emissary into Navajo country to conclude the talks, to save the aged Narbona from having to brave a trip. Narbona was in no position to speak for the entire tribe, but he probably had more powers of suasion than any Navajo alive.

Winter was coming on, the time when Navajos traditionally met in ceremonials and told their stories and discussed their common problems in councils. Winter was the time for conversation, between first frost and first lightning, when the corn had been harvested and stored, when the snakes had gone to bed and the
yeis
, the gods, would be listening. There would be sandpaintings, nightchants, and ceremonies with hand-tremblers. Around campfires, in hogans and sweat lodges, the conversation would surely turn to the Americans, and Narbona would be called on to render his opinion. How should the Navajos respond to the considerable demands of these invaders?

Narbona did not know, but he was certain he needed to see these large-eared Americans for himself. So one day in the fall, probably sometime in late September, he picked a few close comrades and set off on a roundabout journey east. Over the years he had made numerous trips to Santa Fe to talk peace with the Spanish and Mexican authorities on the plaza, and he knew the trails well. But this time the old man took a network of obscure hunting paths that led across the Rio Grande and then well to the north of Santa Fe, up into the Sangre de Cristos.

From the mountains, he and his party dropped down into the foothills that skirted the town, knowing that if they were caught they would likely be shot. Hobbling their horses and leaving them in a protected place, they crouched quietly in the piñon trees and peered down at the ominous stirrings of the new fort that General Kearny was building.

On the night of September 24, 1846, bells rang over the city, incessantly, crazily, as they always did when something was afoot. From the six churches they clanked and clanged, filling the streets with a maddening metallic din. The Santa Feans loved their bells and used them to announce every occasion—weddings, masses, even races and fandangos. Their sound was far from dulcet, for most of the bells were decrepit and cracked, some having been forged centuries earlier in Castille and shipped by galleon across the wide ocean and then hauled nearly two thousand groaning miles north from Mexico on the desolate wagon road, the Camino Real, which long served as the town’s only umbilicus to the civilized world. Through their long sojourns, the bells had been splashed with brine, dropped in silty arroyos, and pecked by bullets. They had seen revolts and massacres, and had endured several centuries of a steady faith’s ringing in the extremes of a high desert clime. Even though the bells were tarnished and streaked with verdigris, they remained the pride of the town, enduring relics from a time when the crown of Spain reigned as the greatest power on earth.

The weather had turned cool and sharp—a storm had dusted the upper reaches of the mountains with the season’s first snow—and on this brisk evening the clanging of the bells was especially loud. On one side of town a large funeral was under way—an old man apparently related to half the citizenry had died. And on the other side of town, over by the plaza, the American merchants were throwing a formal ball at the Palace of the Governors. The event was a bon voyage party for General Kearny and his dragoons: The next morning they were leaving for California, to continue the conquest.

Kearny’s fete was the largest event of the year. The long, narrow ballroom was crammed with more than five hundred people, Mexican and American alike, dressed in their finest clothes. They drank
aguardiente
and El Paso brandy and performed old dances of the province as a fiddler and a guitarist scratched out their bittersweet melodies. The Palace of the Governors’ “ballroom” was festive but decidedly humble in its appointments, its ceiling leaky, its plaster walls in decay. The floor was made of hard-packed dirt, and the door panels were fashioned from cured buffalo hide that had been faux-painted with burls and knots to look like wood. On one wall was a sweeping mural, painted by a local artist, that depicted General Kearny unfurling a constitution for a grateful Mexican peasant.
LIBERTAD
, the scroll read, and around it was painted a cross, a plow, and a cannon festooned in a bunting of American flags. Hung all around the hall were American company flags and pennants hand-sewn by the women of Missouri.

The cream of Santa Fe society, such as it was, had turned out to say its good-byes to the conqueror: Government officials, prominent families, priests, American merchants, officers. Susan Magoffin was at the ball and described everything in cheerful detail in her journal. That night she was wearing a Chinese shawl of red crepe as she danced with several American officers. She noted in her diary that the “ladies were all dressed in silks, satins, ginghams—and decked with showy ornaments, huge necklaces, countless rings. They had large sleeves, short waists, ruffled skirts. All danced and smoked cigarettos.” In one corner she was somewhat distressed to see a “dark-eyed senora” from a well-to-do Spanish family who had brought along a “human foot-stool,” as Magoffin called it—an Indian servant crouched on the floor for her mistress to use, between dances, “as an article of furniture.”

Magoffin was shocked by the boldness of the local ladies, to say nothing of their plunging necklines. “They slap about with their arms and necks bare, their bosoms exposed,” she sniffed, wishing she had “a veil drawn closely over my face to protect my blushes.” Most of the women wore a bright red rouge on their cheeks that “shone like grease,” Magoffin noted, while others were “daubed over with a ghostly flour-paste—a custom they have among them when they wish to look fair and beautiful.” The Mexican men, on the other hand, “stand off with crossed arms, and look on with as much wonder as if they were not people themselves.”

Magoffin was especially intrigued by a certain redheaded woman who danced and carried herself with a haughty sense of freedom. Her name was Gertrudes Barcelo, but she was universally known around town as Madame La Tules. A Taos native, La Tules had long run a successful tavern in Santa Fe—its gambling rooms and accompanying brothel had been wildly popular among the Missourians. It was rumored that among her many illicit affairs, Barcelo had once been Governor Armijo’s mistress. She was a vivacious hostess and a cunning businesswoman; at her establishment the principal amusement was five-card monte—a game, it was said, whose mysteries could be learned only by losing at it. Through her brisk gaming tables, she handled astounding wads of cash for a specie-starved town, and sometimes floated loans to soldiers at usurious rates. Magoffin studied Barcelo as she moved about the ballroom, judging her to be a “stately” woman possessed of “that shrewd sense and fascinating manner necessary to allure the wayward, inexperienced youth to the hall of final ruin.”

Kearny’s soldiers were also intrigued by the women at the ball, although in a different way. Their diaries are full of prurient compliments. Hughes remarked on their “lustrous, beaming eyes that peer most captivatingly from the folds of their rebozos.” Capt. Philip St. George Cooke thought the Santa Fe ladies “remarkable for smallness of hands and feet,” but noted that “nowhere is chastity less valued or expected.” Private Edwards: “The women are the boldest walkers I know, their step being always free and good, and their bodies have a graceful oscillation. They do not seem to know what modesty is, and are very fond of the attentions of strangers.” George Gibson: “As a general thing their forms are much better than the women in the States.”

The wine flowed easily, and the party went far into the night. The tiny ballroom sweltered in the close heat as the guests pressed through a haze of cornhusk cigarette smoke. On the dance floor, the Americans and Mexicans swirled together in “an infinity of petticoats.” With the sweep of an eye, Susan Magoffin could see the future of the territory: judges, bankers, engineers, businessmen, the whole new American imprint on the ancient country. In one corner stood the newly appointed governor of New Mexico, the stout and stolid Charles Bent, Kit Carson’s old friend. Bent was a bullnecked Missourian with dark features and a massive furrowed brow—“tough as an oak knot” in the words of his biographer David Lavender, “a man of implacable drive.” It was Charles Bent who had first tested and then perfected the use of large ox-teams (instead of horses or mules) to pull wagons along the Santa Fe Trail; the success of the slower but far stronger oxen, Lavender suggests, led the way to the “gargantuan freight caravans that came to sinew the West.”