Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (54 page)

Some of the murderers, however, stayed behind with White’s carriages. Practicing an old ruse, they hid in the scrub along the road, waiting to ambush the next travelers who might happen along. Soon a party of Mexicans came down the trail. Seeing the dead bodies and the upturned carriages, they began to rummage through White’s belongings, taking whatever looked promising. Then the Indians pounced. After a struggle the Mexicans somehow got away, but not before one of their party, a small boy, was pierced with an arrow. Thinking the boy was dead, the marauders quickly gathered up their loot and scattered.

After the horses’ hoofbeats had faded, the Mexican boy rose up, frightened and disoriented, and staggered down the trail. The arrow was lodged deeply between the bones of his arm, but he could walk. Later that day he was picked up by a caravan of Americans and taken to Santa Fe, where he was able to communicate the details of his ordeal to the authorities.

Soldiers were dispatched to investigate, and the bodies from White’s party were soon found and identified. The abandoned carriages were broken to pieces. Trunks had been pried open and belongings strewn about. It was not altogether clear which tribe of Indians was responsible. The dead had not been scalped or mutilated, which was unusual for a Plains Indian attack. The soldiers buried the bodies by the side of the trail and covered them with rocks to keep the wolves from digging them up. When Francis Aubry learned of the massacre, he immediately put out the word to friends throughout the region, offering a one-thousand-dollar reward for the return of Ann White.

For some time, Kit Carson had sensed a change in the air. He recognized that the once inexhaustible West was shrinking before his eyes. In the mountains above Taos, the population of silvertip grizzlies had dwindled in just a few short years. The great migratory herds of buffalo roaming the plains were fast succumbing to the new tide of immigrants, many of whom slaughtered the beasts for the sheer sick pleasure of it and left the carcasses to rot on the prairie. Indians across the West were finding that their old hunting grounds were being steadily grabbed up by new settlers. Many tribes had been wiped out by smallpox and other European diseases from which they had no immunity. Homesteads were popping up everywhere, it seemed, and there was an unfamiliar traffic in the narrow mud streets of Taos and Santa Fe. Carson saw the tendrils of civilization creeping in; the America he had left behind was finally catching up with him.

In a literal and even legal sense, it
had
caught up with him. All the West he had known since leaving Missouri as a boy had become, at last, American soil. With the signing of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty in February 1848, the Mexican War officially ended, and the United States officially absorbed 1.2 million square miles of new real estate—increasing the national domain by more than 66 percent. Agreeing to pay the paltry sum of $15 million, Polk had won precisely what he wanted at the outset, a vast, unbroken continental nation with Pacific harbors. Washington’s first war of foreign intervention had cost the lives of more than 13,000 Americans—the highest death rate per fighting soldier in U.S. military history—with the Mexican toll soaring far higher, perhaps as high as 25,000 dead. The victory did not come without stout reservations and pangs of somber introspection among many American leaders who could not ignore the war’s darker imperial shadings. Ulysses S. Grant, to name one prominent doubter who actually fought in the conflict, would call the Mexican War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Even Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had at first so staunchly supported the war (as a way to extend slavery), began to have his doubts. He told the Senate: “A deed has been done from which the country will not be able to recover for a long time, if ever; it has dropped a curtain between the present and the future, which to me is impenetrable.”

Nicholas Trist, the American envoy sent to Mexico City to negotiate the treaty, later recalled sitting down with the Mexican officials and trying to hide his guilt about concluding a treaty that sheared from Mexico nearly half of its territory: “Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was strong…. For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.”

And yet already, it seemed, the great landgrab had paid off: Scarcely before the ink had dried on the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, gold was discovered in California, and now the rush was on. It’s remotely possible that Kit Carson played a role in disseminating news of the strike; some accounts have suggested that on his second transcontinental journey to Washington, in 1848, Carson carried in his saddlebags one of the first notices of the placer discoveries in the Sierra Nevada. Almost instantly a dusty exodus of people and goods was set in motion. The Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, and their tributaries were now virtually choked with determined men—“Forty-Niners,” they were called—who had chucked everything for a stake in the California argosy.

From Carson’s point of view, the West was filling up fast with what he took to be untrustworthy characters—outlaws, charlatans, religious zealots, opportunists, schemers, boosters, empire-builders. Yet he seemed scarcely to recognize that by guiding Fremont all over the West, he had been an important catalyst in bringing about these changes; in a sense, Carson had unwittingly fouled his own nest, luring to the West the very sorts of people he loathed.

Everything he touched, it seemed, had withered. The beaver he had trapped were on the verge of extinction. The Indians he had lived among had been decimated by disease. Virgin solitudes he once loved had been captured by the disenchanting tools of the togographers. The annual rendezvous of the mountain men was a thing of the past. Even the seemingly indestructible Bent’s Fort was no more. One day in August 1849, Charles’s brother William decided it was time to start over. Not wanting to sell the great fort to the government, not wanting it to be vandalized and overrun by Indians, he came up with a more dramatic solution: He filled the labyrinthine chambers with kegs of powder and blew parts of his weird, splendid castle to smithereens. If there had been any doubt before, the immolation of Bent’s Fort loudly proclaimed the death of an era.

In this diminished new world, Carson was an anachronism, a buckskin curiosity who had, it seemed, no role left to play other than as a beloved symbol. And he
was
beloved: Everyone who encountered him seemed to find him inexplicably endearing. An English writer named George Ruxton, who passed through the West shortly after the American occupation, was intrigued by the contrasts within Carson’s personality—his laconic homeliness on the one hand, and his legendary status on the other. Ruxton wrote, “Small in stature, and slenderly limbed, but with muscles of wire, with a fair complexion and quiet, intelligent features, to look at Kit none would suppose that the mild being before him was an incarnate devil in an Indian fight.”

William Tecumseh Sherman, then a young army lieutenant, met Carson briefly in California and expressed a similar astonishment at the scout’s appearance: “I cannot express my surprise at beholding a small, stoop-shouldered man, with freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring. He spoke but little, and answered questions in monosyllables.” But, Sherman went on, “Carson’s integrity was simply perfect. The Indians knew it and would trust him any day before they would us [soldiers], or the president, either!”

“His voice is as soft and gentle as a woman’s,” wrote George Brewerton in a perceptive article for
Harper’s Monthly
after having ridden with Carson on one of his transcontinental treks. “The hero of a hundred desperate encounters, whose life has been mostly spent amid wildernesses where the white man is almost unknown, is one of Dame Nature’s gentlemen.” For other people, especially women, Carson’s humility came across as a disconcerting awkwardness. “He was uncouth…a lonely man,” recalled Marian Sloan, an Anglo girl who lived in Santa Fe. “His was a great heart and very kind, yet he wore shyness before his face like a veil.”

The majority of the public apparently saw something beyond the veil, however, for Carson’s fame now spread far and wide. Rivers, lakes, passes, trails, and mountain peaks bore his name. A tiny outpost in Nevada, eventually to become the territorial and then state capital, would be called Carson City.
Kit Carson,
an elegant steamship launched a year earlier, now threshed the Mississippi and Missouri waters.

Carson was somewhat oblivious to the attention he stirred. Even if it had occurred to him to cash in on his burgeoning fame, he lacked the talents to promote himself, and this only made him more authentic. The man was just plain hard to reach in remote New Mexico and had, up until the summer of 1849, been so constantly on the move that few reporters had gotten a word with him. Keeping himself scarce whetted the public’s appetite, for nothing stokes a myth like inaccessibility.

Carson’s reticence led people to fill in the gaps and project upon him whatever qualities they wanted a frontier hero to have. Most magazine and newspaper writers couldn’t resist the urge to make him taller, stronger, more dashing and more eloquent than he actually was. Once, on the Oregon Trail, Carson happened to encounter a man from Arkansas who’d heard the famous scout was in the vicinity. “I say, stranger, are you Kit Carson?” he demanded. Carson answered in the affirmative, and the man studied him doubtfully. “Look ’ere,” the Arkansan finally said, “you ain’t the kind of Kit Carson I’m looking for.”

It was only a matter of time before popular novelists would take up the character of Kit Carson and shamelessly fictionalize him. That year, 1849, saw the publication of
Kit Carson: The Prince of the Gold Hunters,
the first pulp fiction paperback featuring Carson as its swashbuckling protagonist. In this forgettable story, written by a hack named Charles Averill, Carson slaughters Indians by the score and predictably rescues a young girl who has been kidnapped by savages. Carson is presented as a great hero who had never lost a battle, a man with “a lynx-like eye and an imperturbable coolness” who is “as little seen as he is widely known.” Carson’s slight stature has, in Averill’s book, swelled to superhuman proportions—he has a “mighty frame,” “massive arms,” “prodigious strength,” and a chest built like “a fortress.” Among other twists, the story involves a prairie fire, a treasure-laden cave, a naïve Harvard student pursued West by an evil miserly uncle, and a perilous escape from Indian captors in which Carson frees his party by having one of his comrades hold a torch to his wrists to sizzle away the ropes that bind him.

Averill’s twenty-five-cent novel was a “blood and thunder,” as the genre was known, a precursor to the modern western, briskly paced and packed with cliffhangers and hair-raising scrapes. Although he claimed the book was “founded on actual facts,” Averill did not make the slightest attempt to learn anything about the real Kit Carson or seek permission to use his name. As one of his actual facts, Averill fabulously asserts that Carson single-handedly “discovered” the goldfields of California. Yet
Prince of the Gold Hunters
became wildly successful, a best-seller as measured by the standards of its day. More important, many other writers would soon copy Averill’s formula. His was only the first in what would be a long line of hyperbolic thrillers, pulp novels, and juvenile biographies—some seventy books would be written over the years—starring Kit Carson as avenger, rescuer, horseman, and Indian killer, the “Nestor of the Rockies,” the “Happy Warrior,” the “Knight of the Prairie,” the “Captain of Adventure.” He had become an action-figure hero. This lurid body of literature would catapult Carson into a stratosphere of celebrity that few nineteenth-century Americans would ever enjoy.