Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (50 page)

But they knew they could not take shortcuts in the burial ritual. They never separated from each other, not even for a minute, for they did not want some evil force “to come between” them. Until the rituals were complete, they felt they were in mortal danger of spiritual infection, and they had to help keep each other strong. Even when one of them had to relieve himself, the other son would go along.

After four nights they were satisfied that Narbona’s spirit had reached the underworld and that their father could no longer hear their chants and prayers. So the next morning the two sons headed for home.

On the north bank of the Rio Tunicha, still a good ways from their village, they encountered a mound of rocks that must have made them smile; prior to leaving on their funereal errand they had asked their wives to bring fresh clothes and hide them beneath a rock pile in just this spot. Now here it was, and they were relieved to know they could finally strip out of their dirty, death-tainted clothes.

Beside the cairn the sons constructed a sweat lodge and built a fire and heated river rocks in the coals. Then they crawled inside the close structure, placing the glowing stones in a small pit in the center of the dirt floor. They poured ladles of river water on the rocks so that they sputtered and hissed and then sent up radiant waves of steam. All day and all night they sat and baked in the smarting heat. They wanted to wash off the contamination of death, to make themselves clean again.

The next morning the men buried their old clothes and put on the fresh leggings and shirts their wives had left for them. Purified, their unpleasant but necessary task behind them, they crossed the river and walked toward the smoking breakfast fires of their distant hogans, to eat and drink and sleep among their people. Like all the Navajos of the Chuska Mountains, their hearts were turned away from mourning, and fixed upon a different emotion now—vengeance.

While Narbona’s sons were burying their father, the Washington Expedition pressed on, north and west, toward the literal and metaphorical heart of Navajo country: the extraordinary sandstone labyrinth known as Canyon de Chelly.

No Americans had ever penetrated this fabulous carved maze, and records left by several Spanish explorers were spotty, describing it ominously as “a fearful chasm” and “a place of awesome grandeur.” It was widely believed that the Navajos had built an enormous citadel down in the canyon’s recesses—turning what was already a natural stronghold into a kind of Gibraltar of the Southwest. The fortress was reputed to be fifteen stories high and reachable only by a network of ladders. To subdue the Navajos, it was thought, one had to probe the full length of the canyon and destroy their great bastion—something no other army from Santa Fe had ever done. For the Washington Expedition, Canyon de Chelly had an aura of impregnability that, of course, made it irresistible.

The name had a French ring to it, but Canyon
de Chelly
(pronounced
de-SHAY
) was neither French nor Spanish in origin. It was derived from the Navajo word
tsegi
(“rock canyon”) and was thus redundant: Canyon of the Rock Canyon. Over the centuries Spanish explorers had tried to approximate the unfamiliar sound of the Navajo word, and it came out, in various documents, as Chelli, Chelle, Dechilli, and Chegui, among other renderings—and finally Chelly, which eventually became the preferred spelling.

By whatever name, the canyon—actually a network of several interconnected chasms running nearly one hundred sinuous miles in length—was one of the most splendid landscapes in the American West. Though not as deep as the Grand Canyon, it was, in its own scaled-down way, just as wonderful.

What’s more, it was a rock wilderness with a human pulse. Because it did not have a mighty river raging through it but rather a gentle stream percolating beneath its sandy floor, the canyon had long supported culture, with farming and domesticated animals and huddled lodges tucked safely among its myriad notches and alcoves. Before the Navajos took up residence there sometime around 1600, Canyon de Chelly had been continuously inhabited by various other Indian groups for more than two thousand years—including, and especially, the Anasazi. The entire length of it was strewn with ruins, many of them precariously situated on high ledges. In some places the canyon’s sheer fluted walls rose nearly a thousand feet from the alluvial floor, and everywhere, painted and pecked and patiently scratched high on the luminous gold rock, could be found the art of the ancients.

James Simpson thrilled at the possibility of being the first American to map and describe Canyon de Chelly. He was intent to make a study of “the fabled Navajo presidio,” as he put it, and to puncture the mythology that surrounded the place. The Kern brothers were excited, too, for they had been around Santa Fe long enough to hear the stories about de Chelly. Since no artist, Hispanic or Anglo, had ever captured it on canvas, no one in New Mexico seemed to have the vaguest idea what the canyon looked like. After having stumbled with Simpson on the extraordinary ruins at Chaco, Richard Kern recognized how lucky he was to be heading, only a few weeks later, for another untouched wonder. Lugging their cases of oils and charcoals and sketchbooks, the Kerns itched to get to work.

John Washington aimed to find the Navajo fortress and, if necessary, lay siege to it—and then sign a treaty with any Diné leaders who would present themselves for a council. He was, he insisted, on a mission of peace, not war. But the colonel seems to have had no notion that the recent slaying of Narbona might sour the possibilities of a warm Navajo reception. Washington apparently had nothing to say about the Narbona incident—and certainly he showed no sense of regret. In his brusque report on the expedition, written upon his return to Santa Fe, he would emphatically declare good riddance upon the Navajo leader’s passing. He wrote, “Among the dead of the enemy left on the field was Narbona, head chief of the nation, who had been a scourge to the inhabitants of New Mexico for the last thirty years.”

Washington failed to grasp the mistake his troops had made. In their first encounter with the Diné, they had met and then promptly killed (and mutilated!) the most eminent Navajo alive, and quite possibly the one man who could have brought about an accord with the United States. An opportunity was not only missed, it was scarcely even perceived—and then in an instant it was gone. One Navajo man, who peacefully approached the Washington Expedition on its march, indicated through a translator that Narbona’s death had caused much turmoil among his people. The man claimed he had a cousin who was dying from a gunshot wound sustained in the same fracas that had killed Narbona. “It is regrettable,” the Navajo said, “that so much damage has been done and we have lost our greatest warrior, all for so trifling a thing as a horse.”

With Narbona slain, angry young warriors of the tribe would gain ascendancy—impatient men like Manuelito who had no use for accommodating these arrogant foreigners. Washington’s mission to secure peace had thus ensured its opposite: a new front in an old war, and one that would last the better part of twenty years. The Navajos had only expanded their venerable conflict with the Mexicans; now they were also at odds with the
bilagaana
.

The Washington Expedition, blind to the trouble it left in its wake, marched blithely onward toward Canyon de Chelly. Predictably, Lieutenant Simpson hated the parched and arroyo-riddled Chuska Valley through which the soldiers passed. Reading his journal, one can almost see him squinching his nose in distaste. “The country is one extended naked, barren waste,” he wrote. Everything was “dead and lifeless, the soil an all-pervading dull, yellow, buff-color.” This land, he declared, was “under a curse.”

Simpson was not unlike most of his countrymen in failing to appreciate such spare terrain. The desert was an unfamiliar—and furthermore, uninviting—world to most Anglo sensibilities. By outlook if not by profession they were still farmers, most of them; their idea of beautiful land was never far removed from valuable land, and valuable land was any that could be
used
. Those from back east who tended to hold more sentimental notions about scenic beauty were in the thrall of a landscape aesthetic that had been passed down from European Romanticists and filtered through New England artists, such as the painters of the Hudson River School. They were used to finding beauty in greens and blues, in mountain streams, plunging waterfalls, sailboats, and flowery meadows full of fat cows.

But here was a landscape of upheaval and bright finality, forged in an unforgiving furnace:
a cursed land
. If the Great Plains was regarded as the “Great American Desert”—as it was often labeled on maps—then this stark realm was Hades itself. The scale of it dwarfed a man, not only spatially but also chronologically; it suggested gulfs of time that mocked human relevance in the terror of creation. A good Episcopalian (and future deacon) who doubtless believed his Maker had fashioned the world in six consecutive days not very long ago, Simpson could not understand this land’s logic—let alone declare it lovely. What he did understand, he probably found unsettling.

Even the sketches and lithographs done by the Kern brothers show an awkward uncertainty about how to render the Navajo countryside; the scales and proportions often seem slightly off, the perspectives cramped, the foliage unmistakably Eastern. The Pennsylvanian artists loved the challenge of painting this queer country. They found it endlessly fascinating, clearly, but rarely sublime. It would take many years before American enthusiasts—writers, photographers, and painters—would begin to champion the Navajo land, or indeed any of the desert Southwest, as a place of singular beauty. “Buff” was no color for a country, Simpson’s generation apparently felt. It was as though they lacked the retinal nerve that allowed them to see the land for what it was; they could see it only for what it refused to be—namely, the green picturesque scenery and tillable farmland of the settled world from which they had come.

But then the expedition climbed out of the broad desert valley and up into the Chuska Mountains, a jagged ten-thousand-foot-high range where elk grazed in the meadow grasses beneath stands of yellow pine and Douglas fir and quaking aspen. In short order they had entered a distinctly different world, one that Simpson would respond to with something approaching glee. In the desert, the lieutenant was learning, the flora and fauna changes dramatically with even modest gains in elevation, the thickening moisture greening everything (so much so that today, botanists of the Southwest refer to aloof mountain ecosystems like the Chuskas as “sky islands”).

The men of the expedition camped beside a clear, swift stream, where they drank “pure, wholesome water” and spotted, to their amazement, a grizzly bear. Lieutenant Simpson was thrilled by “the towering pines and firs, the oak, the aspen, and the willow; and bordering the streams, the hop vine, loaded with its fruit. Flowers of rich profusion, and of every hue and delicacy, are constantly before the eye—upwards of ninety varieties have been picked up, the wild rose being among them.” He was surprised and relieved to behold “a rich, well-timbered, and sufficiently watered country, a thing I have not seen since I left the confines of the United States.”

To cross the Chuskas, however, the men had to crawl up through the same rocky passage that several Spanish and Mexican military expeditions had squeezed through in generations past. In truth, it was the only practical way to ascend these imposing mountains, and the narrow, winding path had for centuries been a well-trod highway of the Diné. Colonel Washington pronounced it “the most formidable defile I have ever seen.” His artillerymen and their animals struggled to pull the mountain howitzers through the tight space. Realizing that they were dangerously exposed, the soldiers marched in fear of a Navajo attack from the high cliffs. Richard Kern wrote that “a fight was expected…At nearly every point stones can be rolled on the passers by.” The Pueblo Indians who served as Washington’s scouts were so worried about an attack that, according to Simpson, they reached into their medicine bags and rubbed warrior herbs “upon their heart, as they said, to make it big and brave.” Periodically the soldiers could spot Navajo sentinels watching down on them from high above, but the feared attack never came.

The Navajo strongly associated this place with Narbona, for this was the “Narbona Pass,” where in 1835 the great leader’s warriors routed a thousand Mexicans in a well-executed ambush.

Lieutenant Simpson, naturally, did not know the Navajo history of this place—but to his thinking, it was the sort of distinctive landmark that cried out for a name. In his journal, Simpson decided to pay his commander an eternal compliment by calling the defile “Pass Washington,” and he carefully marked it as such on the official map he was preparing for his superiors back east.